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On the Chicago Teachers Union's bottom-up, democratic organizing model

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 02:39:46 +0000

Cowritten with Jasson Perez, for In These Times.

Chicago Teachers Union delegates leave a union hall after voting to end their strike on September 18. (Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

FEATURES » NOVEMBER 30, 2012

Democratic to the CORE

The Chicago Teachers Union’s secret to success? The rank and file are in control.

BY MICAH UETRICHT AND JASSON PEREZ

During September’s Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike, local and national media rushed to frame the fight as a clash of oversized personalities: the stubborn, foul-mouthed Mayor Rahm Emanuel against the brash chemistry-teacher-turned-union president Karen Lewis. Even progressive media hyped Lewis as the driver of the union’s victory, praising her personal toughness as more than a match for Emanuel. It was classic “Great Man” historicism, tracing the strike’s origins to leaders’ personal traits.

Few accounts mentioned the constituencies behind these leaders. For Emanuel, this includes anti-union charter-school advocates, who donated $12 million toward his election. In Lewis’ case, it was the dictates of her 30,000 members. Indeed, the CTU is one of the most vibrantly democratic union locals in the United States.

Since a 2010 upheaval within the CTU, rank-and-file teachers have made up the union’s leadership, and members make many of its day-to-day decisions. Public actions are typically planned and executed by members themselves, not paid staff. And the CTU took the incredible step of extending its September strike an extra two days to ensure members had a chance to examine and debate the proposed contract.

As Lewis puts it, “We put the power into the hands of the rank and file, where it belongs.”

In recent decades, as the American labor movement has declined in membership and power, several unions have undergone a sea change, with new leaders proposing bold visions for how to revitalize labor. But rarely have those visions been as closely tied to a commitment to member-led democracy as in the CTU.

Shifts in leadership

Unlike many unions, in which officials cling to power for decades, the CTU has a long history of leadership turnover. Even when leaders did not run the union democratically, the CTU’s structure allowed for reform caucuses to develop. The United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which was rooted in racial justice caucuses in the 1970s but failed to push back against corporate education reform, held power for three decades. Proactive Chicago Teachers (PACT), a reform caucus pledging to recapture a past union militancy, briefly unseated the UPC in 2001—the same year current Secretary of Education Arne Duncan became CEO of Chicago Public Schools (CPS), pushing an agenda of closing public schools and opening charters.

Leadership changed hands three times in nine years—an incredible frequency compared to most American unions. Then, in 2010, teachers elected the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), a reform caucus with deep roots in community-level education equality fights. CORE had learned from PACT’s failures. Upon her election as CTU president, Lewis stated that CORE would “change this into a democratic union responsive to its members.” CORE immediately began restructuring the union. Leadership broadened the rights and responsibilities of members in the governing House of Delegates. Fourteen member-led committees, from political action to media, were tasked with central roles in the union’s day-to-day functioning. A new training program prepared delegates and members for union organizing and governance. At schools, committees of teachers, parents and students were organized to facilitate activism independent of union leadership. Quickly, educators began to take control of their union. “We turned our members into organizers, then we cut them loose,” says CTU staffer Matt Luskin.

Charlotte Johnson has been a teacher’s assistant for 19 years in CPS. For most of that time she was uninvolved in the union. “I can’t even remember what the president’s name was,” she says, referring to the UPC era. “You’d hear things were happening, but they weren’t good.”

Johnson says CORE leadership engaged members right away through programs like a summer organizing initiative, where activists knocked on other members’ doors and discussed workplace issues face to face in their homes. “That’s the only way you can hear from 26,000 people,” she says.

That commitment to bottom-up engagement was on full display during the 2012 strike. Members spontaneously planned and executed actions such as protests against Democratic aldermen hostile to the strike, often without even a nudge from staff.

Kim Walls, a science teacher at Robert Fulton Elementary, had never been active before CORE members approached her in 2010. She attended the union’s summer organizing program, where she first heard about tax increment financing (TIFs), a city policy that diverts resources away from public institutions such as schools to corporations.

On September 14, the union and the Grassroots Collaborative coalition planned a rally against TIFs downtown, focusing on billionaire hotel heiress and CPS board member Penny Pritzker. Her company, Hyatt Hotels, had received $5.2 million in TIF funds to build a new hotel in Hyde Park, where Walls lives.

