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NationofChange / Op-Ed
Published: Thursday 13 September 2012
For people who are wondering where Occupy is today, just look at the streets of Chicago.
Mayor Rahm-Ney’s Attack on the Chicago Teachers Union
Unions are under attack in the United States—not only from people like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, but now, with the teachers strike in Chicago, from the very core of President Barack Obama’s inner circle, his former chief of staff and current mayor of that city, Rahm Emanuel. Twenty-five thousand teachers and support staff are on strike there, shutting down the public school system in the nation’s third-largest school district. This fight now raging in Chicago, Obama’s hometown, has its roots in this historic stronghold of organized labor, and in the movement started one year ago this week, Occupy Wall Street. The conflict presents a difficult moment for Obama, who will need union support to prevail in his race with Mitt Romney, but who is inextricably linked, politically, to his brash, expletive-spewing former aide, Mayor Rahm-ney Emanuel.
At the heart of the conflict is how schools will be run in Chicago: locally, from the grass roots, with teacher and parent control, or top-down, by a school board appointed by Emanuel. Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, worked as a board-certified chemistry teacher at King College Prep High School in Chicago. She understands how the system works. Months before the strike, I asked her about the situation in Chicago. The newly elected Emanuel had an appointed board comprised mostly of corporate executives, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Lewis told me, “One of the biggest problems is that when you have a CEO in charge of a school system, as opposed to a superintendent, a real educator, what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue as to how to run the schools.” The AUSL not only relies on business executives with no education experience to run schools, but also brings in recent college graduates to teach. These recruits cost very little to pay, but arrive with little or no teaching experience.
Pauline Lipman is a professor of education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She explained, “Chicago was the birthplace of this neoliberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, disinvesting in neighborhood schools and then closing them and turning them over to charter schools.”
Lipman credits Arne Duncan with driving this corporatization of Chicago’s public schools. Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, was the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, where he led the institution of charter schools, 90 percent of which are nonunion. “Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators or expanding charter schools and having charter schools come in ... and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to high-stakes tests. That agenda has been really devastating in Chicago.”
Chicago is also the epicenter of the community pushback against the Duncan/Obama/Emanuel attack on public schools and the teachers union. Lewis comes out of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, CORE, which took over leadership of the union with a commitment to transparent school administration. Opposition to Emanuel’s dictates has provoked the union into this historic strike. Phil Cantor, a strike captain for Teachers for Social Justice, explained: “We’re not allowed legally to strike over anything but compensation. But teachers are not most interested in compensation; we’re most interested in being able to do our jobs for the students we serve.”
Thanks to the grass-roots organizing that preceded the strike (in the same Chicago streets where Obama was once a community organizer), the striking teachers enjoy extensive parent and student support. One parent, Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, has two children in elementary school in Chicago. She is a member of the group Parents 4 Teachers and is marching with the teachers. She told me, “When we fight for the rights of teachers for a fair contract, fair compensation, lower class size, well-resourced schools, having psychologists, enough social workers, enough support staff, enough aides in the classroom, nurses ... when teachers have these resources in their schools, we know that our children can do incredible things.”
This struggle reflects the essence of Occupy Wall Street—community members across class, race and other traditional divides uniting in disciplined opposition to corporate power. Author and journalist Chris Hedges, who has observed the Occupy movement closely, put the strike into context:
“The teachers’ strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades. If it does not prevail, you can be certain that the template for the attack on the union will be carried out across the country against other teachers unions and against the last redoubt of union activity, which is in the public sector, of course—firemen and police.”
For people who are wondering where Occupy is today, just look at the streets of Chicago.
© 2011 Amy Goodman
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
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ABOUT Amy Goodman
Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of "Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.
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By Tara Culp- Ressler
17 comments on "Mayor Rahm-Ney’s Attack on the Chicago Teachers Union"
September 14, 2012 8:55am
I don't know about this one, and I frankly admit it. I have to wonder if this strike is really necessary. I have had my own criticisms of our public schools and its teachers over the years. Some of the things teachers do today seems quite ridiculous to me, and I still believe that students today are learning less than they did when I was a kid.
It's rather hard for me to believe that the man (Emanuel) who co-authored a forward-looking book called "The Plan" (2006) is really some kind of anti-union politician.
