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| Chicago |
Excerpt, editing by Carolyn Bennett
“Rebirth of Chicago Teachers Union, Possibilities for a
Counter-Hegemonic Education Movement” by Eric (Rico) Gutstein and Pauline
Lipman
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| Philadelphia, Pa USA |
The authors
of this essay are activists and scholars. Lipman writes and teaches about the
political economy and racial politics of urban education. Gutstein writes and teaches about critical
pedagogy, education for social justice, and mathematics education policy. Both are
active members of the grassroots organization Teachers for Social Justice (TSJ) in Chicago and have participated
in education organizing against school closings and education privatization
since 2004. Through TSJ, the authors were involved in building support for the Chicago
teachers’ strike as part of a broad coalition of parents, community members,
and educators. This is an edited excerpt from their essay.
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| Chicago |
Predators at America’s jugular:
its young, its
community, its workers
I
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n a version of disaster capitalism reminiscent of
post-Katrina New Orleans, the 2008 economic crisis was a golden opportunity to
accelerate education privatization at all levels, weaken unions, and further
streamline schooling for global competitiveness.
This was the thrust of the Obama administration’s $4.3
billion economic recovery initiative for education, known as ‘Race to the Top.’
The ensuing ‘fiscal crisis’ of the state provides a warrant to close public
schools, expand privately run charter schools, and dismantle whole school
districts (e.g., Detroit), or replace them with a ‘portfolio’ of education
providers (e.g., Philadelphia).
Not educators, profiteers: Gateses, Waltons: Billionaire venture philanthropists, such as the (Bill and
Melinda) Gates Foundation and the Walton (Wal-mart) Foundation, are deploying
their enormous wealth to steer federal and state policy and local school
districts in this direction. At a moment when public schools face severe budget
cuts, “in state after state, (mostly) men … with vast personal fortunes invest
in campaigns to end teachers’ tenure, end seniority…and clear the way for
private takeovers of public schools, where teachers work with no job rights at
all.” The focus is urban school districts where African-American communities
have borne the brunt of school closings.
This neoliberal class project exemplifies ‘accumulation by
dispossession’—commandeering public goods for private accumulation—whether
through opening the Amazon rain forest to cattle ranching, privatizing water in
Bolivia, or privatizing public housing, roads, bridges, and schools in the
United States.
It is in the context of this drive-by investors to
appropriate public goods—and the related displacement, dislocation, and robbery
of the vast majority—that the global neoliberal assault on teaching, teachers,
and their unions needs to be understood.
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hicago teachers stood up to this agenda (and) …the
significance of their strike should be viewed in relation to the global agenda
to restructure public education for economic competitiveness and capital
accumulation.
In the United States, this agenda ─ a bipartisan agenda ─
began with the Reagan (Ronald Wilson Reagan, 40th president of the United
States,1981–1989, born in Tampico,
Illinois, died in Los Angeles, California) administration’s call to hold teachers and
schools accountable for results and to run schools like businesses.
In more than twenty-five years various sectors of capital
and corporate “education ‘reformers’” have pushed a national system of top-down
accountability driven by high-stakes standardized tests, national standards,
teacher evaluation tied to test scores, mayoral control of schools, and privatization.
In the second decade of the 2000s the public counterpunched.
Isolationism and regress to possibility and progress
A convergence of social forces and unfolding crises has
created an opening for a counter-hegemonic education movement in Chicago. 
The economic crisis, the accumulated effects of neoliberal
education policies, the acceleration of school closings, the illegitimacy of
mayoral control, the persistence and maturation of the education-justice
struggles in black and Latina/o communities, and the rebirth of the Chicago
Teachers Union (CTU) created conditions for new alliances and new possibilities
to contest the dominant education agenda. This new moment was crystallized in
the Chicago teachers’ strike. 
2010 Illinois ‘fiscal crisis’: Chicago
Public Schools (CPS) had threatened broad cuts to music and art, increases in
class sizes ─ even in affluent neighborhoods; and middle-class parents, a key
constituency that Chicago’s mayors had worked to recruit to public schools and whose
neighborhoods had experienced no school closings, were alarmed. They formed a
new organization to lobby against the cuts. 
