A Fight for the Soul of Public Education

The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike

Steven Ashby, Robert Bruno

• Publisher: ILR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781501706486
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In reaction to the changes imposed on public schools across the country in the name of "education reform, " the Chicago Teachers Union redefined its traditional role and waged a multidimensional fight that produced a community-wide school strike and transformed the scope of collective bargaining into arenas that few labor relations experts thought possible. Using interviews, first-person accounts, participant observation, union documents, and media reports, Steven K. Ashby and Robert Bruno tell the story of the 2012 strike that shut down the Chicago school system for seven days. A Fight for the Soul of Public Education takes into account two overlapping, parallel, and equally important stories. One is a grassroots story of worker activism told from the perspective of rank-and-file union members and their community supporters. Ashby and Bruno provide a detailed account of how the strike became an international cause when other teachers unions had largely surrendered to corporate-driven education reform. The second story describes the role of state and national politics in imposing educational governance changes on public schools and draconian limitations on union bargaining rights. It includes a detailed account of the actual bargaining process revealing the mundane and the transcendental strategies of both school board and union representatives.

1

EDUCATION REFORM FROM WASHINGTON TO CHICAGO

The Chicago Public School (CPS) system is the third-largest school district in the country. Its educational, political, and socioeconomic imprint on the Illinois landscape is enormous. For example, more than 550 Illinois school boards—64 percent of the total—oversee school districts that enroll fewer students than the average Chicago high school. Nearly 400,000 students, or about one in five of those enrolled in Illinois public schools, attend one of 660 Chicago schools, a number that accounts for 17 percent of the state’s total. The student population is overwhelmingly children of color (84 percent) and “economically disadvantaged” (86 percent). CPS employs approximately 40,000 people, and teachers in Chicago represent about one-quarter of the number employed in Illinois. The system’s operating budget is roughly $5.6 billion. If CPS were a city it would be the second-largest in Illinois.1

Size and racial and socioeconomic composition are not the school district’s only defining characteristics. Teachers strikes, some in consecutive years, have been frequent, and as bargaining for a new contract in 2012 approached, the system was primed for a fight. Adding to this local dynamic were an intensifying conflict between the Chicago Board of Education and the CTU and a national attack on public schools.

In 2012, labor relations between the CTU and CPS would be redefined as more than a narrow technical exchange limited in its impact to the parties of a contract. Extending deep into Chicago neighborhoods, the school dispute offered a vision of collective bargaining that associated workers rights with elevating the public good. Teachers across the country were fixated on Chicago because they, too, were the victims of an educational reform movement that was tearing up the roots of public education. Teacher anger had grown to dangerous heights, but the seeds of the dispute were planted three decades before. To understand why the CPS-CTU conflict mattered beyond Chicago requires first examining how a Washington political consensus converted public education into an investment opportunity.

A Nation at Risk?

By the early 1980s, Chicago had become the symbol for a frenzied anti–public school movement that blamed public education for putting the nation’s security at risk. In 1981, at the direction of President Ronald Reagan, Secretary of Education Terrence Bell appointed the National Commission on Excellence in Education and directed it to examine the “quality of education in the United States.” The commission was created to address the public perception that the nation’s educational system was falling short of expectations. In the opening paragraph of its 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform, the authors sent a clear distress signal: “We report to the American people that … the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people.”2

As evidence of decline, the report pointed out that millions of adults, and perhaps 40 percent of minority youth, were “functionally illiterate.” On one academic test after another, Americans were found to trail most other developed countries. The report also addressed the need for more stringent high school graduation requirements, higher academic performance standards, additional time dedicated to classroom instruction, and increased teacher salaries. Critics of the report, however, pointed out major flaws in the statistics used to document alleged educational failure and in the quality of the overall assessment, the questionable link between student achievement and the national economy, and how politicians shamefully used the bad news to “manufacture a crisis.”3 Whatever the legitimacy of its content, the report fueled a national debate about school performance and launched a multibillion-dollar high-stakes testing industry. A crusade to reform public education was begun, and critics of the public schools quickly jumped to the front of the line.

Schools were accused of being captured by vested interests, including “teacher unions and myriad associations of principals, school boards, superintendents, and administrators,” who were “beneficiaries of the status quo.”4 To break the hold of what Connecticut Senator Joseph Lieberman called “ossified bureaucracies,” public schools, it was claimed, should operate in a competitive environment disciplined by market incentives.5 Conservative economist Milton Friedman had first laid out the proposition that schools should be driven by market principles such as consumer choice, and his disciples published books, funded conservative think tanks, and recommended national education policies.6 Decades later Friedman continued to carry the reform flag by escalating the rhetoric that boosters adopted as if it were a divinely inspired creed. “Our elementary and secondary educational system needs to be radically restructured,” Friedman pronounced with certainty. To bring about this reconstruction required “privatizing a major segment of the educational system—i.e., by enabling a private, for-profit industry to develop that will provide a wide variety of learning opportunities and offer effective competition to public schools.”7

After a fitful start, the market found ardent proponents in both the Republican and the Democratic parties. George W. Bush, a self-declared “education governor” and, in 2001, a president committed to the principle “No child will be left behind,” revealed his own plan to reform US education. Promising higher school standards, increased testing, stricter school accountability, aid for struggling schools, and options for children in failing schools, his No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) won broad bipartisan support, becoming law in 2002.

According to education reform critic Diane Ravitch, Republicans and Democrats enthusiastically embraced NCLB because they “believed that accountability was the lever that would raise achievement.”8 Intentions aside, more than ten years of trying to implement the law’s provisions have revealed that little of NCLB’s promise was fulfilled. Student scores at best inched up.9 But by one measure NCLB was a huge success. The time withdrawn from the instructional school day to test students and to prepare children to take tests of questionable value had expanded exponentially. As Washington was incentivizing the states to squeeze the time that teachers could teach by tying federal aid to student test scores, school districts were being asked to do more with less.