Walls recalls Luskin telephoning her days prior about the action. “I said, ‘Matthew, I’m not going downtown. There’s a Hyatt right here.’ ” She told Luskin she would organize her own protest against Hyatt in Hyde Park. “He just said, ‘Go for it.’ ”

So Walls called Hyde Park-area teachers and told them to “call their people” to come out to the action. When the day came, 300 teachers and supporters marched on the hotel—with little to no support needed from union staff.

Two extra days

After the strike’s first week, many Chicagoans assumed teachers would return to class Monday. Emanuel had lost the public relations battle: Polls showed strong majorities, especially among CPS parents and Chicagoans of color, backing teachers. The union had the upper hand in bargaining, and the draft agreement CTU leaders brought to the House of Delegates meeting that Sunday, which CPS had signed off on, was rumored to be strong.

Which is why many in the local media were stunned when delegates voted to stay on strike for at least two more days—not because the proposed agreement was unfavorable, but because members wanted more time to examine it. Instead of forcing membership to decide on a contract that they had not read and did not fully understand, delegates extended the strike to ensure members “wouldn’t feel like anything was being shoved down our throats,” as delegate and first-grade teacher Yolanda Thompson put it.

Favorable coverage in the mainstream press evaporated. Nevertheless, on Monday morning, teachers arrived at picket lines outside their schools at 6:30 a.m., eager to review the proposal but lacking a formal process. Becca Barnes, a ninth-grade history teacher on the South Side, says teachers at her school made photocopies of the contract, stood against a fence, and spent an hour reading through line by line, circling key sections and commenting in the margins—as though they were grading papers. As they began picketing, the contract was still on their minds. So Barnes and her fellow teachers—about 100 of them—decided, right there on the picket line, to walk to a nearby park and read it together.

“None of us planned in advance to comb through it collectively,” Barnes says.

But that’s what they did, at first only for the big picture.

“We were going to just go over highlights,” Barnes remembers, “but then someone said, ‘No—we need to read the entire contract!’ ”

So, sitting together at a park, they read through every line, passionately debating the victories and concessions hashed out at the bargaining table.

“It was very emotional,” says Barnes. “Some people were sick of striking. Others said, ‘This isn’t good enough. This one line is reason enough for me to stay out.’ ”

Similar scenes took place throughout Chicago. For the first time, teachers were studying every word of their contract, the principal document governing their work lives, sometimes emotionally and contentiously, but together.

“We were genuinely interested in what each other had to say—even the people who wanted to go back,” Barnes says. The union voted to ratify the contract October 3, with 79 percent of membership in favor.

One CTU staffer, Norrine Gutekanst, says she was “a bit concerned” when delegates extended the strike, thinking “public opinion would turn against us.” “It was inconvenient,” she says, “[but] because this leadership is committed to bottom-up democracy, we just felt like we had to do this, and that it would result in a much stronger union.”

Mark Brenner, director of Labor Notes, an organization dedicated to fostering union democracy, says this commitment sets the CTU apart from much of American labor. “There’s a lot of cynicism in labor about the capacity of ordinary, working-class people to run their unions,” Brenner says. “Leaders think those people should have good lives, but they don’t think they have the capacity to do big things.” That cynicism, Brenner says, has prevented other unions from engaging members the way Chicago teachers have. “Even among ‘progressive’ unions, democracy is not high on the list of must-haves. That has really hurt our movement,” he says. “Democracy is what builds the capacity to take high-stakes, risky actions like the CTU did.”

CTU-style democracy ‘dangerous’

The labor movement is still parsing the lessons of the CTU strike. Illinois’ AFSCME Council 31 appears emboldened by the CTU, publicly praising the strike and stirring rumors of a potential work stoppage in their battle with Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn.

Other union leadership has been made skittish by the CTU example. Referring to a CORE-style caucus fighting a recently negotiated Newark Teachers Union contract introducing merit pay, NTU President Joe Del Grosso seemed nervous. “They had some signs there that we should follow Chicago’s lead,” Del Grosso recently told Working In These Times’ Josh Eidelson. “I think that’s very dangerous.”

In New York City, the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), a dissident caucus challenging the current leadership of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), draws inspiration from the CTU’s rank-and-file democracy.

Kit Wainer, a social studies high school teacher and member of MORE, says that under the UFT’s current leadership, “There’s no real process for members to have any kind of direct say in the day-to-day direction of the union. There’s formal democracy, but no substantive democracy.”