2011: Newly elected Mayor Emanuel had
launched a crusade for a longer school day (same as pre- Emanuel, interminable-day
approach to improving schools with no additional resources) as a quick-fix
education reform. Parents across the city got angry; white working-class
communities were galvanized. Parents previously uninvolved in education
struggles began protesting school board policies and in the process encountered
black and Latina/o parents who were fighting school closings and charter
expansion.
2012 Solidarity: groups of mainly
white parents and African-American and Latina/o organizations fighting school
closings and education-justice organizations formed a cross-city campaign for
an elected representative school board in Chicago. 
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he CTU strike, the elected school-board campaign, and growing
alliances demonstrate new possibilities.
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The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike
changed the education landscape, locally and nationally.
It showed that teachers’ unions in
partnership with the community can stand up to the neoliberal assault on public
education.
It showed the power of social movement unionism born in part of
community education struggles also enlivens those struggles.
It demonstrated the possibility of
imagining a counter-hegemonic formation that pushes forward an agenda for
education justice that spreads beyond schools to stake a claim for the right
to the city.
Broad Public Solidarity: community, workers, public interest
conjoined
“The significance of the Chicago teachers’, strike, the educators
write, “has to be understood in relation to the broad attack on the public
sector.
Local governments insist that there is no alternative to
address the ‘fiscal crisis’ and press for austerity budgets that cut deep into
what remains of the social-safety net and
decent public-sector jobs.
City governments are cutting police and firefighters, slashing public employees’ wages and benefits, closing libraries and schools, foregoing infrastructure repairs and maintenance, and selling off public infrastructure to consortia of transnational investors.
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| Chicago |
This is a class strategy to shift
the cost of the crises of financialization,
speculative real estate investment, and corporate profiteering run amuck onto working
class and poor people, especially people of color and middle-income earners; and
to support capital accumulation in the context of lack of ‘profitable’ outlets
for investment.
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| Public Sector rally Civil Servants Greece |
eachers and other public-sector workers are ultimately
responsible to the families and communities they serve and their working
conditions are tied to the funding and quality of public institutions. This
calls on unions to emphasize the connection between the well-being of workers
and the well-being of communities and to build principled union-community
alliances.
The broad-based attacks on teachers and teachers’ unions
create conditions for a new teachers’ union politics that breaks with the
business unionism that has failed miserably to defend workers and the public
interest.
Sources and notes
“The Rebirth of the Chicago Teachers Union and Possibilities
for a Counter-Hegemonic Education Movement” by Eric (Rico) Gutstein and Pauline
Lipman (Introduction), http://monthlyreview.org/2013/06/01/the-rebirth-of-the-chicago-teachers-union-and-possibilities-for-a-counter-hegemonic-education-movement
Article examining interrelationship of community education
struggles and the emergence of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) as a social
movement union; and concluding with possibilities for a counter-hegemonic
education movement in Chicago:
“For nine days in September, Chicago belonged to the
teachers, school paraprofessionals, and clinicians. On September 10, 2012,
26,000 members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike. It was the
first teachers’ strike in Chicago in twenty-five years. While public and
private sector unions have taken concessions and capitulated to cuts in wages,
benefits, seniority rights, job protections, and much of what was won by the
labor movement in the twentieth century, the CTU stood up to Mayor Rahm Emanuel,
the Commercial Club of Chicago, and the billionaire hedge-fund managers who
have set out to break teachers’ unions and dismantle public education. Chicago
was a sea of CTU red.
“Teachers—and their parent, student, and community
supporters—picketed at schools across the city, marched through neighborhood
streets, and brought downtown Chicago to a standstill with mass rallies of
thousands, day after day. There was no need to defend school entrances against
scabs—there
were none!”
Authors of
essay
Eric (Rico) Gutstein is a
professor in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois-Chicago
and is active in the movement against education privatization. He is author of Reading and Writing the World with
Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice (2006), and co-editor of Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social
Justice by the Numbers, 2nd ed. (2013).
Pauline Lipman is
Professor of Educational Policy Studies at University of Illinois-Chicago,
Director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education, and an
education activist in Chicago. She is author of The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race, and
the Right to the City.
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