The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead
When these Chicagoans walked off the job in 2012, they changed the future of organizing.
On the morning of September 10, 2012, the bells rang to open Chicago’s public schools, but there were no teachers in the classrooms.
The night before, negotiations with Chicago’s reform-minded mayor, Rahm Emanuel, had gone south, and the new activist leaders of the city’s 25,000-member teachers union, clad all in red, walked out. Surrounded by a throng of cameras, they declared that their members would go on strike for the first time in 25 years.
“It looks like a sure bet in hindsight, but at the time, not so much,” recalls Jesse Sharkey, a former high school social studies teacher and chess-team coach who was part of a new guard that took over the Chicago Teachers Union in 2010. “I can remember hearing, ‘They can’t do that!’”
City leaders had been closing schools for years as part of an education reform platform; teachers were becoming easier to fire under new accountability rules. But the strike was a risk they felt they had to take. “We were okay with it,” says Stacy Davis-Gates, who was one of the many black educators to walk out that day (she is now the Chicago union’s vice president). “We had no other choice.”
The teachers needed a new contract, and the two sides were at odds; Emanuel, who’d served as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and was a year into his job as Chicago’s mayor, wanted to pair raises with layoffs, and the new union leadership wouldn’t accept. They went on strike to demand not only better compensation but also that officials deemphasize standardized tests in determining teacher pay. They wanted smaller class sizes too. They adopted a simple slogan: The Schools Students Deserve.
The strike — the first walkout in a major city since Detroit teachers sought better pay in 2006 — ended nine days later, but not before Emanuel would pursue a court order to try to force teachers back to school. (He failed.) The union won concessions on many of the issues it cared most about: a 16 percent raise over four years, less emphasis on test scores in evaluating teachers, the right for laid-off teachers to get first dibs on new job openings at CONTINUE READING: The strike that brought teachers unions back from the dead - Vox
