Book Review

A Fight for the Soul of Public Education:  The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike

Book Review

by Jim Vail

You know you're good when you have a book written about you.

Celebrities, famous leaders, world events, etc. have plenty of books written about them. So it should be no surprise that the powerful Chicago Teachers Union and its CORE leadership have a book written about their exploits in leading the first teachers strike in 25 years.

A Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike was written by labor professors Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno who followed the strike closely and had access to union communications.

That means first and foremost that the book published in 2016 is a glowing report about the strike and how CORE organized an amazing fight back against the corporate forces hell bent on privatizing public education, closing schools and destroying the teachers union.

I joined CORE when it first formed around 2006 because our Chicago Teachers Union was a total and pathetic sell out. It was no coincident that Mayor Richard Daley announced the Renaissance 2010 plan to close 100 public schools and open mostly privately managed charter and contract schools with no unionized teachers the day after PACT President Debbie Lynch lost her re-election to the UPC Marilyn Stewart. 

CTU President Stewart stayed silent after Daley announced this massive attack on the union. The UPC in fact worked with the Mayor to help destroy our public schools. They organized no resistance to the massive school closings, and said nothing about the new sweatshop labor of charter schools (Marilyn kept saying charter schools are our friends!).

That was why CORE formed and captured the imagination of not only the city, but the nation.

CORE's 2012 strike was very symbolic. It was the first fightback against the powers that wanted to destroy public education - from Republican President George Bush's No Child Left Behind (that union darling Diane Ravitch first supported when she worked in his education dept.) to Democrat President Barack Obama's Race to the Top. 

CORE and the teachers and public school parents, students and communities fought back! We said no to charter schools, no to attacking public schools and no to mind-numbing standardized tests.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Mr. 1%, was the epitome of corporate greed and the billionaire attack on the people. He was an agent of capital and wealth and greed that forced working people out of their jobs, homes and health care in order to preserve the billionaire portfolios.

The book focuses a lot on the organizing tool that CORE brought in order to lead this successful strike in 2012. A lot of nuts and bolts and teacher and union staff comments about how it went down. That is not terribly interesting to me, but nonetheless good stuff for especially our new teachers and staff and others who may not know what the 2012 Teachers Strike was all about. 

I voted against ending the strike. The reason was teacher evaluations. We could not end the destructive attack on our teaching forces when the Chicago Board of Education implemented the ugly Reach Evaluation that stated 2 developing or fair ratings turned into an unsatisfactory rating and the end of many teachers' careers.

I can speak personally how this attack went down on our teachers. Our physical education teacher did everything for our school - he coached many after school sports, the kids loved him, he fund raised and sponsored many events, he organized teacher outings and he even got a sponsor to pay for the insignia painted on the middle of our gymnasium floor. But because he was a veteran of many years, he was attacked for any little weakness and got the 2 developing ratings that turned into an unsatisfactory rating and now he is gone. We have not been able to secure a regular PE teacher ever since.

That was a big part of the corporate attack on the public schools. Destroy the family, destroy the beloved teachers who gave everything for the kids and put in a cold, hard, corporate culture that focused on fear and firing teachers. 

Mayor Emanuel got his revenge after the strike by closing 50 schools in the city, the most in history. The rich loved that he destroyed so many city public schools that served as anchors for low-income children. He was rewarded for his anti-people work with an ambassador post for President Biden (who I remember emphatically defending the rich on stage at the American Federation of Teachers Convention in Detroit after CORE was elected).

What was an eye-opener to me was how the ruling class worked with our union to set up this horror show. The CTU used to be one of the most fearsome unions when it went on many strikes throughout the 1970s and 1980s under the fearsome leadership of Jackie Vaughn. She rightfully has a public school named after her and the hall in CTU headquarters is named after her.

Mayor Harold Washington and public school reformers had passed the Local School Council law that gave the communities control over their schools while Vaughn headed the CTU.

But then all that was erased with the election of Tom Reece in 1994 who sold us down the river. He partnered with CPS CEO Paul Vallas to keep the union silent. He infamously said the only strike he wanted to see was in a bowling alley.

The corporate attack on us first began in 1991 when Vaughn was still the CTU President (she died of cancer in 1994). Mayor Richard Daley decided to take a big interest in the public schools and offered the union a 21 percent raise over 3 years to not only avoid a strike, but set up his diabolical plan with union support. In 1995 Daley again gave the teachers a nice raise in exchange for more control over the school operations after the Republicans took control of the state legislature the year before and wanted to ban Chicago teachers from going on strike. 

(I actually was hired at this time in Russia to work on behalf of President Clinton and his Russian aid program that similarly wanted to privatize the Russian economy on behalf of wealthy American investors at the expense of the people because the Republicans took control of the Congress and wanted to cut aid to Russia. I guess I was as stupid as Reece to work for the enemy!) 

In Illinois the Republicans wanted school reform and Daley wanted to take control of the public schools!

