All of the board’s justifications for these closures were repeatedly dismantled both by activists and the mainstream media. The board initially claimed, for example, that schools were massively underutilized because 145,000 school-age children had left the city over the previous decade; reporters quickly pointed out that the district’s own numbers showed that less than 29,000 students had left the district during that time.15 In schools it planned to close, the district cited huge percentages of underutilized classrooms, claiming that 140 schools were half-empty; independent analysis soon pointed out that the board’s numbers were deeply flawed, based on packing classrooms with as many as thirty-six students, counting special education classrooms with fifteen students as severely underutilized, and other dishonest statistical maneuverings.16 The district initially claimed it would save $560 million by closing schools, but the board was soon forced to admit that even with optimistic cost projections, it had exaggerated those costs significantly; the district also had not included the over $200 million in loans to improve receiving schools and the $25 million annual cost of servicing those loans.17 And while it was claimed that the closures were about creating better education opportunities for students and that all students whose schools closed would attend better-performing schools, investigations by mainstream media outlets quickly found this to be false, with both of the city’s major dailies reporting that around two thirds of students at slated closures would now attend schools that, according to district metrics, performed no better than their old schools.18
As with so much of public policy governing public goods in the age of austerity, Chicago school closures are designed not to strengthen public education, but to dismantle it.
Closures are an example of what education scholar Pauline Lipman has described as the neoliberal state’s “intervention … on the side of capital, first to destroy existing institutional arrangements, and then to create a new infrastructure for capital accumulation.”19 Public schools are shuttered under the guise of crisis and then immediately replaced by charter schools—often in the same buildings the public schools once inhabited: Some 40 percent of public schools closed since 2002 are now being run by private operators. Those charters then conduct aggressive outreach campaigns to draw students away from neighborhood schools that still exist, leading to additional empty seats in those schools, which are then labeled as underutilized. The district speaks of an “underutilization crisis” justifying its need to close 100 schools, yet it plans to open sixty new charters to accommodate 50,000 students.
The same spirit seen during the strike was rallied against school closings: In November 2012, teachers and community activists staged a sit-in on the fifth floor of City Hall, outside the mayor’s office, demanding a moratorium on school closures and resulting in eleven arrests; the weekend before the final closings vote in May 2013, the union led a three-day march to all fifty-four schools slated for closure (four schools were removed at the eleventh hour); high school students whose schools were not being closed led multiple walkouts to protest the closings; City Hall and the Board of Education saw unannounced civil disobedience actions from teachers and activists in the week before the closure vote; protesting parents and teachers were dragged out of the Board of Education’s meeting to vote on the final list of closures. At one point, inside of a South Side elementary, parents confronted a logistics firm hired to inventory the school before its “turnaround,” actually knocking books out of staffers’ hands and guarding the school’s computers and other items in a classroom to prevent the firm from continuing its work.20 Public opinion polls found, as they did during the strike, that a strong majority of Chicagoans backed the CTU and opposed Emanuel’s plans.21
But teachers did not have the kind of leverage over the board that they had during the strike. And Mayor Emanuel likely saw the closure battle as one he could not afford to lose. The closures will likely cause upheaval to CPS students and their families, further devastation to communities that have long borne the brunt of disinvestment, and the loss of thousands of jobs for members of the CTU and other unions.
The closures targeted the South and West sides of the city, but a decision to shift the way the district funded schools led to budget cuts so massive that the district could no longer meet meet the schools’ most fundamental needs, such as providing supplies of toilet paper. CPS decided to shift the way it funded schools from granting block amounts for a given number of teaching positions to allocating money on a “per-pupil” basis (a move advocated by the Broad Foundation, one of the principal foundations pushing free market education reform).
The result was $162 million in budget cuts and 3,168 layoffs, including about 1,700 teachers. While many of those teachers were rehired, the classroom-level cuts have left many principals unable to meet the basic provisions legally mandated by the teachers union contract, like keeping class sizes below twenty-eight for elementary schools and thirty-one for middle and high schools. At the beginning of the 2013 school year, many teachers reported class sizes topping forty. Arts and physical education teachers and librarians, which many public schools never had to begin with, have been laid off in disproportionate numbers. Principals report that they will likely be forced to lay off veteran teachers because they cannot afford them—not as a one-off act but for as long as per-pupil budgeting remains in place. This will continue because principals will be forced to staff classrooms with a set amount of money and will be unable to justify hiring and keeping more experienced (and more expensive) teachers.22
The CTU fought both school closures and the shift to per-pupil funding, and it lost on both fronts. The implications of those defeats are fairly uncomfortable: Despite organizing at the community and rank-and-file levels, taking on the mayor and the Board of Education and the free market reformers, filing lawsuits and taking over public hearings, leading mass marches and civil disobedience actions, and winning the hearts and minds of a strong majority of the Chicago public, the CTU suffered stinging defeats. No matter how well-organized communities and workers are, the overwhelming power of free market forces and their representatives in public office may still triumph.
