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The significance of the Chicago teachers strikes lies in its winning combination of internal democracy, it’s militant approach and its refusal to kowtow to Obama and Emanuel, especially now while the circus of the two parties of management and the rich is underway. It was a very impressive strike because:
1) We won and the children won.
2) CTU was built as a democratic, anti-Democrat union
3) the Strike was a slap in the face for Union busting scabs like Emanuel and Obama. LABORNotes 09 07 2012 “As Chicago Teachers Head Toward Strike, Democrats Turn on Their Union – With Chicago teachers preparing to strike Monday, unionists say it’s a “which side are you on?” moment for Democrats. But Have Democrats abandoned teacher unions in their pursuit of a corporate-backed education overhaul? From the looks of the Democratic National Convention, it would seem so”.
It’s the biggest strike since the 1997 teamsters strike against UPS and the series of regional strikes by the National Nurses Union. KC LABOR 09 18 2012 “Some important unions, such as National Nurses United, SEIU janitors, and Chicago Transit Authority ATU locals, have shown genuine solidarity with the teachers. So has Rev Jesse Jackson and other community allies. Early polls showed many more supporting the strikers than the Mayor.”
4) They fought and won a battle to provide first class education for youth from the working class and people. “Chicago Mag.com 12 03 2011 “CTU President Karen Lewis: Race, Class at Center of Education Debate — The Waltons; Warren Buffett, by virtue of the fact that he’s given a lot of money to Bill Gates’ foundation; Eli Broad; all of these people who have been putting money and money and money into education. And all they come up with is, “Let’s just get rid of all the teachers; let’s have a national curriculum; let’s test people to death.” None of this stuff works; not only does it not work, it exacerbates the problem.… Standardized tests have been disguised as merit when they’re just ranking and sorting, and they’re disguising race and class privilege. We don’t want to have those discussions….. We don’t have honest discussions about education in this country because we don’t want to have honest discussions about race and class.”
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/FF20111103-Karen-Lewis-CTU-Part-2.jpg
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis
11 Comments
Teachers have kids for 6 hours per day, the kids have to live in the real world for the other 18. That real world consists of gangs, drive-by shootings, hunger, no sleep, unstable living arrangements, physical and psychological abuse, fear, peer pressure of a sort we grownups never have experienced, zero tolerance programs (more about that), poor health, poor school preparation from day one, poor or no incentives to learn, and poor societal attitudes towards teachers (duh!).
And yet we expect those very teachers to overcome all those obstacles on a daily basis and perform a miracle by getting every single child above some magical learning level set by some bureaucrat who has never stood in front of a classroom full of kids like this.
Everyone keeps complaining that we “can’t just keep throwing money at the problem”. Well, in one way that is true, but in another way, it is not. The problem is that all the money-throwing is going towards the wrong things. The money goes for administration salaries and perks – and not for the things that will make a difference.
If you really want to make a difference in the classroom, you must start where it will really matter – with the root causes of poverty. Kids in poverty come to school on day one with a deficit of 17000 words of vocabulary. They can recognize only 9 letters of the alphabet compared to 22 for their more well-off peers. On day one. So what is happening? Funds for Head Start and Early Head Start are being cut. Kids from neighborhoods like the south side in Chicago are not in pre-school, or Head Start, or anything else. They grow up in households with no books, no one reading to them, no trips to the library, heck there are no libraries anywhere around.
In their world, the parents are lucky to be able to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. You have to address those basic survival issues first.
And until those things are done – you cannot – absolutely cannot use that child’s lack of knowledge on some standardized test as a way to grade the performance of her teacher.
What should be tested – and almost never is – find where each individual child is perfoming, and then measure each child’s progress over the school year from where they began. That is the measure – if they make progress, not whether they achieve some arbitrary goal. Especially if they are beginning the race a mile behiind the starting line.
Please.
This is about privatization, who gets to profit from what was once public and non-profit education and who gets to brainwash the nation’s kids.
That Democrats are leading the charge is only further proof that the Democratic Party of FDR, Truman, Kennedy and Johnson is now nothing but a shell, much like the Trojan horse.
The Trojan horse was loaded with enemy soldiers, and so is the Democratic party.
But listen, I have a friend who is an incredibly dedicated and caring teacher, a great teacher too, who is intensely frustrated with the current situation – but she blames it all on the Republicans. You can tell her about Arne Duncan and all the rest and she just shakes it off. She is convinced that Republicans are the problem and Dems are the solution.
Nonsense. The strike was settled on direct orders from the Obama campaign for, though Obama fully agrees with Emanuel’s policy to ultimately destroy the public education system, the teachers themselves were starting to wake up.