But I'm not up-to-date about what's happening in Chicago schools. And though I'm not anti-union at all, I have had, as I said, issues with teachers in my lifetime, including some of the Parent-Teachers conferences I had when my 2 sons (now grown) were in school.
I think Amy Goodman may be too reflexively liberal about this one. I think all parties concerned in Chicago should take a step backward, chill out, and see if they can work out their problems without a strike and (now) a lot of side-taking and name-calling.
September 14, 2012 5:58am
Amy, the article is great with this exception: You lower yourself in employing this stupid picture (who knows where/when it was taken, and under what circumstances: maybe Emmanuel was clowning around with his staff?) and especially in creating the parody of his name (presumably to suggest Romney). I've never before taken exception with your style whether in print or on the radio, so let's hope this is an aberration, not to be repeated.
September 13, 2012 7:29pm
Love the photo of Rahm-the-Great. What a jerk! Too bad you didn't also include one of Arne Duncan with a great big dunce cap---kneeling at the feet of the corporate charter school lobbyists. You go, CTU!
September 13, 2012 4:50pm
By-the-way, Ram-Rahm is a traitorous bastard. He turned his back on the people when he was Chief of Staff.
September 13, 2012 2:24pm
You have to realize that people in the USA have been brainwashed into thinking that corporations will run the country better than a strong Federal and State government. Granted, "government" does a lot of stupid things, but when you do the research, we find those stupid things, most of them, are because of corporate lobbying.
Things like:
--Not labeling GMO food even though the vast majority of people want it.
--Cutting taxes for corporations while raising them on small business.
--Lobbying for not only a reduction in minimum wage, but the recall of the law itself.
--Offering to remove all of the Los Angeles railway system (major oil companies did this to increase the dependency on automobiles). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_American_Streetcar_Scandal
So if people really think that corporations will be create a better government, a corporate government, then I say give it to them.
Remember though, once we have a Corporate government instead of a Democratic Federal and State government, your "Constitutional Rights"-- those things conservatives love to hate, such as "Civil Liberties"-- no longer apply. Corporations exempt themselves of those responsibilities and draw up their own "policies."
So go for it. And please, don't cry when you find out how nasty, brutish, and short your lives get. You wanted it, and you're getting it. You're new government is a conglomerate of Halliburton, Brown and Root, Monsanto, and Karl Rove. USA, number #1!
September 14, 2012 7:04am
You are sooo right. Why do these Nazi's always harp on smaller Gov. yet they all want to be part of it, collecting on all social safety nets ,pensions, cheap healthcare, great vacation time...all the things they despise for us.Lets not forget one foot in Gov. and the other in the corporate world, a revolving door it seems. You are a common sense thinker, how rare in todays society of sheeple. No one can connect the dots. These corporate whores want to remove all Gov. and our tax $ will be paid directly to the corporations via "privatization." Most sheeple do not understand a corporations only concern is profit and shareholders. I think their motto should be ..socialism , only good for the elite.
September 14, 2012 1:23am
Excellent post, dwdallam.
"So if people really think that corporations will be create a better government, a corporate government, then I say give it to them.
Remember though, once we have a Corporate government instead of a Democratic Federal and State government, your "Constitutional Rights"-- those things conservatives love to hate, such as "Civil Liberties"-- no longer apply."
I have been trying to say this, but far less effectively than you.
September 13, 2012 12:48pm
The cost of private education is much higher. I wonder how the private schools would do if they had the same funding as public schools? You can probably guess the answer. Unless there's a profit for the "owners" they're just not interested. Government will only be required to provide an easy source of money with hardly any oversight to private corporations, much in the same way that has been done to health, agriculture, defence, etc...
The greatest opportunity in for-profit education is to disenfranchise public education and create a private cartel of operators who provide education for the masses who pay for it, partly by government grant (easy money) and partly by themselves, all under the umbrella of "insurance". This is a formula that allows all the public money originally set aside for a public service (education) to flow more directly to corporations, who then top-up their margins with regular premiums from the masses. What's missing from the scenario is quality feedback and direct accountability. A corporation and it's legal team is much more powerful than any parent group or even a governmental regulatory committee. Corporations are hardly democracies despite the protestation that they only serve their customers interests (which are always secondary to their shareholders) and must remain competitive (unless they have a monopoly over a service in a particular area or combine interests with other competitors in a cartel arrangement, like big pharma, big oil, medical insurance, etc..).