Still, in the fight against closures, the union strengthened its broad coalition with the community and other unions. And that coalition, along with the union’s strike and general antagonism toward the neoliberal wing of the Democrats since 2010, has successfully created a political crisis in a city long accustomed to political stasis. School closures have opened up a rare space in the city council for members to break as a bloc, albeit tepidly, with the mayor. A progressive coalition has emerged within the council, speaking out against the school closings and lending its weight to other union and community fights; calls for Toni Preckwinkle, the somewhat progressive president of the Cook County Board, have gone up from newspaper columnists and grassroots groups.
The CTU has announced plans to wade into city politics. The union has announced that it will register 100,000 new voters in the city, ostensibly in an attempt to take on Mayor Emanuel and other city council members backing him. The union’s contract expires in 2015—timing that could create another political crisis for Emanuel should the union again turn contract negotiations into a pitched battle over Emanuel’s education policies. And such a battle could help unseat him if a strong progressive candidate were to run. (In response to a media report about Emanuel’s massive war chest, the union’s political director Stacy Davis Gates told a Chicago newspaper, “He’s going to need every damn dime.”)23
There have also been rumblings of rank-and-file teachers running for city council and other positions in the city. As this book goes to press, the union continues to debate its course of action internally, with organizers aware of the conservatizing effect that electoral politics often has on social movements. But the feeling is that the union has no choice but to attempt to unseat the mayor and his political allies if public education is to be maintained in Chicago.
This shift to electoral politics is necessary bec
ause of the highly undemocratic ways in which education policy is currently crafted in Chicago. Like other large American cities undergoing free market education reform, including Washington, DC, and New York, Chicago’s school board and CEO are appointed by the mayor and are thus completely unaccountable to the city’s residents. During the battle over school closures, the union and community groups ran a months-long campaign utilizing a wide array of tactics to convince the Board of Education not to close the slated fifty-four schools; in the end, the unelected board, accountable only to the mayor and his wishes, closed fifty. If other mass closings or similarly devastating policies are to be avoided, legislative shifts will be necessary. And if the kind of internal democracy and militancy that have characterized CORE’s governance of the union are to be maintained, the CTU will have to wade into electoral politics very carefully.
The CTU will have many opportunities to fail in the near future, and it will likely continue to lose some key battles. But the memory of CORE will continue to serve as an example of how the rank and file can push back against austerity and the union’s own calcified leadership.
On the first day of the strike, after the entire city of Chicago had been blanketed by striking teachers, the teachers held a massive march in the city’s downtown—the first of several throughout the walkout. I arrived as the march got under way. Entering in the middle of the crowd, I spent about fifteen minutes wading through the crush of people trying to get to the front, but I never found it. I jumped up on a concrete planter to try to see the march’s end, but couldn’t see that either.
We still see a few strikes in twenty-first-century America, but there is a palpable sense of desperation clinging to most of them. Battles may be won, but the outcome of the larger war between the working class and capital has long seemed settled. Still, as Chicago’s education workers finished their first day on strike with a mass rally, I looked around. Tens of thousands of teachers, clinicians, and paraprofessionals were decked out in red, holding homemade signs decrying the Board of Education or the mayor; some held signs with one hand and pushed strollers or tugged small children along. Many had never been to a rally before, but here they were, on strike, radiating a mixture of defiance and exhilaration.
As the march began to end, teachers took their time leaving the streets. They clearly enjoyed their sense of ownership over the city, shutting down large swaths of downtown at rush hour while everyone from McDonald’s employees to suit-and-tie office workers yelled or gestured in solidarity.
Standing in the middle of a city where striking teachers could be seen every few blocks, where average passers-by spontaneously shouted out their support, where a struggle against neoliberal reform was center stage for weeks and was overwhelmingly supported by the city’s residents, it became clear that the war had not yet ended. Maybe the working class could actually win.
A naïve thought, perhaps. But just a few years earlier, many felt that a small group of dissidents were naïve in thinking that they could win control of their union; a few months earlier, many Chicagoans thought it impossible that the union could ever achieve a strike after the newly restrictive legislation leveled against them; many observers thought it unlikely that a free market agenda on education backed by both political parties could be rolled back. And it wasn’t long ago that those who dared to argue that the global neoliberal project was not the “end of history” were seen as naïve.
The CTU serves as a reminder that history—of education reform, of public sector unions, of the fight against austerity and the future of the working class—remains unwritten.
1 Alex Parker, “Jean-Claude Brizard: We ‘Underestimated’ Teachers Union,” DNAInfo.com, August 22, 2013.
2 Doug Henwood, “Strike Wave!” Left Business Observer, August 18, 2010.
3 Aaron Brenner, Robert Brenner, and Cal Winslow, eds., Rebel Rank and File: Labor Militancy and Revolt from Below During the Long 1970s, Verso, 2010.