State financial support for public schools was diminishing at an alarming pace. By 2010 the states’ contribution to public education had slipped to a near fifty-year low of 43 percent, and education became the biggest victim of the 2007 banking recession. When the economic downturn hit, schools got punished. Between 2008 and 2013 more than two-thirds of the states cut their K–12 per-student education spending. State cuts to education spending in 2012 and 2013 exceeded more than $10 billion; many states reduced spending by double digits. Illinois slashed school appropriations by 11 percent and, in 2010, contributed a smaller share of revenues to education than any state except Missouri.10 The reduction represented a dramatic withdrawal from the United States’ historical commitment to schools.

After A Nation at Risk was published and widely popularized, it became conventional wisdom that education was in crisis. Task forces and commissions claimed to have evidence of failing students, obstructionist teachers unions, and poorly performing teachers. The public was saturated with negative school headlines, and its approval rating of public schools fell from 58 percent in 1973 to 29 percent in 2012.

Across the nation school districts were reorganizing and closing schools. The upheaval of school reform may have been necessary collateral damage if indeed there had been a crisis that needed fixing, but just as there had been questionable evidence in 1983, there was little to be found twenty years later, after the latest “education president” had left office. According to long-term trend results, reading and math tests scores had improved.11 Additionally, based on national comparisons, US students were scoring above the international average.12 Graduation rates mirrored testing results.13

Taken cumulatively, since the 1970s, student standardized tests scores did not reveal evidence of anything approaching a national crisis in public education. Undeniably, since 1992, at least for elementary students, modest improvements in math and reading test scores have occurred. But the growth was actually faster in the decade before NCLB was authorized than since the law went into effect. Additionally, even these small gains cannot be strongly correlated with any reform measures. Instead, numerous studies have documented that test score and graduation rates are much more strongly predicted by the socioeconomic status of students’ parents than any other particular variable.14 In other words, when you take into consideration a student’s family economic status, little improvement is seen for low-income children. The wealth effect holds for international comparisons. For example, based on test results from at least 1999, when socioeconomic characteristics are controlled for, the discrepancy between US test scores and those in other wealthy nations disappears. Comparing a middle-class suburban US school with its counterpart in Europe reveals no differences in test scores.

The strength of the relationship between students’ socioeconomic class status and school success has not only effectively explained achievement disparities, but it reveals a growing problem that reformers have been hesitant to acknowledge. Beginning in the late 1970s, economic policy in the United States had the effect of concentrating wealth at levels not seen since the Great Depression and overturning three decades of a roughly shared prosperity.15 As economic inequality between the late 1970s and the second decade of the twenty-first century reached historic highs, the achievement gap between the wealthiest and poorest students nearly doubled. Consequently, as explained by Sean Reardon, the “achievement gap between children from high- and low-income families is roughly 30 to 40 percent larger among children born in 2001 than among those born twenty-five years earlier.”16

It does not seem coincidental that at the same time that income inequality was rising, family economic stability was weakening, and social mobility was faltering, reformers popularized a new notion of what constitutes education success. By any measure, since the early 2000s, test scores have become increasingly central to the purpose of public education. Teachers express deep frustration with the escalating time they spend preparing for and giving standardized tests. As student assessments have come largely to define how schools are performing, the widening class differences between students suggest that the achievement gaps are likely to worsen. Families with greater economic resources will continue to invest more in test preparation than those with fewer financial means. In 2013, high-income families were already spending approximately seven times as much on their children’s educational development as low-income families. By comparison, in 1972 the ratio was only four times as much.17

The stubborn consistency of long-term educational performance trends should have prodded school administrators, school board members, big city mayors, and legislators at all government levels to rethink the idea that “school-based strategies alone will eliminate today’s stark disparities in academic success.”18 But the rethinking never happened. So in 2008, progressive educators and defenders of the public school system believed they had finally brought some rationality to the reform movement. They had helped elect an ex-community organizer, college professor, and best-selling author to the nation’s highest office. But they could not have imagined how much more irrational things were to get—a process that started with the new president’s first educational decision.

Barack Obama’s Race to the Top

When Illinois Democrat Barack Obama was elected president, Chicago teachers and advocates for public schools around the country were rightfully hopeful that Washington would adopt a different approach to improving education. The CTU was in an unusually aspirational mood. It was one of the first labor unions in the city to endorse Obama’s 2004 primary run for the US Senate. Another, more experienced prolabor candidate from a political family, Dan Hynes, was preferred by a large majority of the state’s labor movement. Backing the unheralded junior state senator over the familiar Hynes earned the CTU a terse retort from the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT’s) president at the time, Sandra Feldman, who asserted that in this race Obama was not “labor’s guy.”19 But, once elevated to the White House, instead of leading a movement that would raise the nation’s respect for the only people who could make schools better—the teachers—Chicago’s native son doubled down on a plan with a track record of failure. To further the sense of betrayal, he did so with an ex-CPS CEO who was anathema to Chicago teachers.

Arne Duncan was confirmed as US secretary of education in 2009. To the disappointment of teachers all over the country, Obama did not nominate Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond. She was considered one of the nation’s most influential people on education policy and headed the president’s education transition team. Darling-Hammond also had a distinct record of negatively evaluating NCLB.

Before going to the nation’s capital, Duncan did not have a leading academic record in education research, but he had been the Chicago schools’ chief from 2001 to 2008. ...