The Amendatory Act of 1995 was passed that destroyed the union's collective bargaining rights. Now Daley on behalf of big money interests had a free ride to privatize the public schools, destroy the union by naming his own board trustees and school's chief and no longer pay into the teachers pension fund (Daley receives today a fat quarter million city pension while he made his name destroying city workers pensions. That's what you call a big City Politician!)

"Inexplicably, the CTU leadership was not only quiescent about its own hobbling, but never mobilized against the law's passing and actually applauded parts of the legislation. CTU President Thomas Reece, who had assumed office in 1994 when incumbent president Jacqueline Vaughn died of breast cancer, pledged that the union would eventually repeal the law. He failed, however, even to criticize the Chicago-area Democrats, including Mayor Daley, who lobbied for the bill."

This new law took all power from the union and gave it to the bosses. now the CTU could no longer negotiate over class size, layoff procedures and school closures. Daley did this by buying union peace (bribing). 

"We paid to control the schools," CPS lawyer and union bargaining chief Jim Franzek said. 

Throughout the 1990s, union leadership preferred higher pay in exchange for ignoring the effects of school reforms dictated by the business class and their puppet mayor. Strikes had ended and peace brought us total corporate misery. People no longer wanted to be teachers!

Who needs enemies when your own union sells you out. 

The book's authors wrote that only State Rep Monique Davis spoke out against this attack on the teachers union, equating the new law to treating the teachers like a slave! When I first started helping CORE do political outreach, Rep. Davis told me that the UPC union in 2007 told her charters were their friends. When I said no, we are the real union, and charters are not our friends, they merely destroy our jobs by outsourcing them for cheaper wages, she agreed and added she didn't like that charters did not do any finger printing for criminal background checks. 

Rep. Miguel Santiago said, "You are putting the school system into the hands of individuals that are going to be corporate executives that do not have any idea of the educational system ... There is nothing in here that improves the educational system."

Today we see the effect of all these corporate decisions to fire teachers resulting in massive turnover in schools that further hurts children and their communities. 

Finally the CTU fought back 17 years later with the strike. 

The Amendatory Act has been repealed to restore our collective bargaining rights. The CTU restored the pension levy so that the city makes its required $500 million payment each year rather than using the money to destroy teacher union jobs. The AUSL private management group that Pres. Obama and his education sidekick Arne Duncan touted to turnaround public schools everywhere and fire everyone in the school is gone! The union put in school closings charter bans. That's called Fighting Back!

The book, however, fails to mention the biggest fight the CTU is engaged in. That is in political arena. They pour a lot of money into political races. It's an ugly game. But why must only the very rich play the political game to keep their taxes low and impose austerity on the rest of us? The CTU plows a lot of money into democrats to protect our pensions, stop privatization of the schools and have an elected school board.

The one glaring omission in this book is not talking to George Schmidt, the fearless teacher union fighter who edited Substance News for 40 years. That is like writing a book about organized crime in Chicago in the Twenties and failing to write about Al Capone. Schmidt was the expert on teacher contracts and the official historian of Chicago Teachers Union history. No one knew school union politics more than George Schmidt. However, I could see that CORE leaders most likely forbade the authors from interviewing a critical voice to rain on their book parade. The book certainly has the feel that CORE thoroughly edited it.

It was a kind of amusing to see the authors first refer to Substance as the pro-PACT newspaper, then later the pro-teacher newspaper. A quick look at their many, many references to Substance in their bibliography must have made the profs feel a little guilty not interviewing George.

The CORE fight is impressive and a great story. But CORE won in 2010 not just because they were organized, but even more so because the CTU President Marilyn Stewart decided to not take a No vote on the 2007 contract that further eroded union rights resulted in the UPC Party split. VP Ted Dallas allegedly called her a "f$% b*tch" right after we delegates chanted "NO, NO Vote" and the media picked up on this. She then fired Dallas. The splintered groups then backed CORE in the runoff.

Also, passing a teachers contract is very political. Mayor Daley fired Paul Vallas because UPC President Tom Reece lost in 2001 to Debbie Lynch. No more push over union to give the rulers everything they wanted without a wimper. But the UPC was still organized and continued to fight Debbie in the House of Delegates and were able to organize against passing her first contract. When a union has no opposition, they then need only to sell their contract to their members who vote on it. CORE had no opposition, and even though the members initially wanted to continue to strike, the last day that the delegates voted to end the strike reminded me of something out of spectacular tent revival event. Even the news media that started to bash the CTU strike in the second week were already set up in the parking lot interviewing delegates and congratulating them on the end of the strike. Who could say no? 

This is not to take away the amazing work CORE did. The contract did not stop the rulers from implementing harmful reforms and closing more schools, but it certainly turned the tide. Now people finally had a reason to be proud of their union! 

But the fight never ends. This book is a reminder of what we face and what a union must do for the working people - Fight Back!