The problem, Wainer says, is not that the UFT lacks a broad social-justice vision—it’s that rank-and-file teachers are not engaged in democratic practices within the union to enact that vision. “[UFT President Mike] Mulgrew talks about poverty, about charters as a privatization scheme by the rich,” Wainer says. “The problem is they won’t mobilize members to fight. Their idea of fighting is hiring lobbyists and lawyers to go to Albany, or buying TV commercials.”

If MORE’s slate can capture leadership like CORE, Wainer says, “We’d build up membership confidence and willingness to struggle. We could reteach members what the union is.”

When’s the meeting?

Proponents of the CTU’s bottom-up organizing style say there is no other way to win. “Top-down just does not work. It’s the style of the bosses,” says Kenzo Shibata, a CORE member who taught English for 10 years before heading social media for the union.

Brenner agrees: “The strike would never have been successful if they hadn’t spent a year and a half trying to identify leaders in the schools and give them the training to be real leaders in the union.”

Kim Walls sees her union activism, begun in earnest only three years ago, as a starting point. She and her colleagues have been emboldened through their organizing and are considering finding a teacher to run for city council. She says she texted a CTU staffer about their plans.

“He responded, ‘Great. Let me know when the meeting is.’ ”

The Death and Birth of Teacher Unions

The Assailed Teacher — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 12:00:24 +0000

USA Today claims that the nation’s largest teacher’s union, the National Education Association, has lost nearly 100,000 members since 2010. That is a decrease of 16%.

The blogosphere is awash with postmortems of the NEA. The explosion of online learning, the rise of non-unionized charter schools, the passage of right-to-work laws in many NEA states, the general disregard for the rights of collective bargaining and the transience of many newcomers to the teaching profession have all been proffered as reasons for the decline of the NEA.

And if the NEA is undergoing such bloodletting, one can only infer that something similar is happening to the other major union: Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers.

Fewer members means less dues collected, which means less money for PACS, which means a decline in their political power. This year, instead of President Obama showing up to the annual NEA convention in order to court their votes, Joe Biden went in his place. Many people interpret this a result of their waning influence.

The destruction of teacher unions has been a major goal of education reform. It now seems that goal is coming true.

The most perplexing question I have about this situation was prompted by the statement Randi Weingarten made recently about instituting a sort of bar exam for teachers. At every turn, Randi has shown herself to be utterly beholden to the education reformers, the people whose goal is the destruction of the union she represents. The same thing goes for UFT president Michael Mulgrew, who sits on the board of New Visions, an organization that seeks to destroy public schools and build charters upon their carcasses.

Why are our union leaders collaborating with the people who are out to destroy our union?

It is an old question for sure. The strategy of our union leaders has been to collaborate on many points of education reform in order to prevent the image of a stodgy, mossback outfit with no interest in educational innovation from sticking. Yet, despite these efforts (their efforts at collaboration, that is), the image still sticks.

In 2005, when Randi was still the president of the UFT, she agreed to a contract with Pharaoh Bloomberg that gave most of our rights away. Her defenders said that this was the best deal that could have been worked out at the time. The winds were blowing in the direction of ed reform and Randi was shrewd to co-opt some of that wind in order to get something for the teachers she represented. After all, it was better to sway with the wind than to stand against it and get blown over.

And yes, even I subscribed to this notion when that contract was first negotiated.

Seven years later and the statistics have made it apparent: teachers unions are literally dying.

Why did the unions do all of this collaborating if, in the end, they were going to die anyway? The whole point of swaying with the wind was to prevent getting blown over by those winds. Yet, we swayed and got blown over anyway.

It does not make any sense to me. Many say that Randi collaborated because she has her eye on public office. The UFT and AFT positions were merely stepping stones to a cabinet post or some sort of national position. Her decisions were self-serving in that she was totally willing to throw her members under the bus for the advancement of her own career. This might be true, but the historian in me says that Randi has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting any sort of national office. Despite her efforts, she is still perceived as a shrill union hack. The fact that the union she represents is dying (and I am assuming that the statistics about the NEA’s dwindling membership is analogous to what is happening to the AFT) certainly does not recommend her in any way as a competent public administrator. All of this collaboration just so her union and her career can die in the end anyway.

It is maddening. And the question in my mind still stands as to why.

In my mind, it seems we live in a very non-confrontational age. Unions were forged in the crucible of confrontation, oftentimes violent confrontation, which helped win its members some rights. In order to preserve those rights, the threat of confrontation must always exist. For unions, confrontation usually takes the form of protest or a work stoppage. While a good union need not resort to these things the vast majority of the time, the only thing that gives a union real traction is the threat of confrontation.