Rahm and co should come clean about the funding shortfall and their view of utopia, which to me resembles something out of a Charles Dickens book or possibly Steven King...
September 13, 2012 12:03pm
deraine: I think I'd be worried too about my job evaluation if 80% don't graduate and only 15% of fourth graders are reading at grade level..and you're making 80 plus!! Please!
September 13, 2012 4:47pm
But you have probably re-elected your ass-dragging congressional representative numerous times.
September 13, 2012 11:07am
Good analysis! Rahm Emmanuel (along with Tim Geirner and Larry Sommers) is one of the reasons Obama has had such a hard time getting a DECENT program going as President (to say nothing of Repuglicon obstructionism). The only things that will help make the next four years at all productive will be a cooperative House and philibuster-proof Senate plus a new Progressive staff in the Executive Branch. Can this possibly happen?
September 13, 2012 10:23am
That picture with the article shows a prime example of an "upstanding Adult Politician" really sets an example for everyone!.....Buddy0799
September 13, 2012 10:28am
What is the Chicago Teachers’ Strike About?
• It’s about fighting against discriminatory, evaluative procedures compelled by corporate-interest groups that want to reduce the “art of teaching” to high-stakes, data-driven test scores and merit pay;
• It’s about the need for smaller class sizes to produce the best possible teaching and learning for public-school students;
• It’s about rectifying the scarcity of textbooks and other essential materials for Chicago’s public-school students;
• It’s about the need for more school libraries and for enriched curricula that include music, art, theatre, creative writing, and physical education;
• It’s about classrooms that need air conditioning so teaching and learning will occur during hot or humid weather;
• It’s about students needing more social workers, counselors, nurses and other support staff;
• It’s about the proper calculation of teachers’ raises and the rescinding of fair compensation for longer school hours;
• It’s about rehiring public-school teachers that were laid off;
• It’s about better health benefits, productive teacher training, and job security for public-school teachers;
• It’s about attacks on teachers’ due process rights and collective bargaining;
• It’s about opposing the villainy of government officials and corporate-financed media and their attacks on public-school teachers’ professionalism and self-respect;
• It’s about fighting against corporate-educational reform and the privatization of public schools by profiteers;
• It’s about protesting ineffectual Value-Added Assessment, Race to the Top, and No Child Left Behind;
• It’s about the closing and destruction of Chicago Public Schools and the systematic and resultant destruction of their communities;
• It’s about the disparities between charter schools and public schools’ economic resources for enhanced programs;
• It’s about propagating skewed data regarding student outcomes from charter schools that are the result of an inequitable policy to accept only the brightest and wealthiest students, despite the fact that most charter schools “underperform” public schools;
• It’s about forced “turnarounds” subsidized by billionaires and their officiousness (for example, the Broad Foundation) to “control and take over” public schools for self-interest, profit and more charter schools;
• It’s about creating disposable teachers, via Teaching for America and the online teaching craze;
• It’s about the deliberate failure to address the root causes of the problems facing public education: the inequality of property taxes that primarily fund public schools in Chicago (and elsewhere in Illinois); and the poverty, dispossession and violence in Chicago and the self-perpetuating impact this has upon teaching and learning in Chicago public schools;
• CTU Teachers are on strike for the above-mentioned reasons, and greed is not one of them.
http://teacherpoetmusicianglenbrown.blogspot.com/2012/09/what-is-chicago...
September 13, 2012 7:37am
This country has been a downhill joke since LBJ displayed the decency and courage to resign.
September 13, 2012 4:48pm
A: Nixon resigned. B: LBJ did not run for office in 1968. Big difference.
September 13, 2012 2:10pm
LOL. Yep, you're right. LBJ. I think his opponents had dirt on him; that's why he didn't run. And that fact destroyed him. He really did miss his call when he proceeded to start the Vietnam war though. That was his downfall.
September 13, 2012 8:00pm
LBJ did a lot of things, starting the Vietnam war was not one of them. Eisenhower has the distinction of starting US involvement in a war that was already being fought. JFK escalated it. LBJ took it another step and started Rolling Thunder and the Americanization.
As for dirt, what president hasn't had dirt held against him? I think dirt is a prereq for even running. Really, I think LBJ had lost control of every thing, the DNC, congress, the war, and lost the respect of the People. He saw the writing on the wall and stepped aside.