They were going to vote down the contract to which Karen Lewis and the other co-opted union leaders had agreed. For good reason. I’m sure David Axelrod feared that teachers across the country might withhold their votes from Obama and the Democrats in November if Emanuel had held firm and gotten his court injunction to end the strike because it was a “clear and present danger” to public safety, in which case Obama would have been forced to show his true Fascist colors too soon.
Emanuel, Obama, and other dynastic capitalists both D and R will be back in spades to destroy the public education system next year. You wait.
Ohio Barbarian you are absolutely right, but you missed Imka’s point. Many teachers fully buy into the democrats good, republicans bad theory despite the evidence.
Thank you much for this diary, Bill Perdue. I’m sort of reserving my judgment as to how good a contract the CTU really negotiated (until more of the terms have been made known).
Unfortunately, I tend to agree with some of the gloomier assessment above (actually, all of them). Hopefully, we’ll have a clearer picture soon, of exactly what went on during the negotiations. From what I read, more than a few teachers believe that Karen Lewis is part of the “Veal Pen,” so to speak. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for the next several weeks, figuring that the “real story” will get out in time. I hope so.
But, my comments in no way at meant to disparage the rank-and-file CTU members. They are heroes, in my estimation. (Lest we forget, that many union members suffer retribution when they rock the boat, too much.
Thanks again. Recommended.
Blue
Thanks, Blue.
We should all reserve our judgement but if the CTU rank and file approve it that settles it until the next go around.
1) This was a strike for better wages and conditions, and strikes by public workers have to take into account the hardships they impose on other workers. If they win what they set out to win they have to accept the victory and plan for upping the ante in the next strike.
2) This was a attack on Emanuel and the Union Buster in Chief and a highly political strike in a very political year. Their attacks on Obama and Emanuel for their racist, anti-worker approach to education are as political and as principled as it gets.
3) Strikes, even general strikes, are not revolutions. The only time they play that role is during nationwide general strikes led by revolutionaries and socialists.
4) Unions, with the best of leaders, are still limited. Unions, in the nature of things are more centered on wages, benefits and work conditions. And should be, that’s their role. It’s only when the majority of workers accept the need for revolutionary change that they become engines that drive change, but at all times the central actors in revolutionary change are revolutionary parties, not unions.
5) The way to change unions and educate the membership is to push for complete and unconditional independence of the trade unions in relation to the capitalist state. This strike was against Obama and Emanuel. Corollary and just as important are the fights for trade union democracy and in the US for unleashing the Labor Party. The CTU, by all accounts, and in contrast to most unions, has an exceptionaly democratic internal structure.
http://www.kclabor.org/
http://labornotes.org/
The Democrat party has always been reactionary.
FDR was a union buster whenever he could get away with it. At other times, terrified that the labor upsurge of the 1930’2-40′s would pose the threat of revolution, he made a few grudging concessions.
Truman was an anti-left crusader. The witchhunts began under his administration. He invaded and occupied Korea and would have sent US troops to China and the Balkans but they mutinied. (*)
Kennedy was a reactionary who tried to invade Cuba and got his sorry ass handed to him on a platter for his trouble. Then he tried to murder Castro. Then he set the stage for the invasion and occupation of Vietnam,
Johnson was a monster who set in motion the racist invasion and occupation of Vietnam and committed genocide in the process. The racist campaign of murders of Blacks leader organized by the FBI began in his administration.
The Democrats have always been a reactionary party from the time of Jeff Davis to the time of Obama. Anyone who thinks otherwise is no student of history.
(*) University of Minnesota “The Demobilization Movement of January 1946 Erwin Marquit
During the first two weeks of January 1946, four months after
the surrender of Japan ended World War II, enlisted personnel and
officers in the U.S. Army and other military services took part in
massive demonstrations and protests at bases throughout the world
demanding to be sent home. The specific focus of the protests was
for an end to the abrupt slowdown in ongoing demobilization.
The largest demonstrations took place in the Philippines, Hawaii,
France, Germany, and Guam, with others, large and small, taking
place in Japan, Korea, India, Burma, Austria, and Great Britain,
and on the U.S. mainland.” http://homepages.spa.umn.edu/~marquit/nst151a.pdf
Exactly.
The Chicago Teachers Union has done the seemingly impossible. At a time when teachers are pilloried in the press and attacked by Democrats and Republicans alike, Chicago teachers walked out for seven days in a strike that challenged every tenet of the corporate agenda for overhauling education.
“Though on paper the strike was about teacher evaluations, in fact the battle was waged over conflicting visions of public education.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his corporate cronies seek to privatize public education into oblivion, creating profit-making opportunities as new charters are opened and new curricula and tests are adopted. Pushing high-stakes testing is key, as student test results supply a justification for shuttering schools as well as firing veteran teachers en masse.” LABORNotes http://labornotes.org/2012/09/chicago-teachers-raise-bar