However, with legislation like New York’s Taylor Law, with Albert Shanker’s refusal to support a teacher strike in the 1970s, with Ronald Reagan’s breaking of the PATCO workers in the 1980s and the general rise of corporatocracy throughout the 1990s and the new millennium, the threat of union confrontation has become non-existent. The street march, the picket line and the work stoppage have become unthinkable for most workers in the United States, whether they are union or not. (Kudos to the MORE Caucus for picketing with the Con Edison workers yesterday.)

Our union leaders were perfectly happy to acquiesce in this state of affairs. We were assured that our collective union dues garnered enough financial muscle to make politicians consider our demands. It was not through confrontation that we would secure our rights, but through lobbying.

And yet, when the millennium changed, the politicians and the reformers attacked us anyway, despite our mighty union dues. So now it is 2012 and the big bad teacher unions that people vilify as corrupt political behemoths are dying.

The brass of both the NEA and AFT will one day have to answer as to why they believed being Quislings was going to help anyone in the end, themselves included. They may not answer to us, the rank-and-file who they have sold out, but they will have to answer to history, and they will not be able to hem and haw like they do with us. The long eye of history will give them no quarter.

The thing is that our union leaders have always coasted by on the excuse that they had to travel in the direction in which the winds of change were blowing. It is a course of action that most groups, most leaders and, I would even say, most Americans have lived by in our day and age. As a civilization, the last 35 years has been defined by an ethos of being ahead of the curve, of getting in at the ground floor of things. We value the skill of setting our course after testing the breeze. After all, it was always the 80s or the 90s or the new millennium or the digital age or the era of globalization. There was a constant demand on us to not only keep up, but to adapt, to constantly discard and take on new values and ways of doing things because that is what society demanded of us. It was always fly with the wind or get blown over.

Therefore, what the teacher unions have been doing is reflecting the value of the times.

This constant imperative to keep up, to be in tune with the future before it happens, has something of authoritarianism within it. Whether it has been changing our fashion sense, or getting on board with the latest technology, or adapting to a new type of job market or, in our case, bringing education into the 21st century, we are constantly being exhorted to use things and ideas not of our own creation. Our choices have already been made for us, usually by a wealthy organization with the media savvy to market its wares as the latest in sleek efficiency. Something is the future because someone else says it is. Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to follow and obey.

The public life of Randi Weingarten reflects this state of constant reorientation. She has no values aside from how far she can ride the current tide. The result for her will be nothing but an underwhelming and sad legacy in American labor history. The result for the rest of us can be seen in the moribund state of our national teacher unions.

For those who wish to save public education, there is no easy fix. Education is about transmitting values between generations. Educators have a duty to transmit these values in a critical way, meaning one that demonstrates to the pupil the underpinnings of those values, their elegance and contradictions. The end goal is not to transmit, but to challenge the next generation to improve upon those values. It is the work of cultural evolution. A teacher union that passively accepts the self-interested values of those in power in hopes of some sort of gain is a teacher union that sells out its mission as teachers, not to mention as union leaders.

Instead of trying to be ahead of the curve, of getting in at the ground floor, of constantly testing the winds, of allowing the rich and powerful to set the terms of education discourse, teacher unions need to be both teachers and unions. We need to teach in that we formulate our own values based upon what we know to be beneficial for the students we teach and the civilization that charges us with doing that teaching. Those values need to be communicated, refined, discussed and debated publicly as a means to educate. It is a not a matter of testing the winds. It is a matter of helping determine where those winds blow from the start.

And we will only be successful in this if we act as a union. Unions were forged in the crucible of activism and confrontation. They must be forged again in the same manner. Only now our society is too authoritarian and atomized to sustain a union strictly of workers. For teachers, our activism must involve not only the teaching work force, but the entire teaching community, which entails parents and students. It means not a union, but a movement. Only a movement can shape the course of the winds, much like labor started as a movement in the late 1800s.

Education reform in its current incarnation is a movement brought about by money, wealth and propaganda. We strive for a movement brought about by community, dialogue and social justice.

This is exactly what the Caucus of Rank and File Educators have started to do in Chicago. It is exactly what the Movement of Rank and File Educators are starting to do here in New York City. These are the eyes of the storm of the next education movement. Around them have been coalescing all of the seething opposition to corporate education reform, and to corporatism in general. It means not only a reclamation of the teaching profession, but a redemption of the entire education system.

