PHOTO/SARAH JANE RHEE
CHICAGO —The fight for the future of Chicago’s public education continues. Teachers, parents, students and the larger community are growing impatient and angry. People are losing faith in the Democrats and Republicans to create meaningful social change.
As a new election season begins, in which direction should the “next step” be made? Let us take a look around.
Schools have been closed, budgets have been cut. Charter schools are multiplying.
The Chicago Teachers’ Union voted to keep its militant leadership in 2013. As the March 18 Illinois primary election approaches, it confronts these developments in the 2014 campaign for governor of Illinois, among others.
In November 2013, Democratic incumbent Pat Quinn chose former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas to run with him for lieutenant governor. That was a political slap to the CTU. Vallas had been an architect of Chicago’s charter school expansion.
In December, Quinn signed a pension “reform” bill that would cut benefits for retired and current state workers, many of whom are not eligible for Social Security.
Meanwhile, in the Republican primary campaign, investment banker Bruce Rauner looked set to win nomination for governor. Rauner is an enemy of the teachers’ unions. He is friend of charter schools and of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, a Democrat whose term ends in 2015.
In December, Emanuel and his allies strong-armed the Chicago City Council into stopping a referendum proposal for an elected Chicago school board from getting onto the November 2014 ballot. Chicago has an unelected school board, appointed by the mayor.
Decades of rust-belt industrial decline, federal prosecution, and voter rebellions have ravaged the 20th century Democratic Party machine in Cook County. Emanuel is from Chicago personally, but politically he is from Washington and Wall Street. They sent him here to do a job for them and he is doing it, with bullying and money.
As Emanuel becomes increasingly unpopular in the neighborhoods, splits with the mayor arise in the City Council over the elected school board and charter expansion. These splits are rooted in grassroots opposition to education cuts.
As old connections to the past break, new connections to the future form. The old unity of employees to capitalists is breaking. A new unity among America’s dispossessed takes its place. The “next step” is always unity around practical demands, such as a truly decent education that is publically funded. Such demands go directly against the power of the corporations.
In 2014, what could that look like?
A third-party campaign drove Paul Vallas from his recent job as school superintendent in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Militant teachers in Chicago have taken notice of that. (Also, during the 2012 CTU strike, Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein picketed with the teachers.)
Impulses toward political independence like that are responses to the corporate attack on public school education. The grip of the corporate two-party system must be broken. The elections of 2014 are opportunities to develop the class unity to break that grip.
