Progress Illinois

Advocacy groups across Chicago mobilized today in support of the Chicago Teachers Union strike, setting up “freedom camps” and scheduling events for the next two weeks including a “freedom ride” to Washington, D.C.

The advocates' approach to the strike contrasts the argument being made by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. While Emanuel frames the strike as a matter of just two outstanding issues, advocates seek to elevate the dispute to a national referendum on urban education policy.

“This labor fight is much bigger than bread and butter issues for teachers,” says Amisha Patel, executive director of the Grassroots Collaborative. According to Patel, the strike is about whether CTU can halt “corporate control over schools”, saying that the business-focused approach to school reform has been going on at least since former Chicago mayor Richard Daley unveiled the pro-charter school “Renaissance 2010” program in 2004. Read more »

The following is written by Oscar Weil, former executive director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

The threat of a teachers’ strike in Chicago is but an introduction to a crisis that will spread as school districts and unions face many problems in negotiating new contracts. A crisis has been building in Illinois for thirty years, as it has been in other states, like California, which was once a model for education in the nation and is now in decline. The decline began in Illinois when Ronald Reagan was able to turn the people away from the progressive income tax as the only way the nation could carry the cost of paying for a public education system that has been the most democratic in the developed world, a system that became the foundation for the greatest economy in the world. 

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