Michael Mulgrew sits on the board of New Visions because the winds now say there is profit to be had in education. Yet, the next movement will totally reject the notion of private profit in education.

Randi Weingarten wants bar exams for teachers because the winds now say that teachers need to be held to higher standards. Yet, the next movement will question those who think they are qualified to determine those standards.

Standardized testing is in vogue because it is a boon to testing companies and chimerically measures “learning”. The next movement cares not for testing companies and asserts that learning is a dynamic state of the human mind, not a pile of data.

Online schooling is popular because it is cheap. The next movement cares not for educating on the cheap, because you usually get what you pay for.

Teach for America is powerful because their alumni come from prestigious universities. The next movement believes that the college or suburb from which you came has nothing to do with being a good teacher. Instead, it is where your passion for teaching comes from and how likely it is to sustain you for a lifetime.

Education reformers claim that poverty, community and family life are not factors in the learning process. The next movement will assert far and wide that this is the stuff of the learning process. We will not allow the suffering of millions of children and female-headed households to remain invisible any longer.

It is not about educating for the 21st century. It is about making the 21st century better for all humankind. The future does not happen to us, we happen to the future. The winds of change only blow to where we determine as a people, not to where the rich and powerful tell us it blows.

The next teacher union will be equal parts teacher and union. In that, it will be the next great movement.

Chicago Stands Up

The Assailed Teacher — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 16:13:25 +0000

Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago’s Teacher’s Union, said that a poll of teachers at 150 schools revealed widespread support for a strike. Chicago is ground zero of the education reform movement, the home base of Uncle Arne Duncan.

Jean-Claude Brizard, head of Chicago’s schools, claimed “It’s unfortunate that the CTU will be talking about a strike when we know we have so much work we have to do within our schools.”

The teachers of Chicago have seen the “work” to which Brizard refers: school closings, teacher firings, more charters and mayoral control.

The Congress of Rank-and-File Educators, the caucus largely in control of the CTU, has shown urban teacher unions across the country the way. We have tried corporate unionism of the Randi Weingarten variety and it is has led to the erosion of the teaching profession. No matter how many times the likes of Randi have cooperated and negotiated with the corporate reformers, she manages to get bashed in the media and teachers manage to lose more and more of their rights. It is the students who pay the ultimate price as they see their schools closed and their most experienced teachers fired.

58 years ago, the Supreme Court made schools the testing ground for racial integration across the south. Children were put on the front lines in a wider battle for social justice. The powerless had nothing but their bodies with which to fight. They used it to conduct acts of civil disobedience: marches, sit-ins, Freedom Rides, etc.

We have come full circle by 2012. The corporate reform movement seeks to, once again, put children on the front lines of a massive social experiment. This time it is the corporatizing of the last great civic institution left in the United States. If some students have to get kicked out of their schools, or have their classrooms starved of resources, or attend charters that make corporal punishment a matter of policy, then so be it. If inner-city schools become hyper-segregated in the process, then that is the price that must be paid. If black teachers disappear because they have been part of the communities they have served for decades and, therefore, cost too much money, then that is the price we pay for progress.

The grand social experiment of education reform is really just a way to turn back the school system to its pre-1954 status. The poorest communities get the most inexperienced teachers and the oldest resources. Many students in NYC are having classes in trailers, much like black students in the sharecropping south had their classes in wooden shacks, if they had classes at all.

So Karen Lewis’ CTU is threatening to use the only weapon available to her teachers: their bodies. They can refuse to show up for work. Despite the laws and heavy penalties for public worker strikes, the CTU is considering something the UFT here in NYC is scared to consider.

But this is the only appropriate response to the crusade to hyper-segregate our schools. Just like the civil rights activists of the 50s and 60s threw their bodies into the machinery in order to grind it to a halt, the teachers and activists who care about public schools are starting to do the same.

This is also the philosophy behind parents opting their children out of standardized exams. As the testing regime continues to spread its tentacles across the country, expect more pushback from parents.

Even if the CTU does not strike, the fact that they are talking about it is a major step in the right direction. Schools districts like Chicago are notorious for getting the press to run nasty stories about teachers during negotiations. Now, Brizard is running scared about talk of a teacher strike. The CTU is only using the tactics available to them.

Hopefully, Chicago proves to be ground zero of the pushback against education deform.