4 New York: Sarah Butrymowicz, “In Retirees, UFT Leadership Finds Loyal—and Unusual—Support,” GothamSchools.org, March 12, 2013.
5 Kari Lydersen, “Rahm the Grinch? Janitors Say Emanuel Is Stealing Their Christmas,” In These Times, December 12, 2012: Melanie Trottman and Brody Mullins, “Union Is Top Spender for Democrats,” Wall Street Journal, November 1, 2012.
6 Newark: Josh Eidelson, “Some Newark Teachers, Inspired by Chicago, Seek to Thwart Concessionary Contract,” In These Times, October 26, 2012: Samantha Winslow, “Newark Teacher Reformers Win Majority,” Labor Notes, June 26, 2013. New York: Sarah Jaffe, “New York Didn’t Pull a Chicago but Dissident Teachers Aren’t Giving up,” In These Times, April 26, 2013. Nationwide: Mark Brenner, “Reformers Resurgent? A Survey of Recent Rank-and-File Uprisings,” New Labor Forum, Spring 2013.
7 Valerie Strauss, “Philadelphia to Close 23 Public Schools; Randi Weingarten Arrested at Protest,” Washington Post, March 7, 2013; Samantha Winslow, “Philadelphia Teachers Take School Closings Fight Citywide,” Labor Notes, February 14, 2013; “Excellent Schools for All Children: The Philadelphia Community Education Plan,” Philadelphia Coalition Advocating for Public Schools, December 2012. The case of the Philadelphia teachers union is especially indicative of the level of attacks teachers unions are currently facing. The demands the union is facing from the Philadelphia School District are stunning in their audacity. See Kristen Graham, “No Seniority? No Water Fountains? More on the Contract,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 2013. Seattle: Jackie Micucci, “How Garfield High Defeated the MAP Test,” Seattle, August 2013.
8 This is a point Burns himself makes in Reviving the Strike.
9 Megan Erickson, “The Strike That Didn’t Change New York,” Jacobin, Spring 2013.
10 Ibid.
11 Bob Sector and Rick Pearson, “Dim View on Emanuel Education Policy, Tribune Poll Finds,” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 2013.
12 See JOMO, “Caring On Stolen Time: A Nursing Home Diary,” Dissent, Winter 2013; Sarah Jaffe, “A Day Without Care,” Jacobin, Spring 2013.
13 Micah Uetricht, “Chicago Teachers Union Overwhelmingly Re-Elects Karen Lewis’s CORE Caucus,” The Nation, May 20, 2013.
14 The failed attempts by New York City public transit workers to reform their union, Transit Workers Local 100, provide a strong case study, particularly for public sector workers. See Steve Downs, Hell on Wheels: The Success and Failure of Reform in Transport Workers Union Local 100, Against the Current, 2008.
15 Linda Lutton and Becky Vevea, “Truth Squad: Enrollment Down in CPS, but Not By Much,” WBEZ, December 10, 2012; Becky Vevea and Linda Lutton, “Fact Check: Chicago School Closings,” WBEZ, May 16, 2013.
16 “On Space Utilization and the Narrative of Right-Sizing the District,” Raise Your Hand for Illinois, ilraiseyourhand.org. The Illinois state maximum class size for children with mild disabilities is fifteen or fewer students without a paraprofessional, seventeen students with a paraprofessional. For students with severe disabilities, the limit is eight without a parapro, thirteen with a parapro. CPS calculations of underutilization treated all of these classrooms with disabled students as underutilized. See Rebecca Harris, “Class Sizes Could Increase for Special Education Students,” Catalyst Chicago, February 27, 2013.
17 Linda Lutton, “ ‘Zero Trust’ After CPS Admits It Overstated Savings from Closing Schools,” WBEZ, May 6, 2013; Linda Lutton, “CPS Will Go Further Into Debt to Pay for Upgrades at Receiving Schools,” WBEZ, April 12, 2013.
18 Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, Jeff Coen, and Alex Richards, “Chicago School Closings: A Closer Look at CPS Strategy,” Chicago Tribune, April 12, 2013; Lauren Fitzpatrick and Art Golba, “Despite Promise, Not All Schools on CPS Closing List Are Sending Kids to Schools with Better Scores,” Chicago Sun-Times, March 22, 2013.
19 Pauline Lipman, The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and the Right to the City, Routledge, 2011, p. 29.
20 Linda Lutton, “Parents at School Slated for Turnaround Chase Away CPS Invento
ry Team,” WBEZ, April 25, 2013.
21 Bob Secter and Rick Pearson, “Dim View on Emanuel Education Policy, Tribune Poll Finds,” Chicago Tribune, May 11, 2013.
22 Micah Uetricht, “New School Year Brings Anxiety for Chicago Parents,” Al Jazeera America, August 23, 2013.
23 Natasha Korecki, “Chicago Teachers Union on Rahm $5 million: ‘He Needs Every Damn Dime,’ ” Chicago Sun-Times, October 11, 2013.
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