Read Online Strike for America by Micah Uetricht - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Micah Uetricht
Ads: Link
still far from perfect. Karen Lewis admitted as much. “These are austerity times,” she stated on the day of the second vote. “This is an austerity contract.” 1
The contract contains some key provisions that have since proven damaging to the union. Much of the negotiation occurred over how much CPS would pay out in benefits to teachers who were displaced from a school that was closed. Neither side had any illusions about what lay at the heart of that debate: how expensive it would be for the district to close schools. The more benefits CPS had to pay displaced teachers, the more difficult it would be for them to close large numbers of schools.
“We lost a significant portion of those benefits,” said CTU organizer Matt Luskin. “We didn’t lose anything near what they wanted, but it became much cheaper to close a school.”
Class sizes had been a central issue in the union’s education reform proposals and public messaging during the strike. CPS had attempted to remove class size ceilings, set at twenty-eight for kindergarten and thirty-one for upper level grades; the union stopped the district from increasing such levels but could not win any contract provisions to lower the ceilings. 2
The contract the union ended up negotiating contained both important wins that were mutually beneficial to teachers and students and some deeply flawed provisions with which the Board of Education and the mayor will continue to try to dismantle public education. 3
Such losses are common for unions in the twenty-first century. But the momentum the union carried after the strike’s end, into its fights around issues like school closures, was nearly unparalleled in recent labor history. The CTU transformed itself from an organization representing the narrow economic self-interest of teachers into the principal body fighting for educational justice for CPS students—both in the eyes of the public, which came to trust the union’s education reform agenda over the mayor’s, and in the eyes of its own members, like the ones I spoke with as they left the House of Delegates meeting.
The achievements of the 2012 strike are greater than the contract the union was able to negotiate, and its success is not owed to one tactic. The union was successful because its aims were broad and encompassed the aims of Chicago’s entire working class, even while its demands were specific. The CTU took a confrontational stance against the forces pushing for free market–based education reform. Rather than trying to meet such reformers in the middle on their proposals to privatize schools or increase teacher evaluations based on standardized testing—as national teachers unions have done—the CTU was uncompromising in its rejection of the demands of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and corporate reform groups. And rather than allowing such groups to paint the union as a roadblock to educational progress, the CTU put forth its own positive proposals to reform schools, groundedin an unapologetic vision of progressive education that would be funded by taxing the rich. Road maps to victory exist only in hindsight, but the CTU’s program can provide some useful guides to teachers unions around the country.
Targeting Neoliberal Education Reform
The push to transform education into a commodity that can be bought and sold on the free market has mirrored the broader neoliberal turn since the 1980s, which has sought to privatize public goods and sell them off to the highest bidder, destroy unions to eliminate workers’ opposition to this agenda, and eliminate restrictions to the flow of capital. 4
In education, neoliberalism has meant a push for the replacement of neighborhood schools with charter schools, expansion of “school choice,” merit pay for teachers, a general demonization of educators and efforts to disempower their unions, and an obsession with standardized testing. Corporate management strategies have come to replace concern for pedagogy; teachers
The contract contains some key provisions that have since proven damaging to the union. Much of the negotiation occurred over how much CPS would pay out in benefits to teachers who were displaced from a school that was closed. Neither side had any illusions about what lay at the heart of that debate: how expensive it would be for the district to close schools. The more benefits CPS had to pay displaced teachers, the more difficult it would be for them to close large numbers of schools.
“We lost a significant portion of those benefits,” said CTU organizer Matt Luskin. “We didn’t lose anything near what they wanted, but it became much cheaper to close a school.”
Class sizes had been a central issue in the union’s education reform proposals and public messaging during the strike. CPS had attempted to remove class size ceilings, set at twenty-eight for kindergarten and thirty-one for upper level grades; the union stopped the district from increasing such levels but could not win any contract provisions to lower the ceilings. 2
The contract the union ended up negotiating contained both important wins that were mutually beneficial to teachers and students and some deeply flawed provisions with which the Board of Education and the mayor will continue to try to dismantle public education. 3
Such losses are common for unions in the twenty-first century. But the momentum the union carried after the strike’s end, into its fights around issues like school closures, was nearly unparalleled in recent labor history. The CTU transformed itself from an organization representing the narrow economic self-interest of teachers into the principal body fighting for educational justice for CPS students—both in the eyes of the public, which came to trust the union’s education reform agenda over the mayor’s, and in the eyes of its own members, like the ones I spoke with as they left the House of Delegates meeting.
The achievements of the 2012 strike are greater than the contract the union was able to negotiate, and its success is not owed to one tactic. The union was successful because its aims were broad and encompassed the aims of Chicago’s entire working class, even while its demands were specific. The CTU took a confrontational stance against the forces pushing for free market–based education reform. Rather than trying to meet such reformers in the middle on their proposals to privatize schools or increase teacher evaluations based on standardized testing—as national teachers unions have done—the CTU was uncompromising in its rejection of the demands of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and corporate reform groups. And rather than allowing such groups to paint the union as a roadblock to educational progress, the CTU put forth its own positive proposals to reform schools, groundedin an unapologetic vision of progressive education that would be funded by taxing the rich. Road maps to victory exist only in hindsight, but the CTU’s program can provide some useful guides to teachers unions around the country.
Targeting Neoliberal Education Reform
The push to transform education into a commodity that can be bought and sold on the free market has mirrored the broader neoliberal turn since the 1980s, which has sought to privatize public goods and sell them off to the highest bidder, destroy unions to eliminate workers’ opposition to this agenda, and eliminate restrictions to the flow of capital. 4
In education, neoliberalism has meant a push for the replacement of neighborhood schools with charter schools, expansion of “school choice,” merit pay for teachers, a general demonization of educators and efforts to disempower their unions, and an obsession with standardized testing. Corporate management strategies have come to replace concern for pedagogy; teachers
Similar Books
