PHOTO/SARAH JANE RHEE
CHICAGO, IL — When March, 2016 arrives, Illinois may still be holding back the $500 million supposed to be allocated to Chicago’s public schools. Negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) may still be stalemated over pensions, wages and working conditions (the last contract ended after the last school year). Claiming budget constraints, the CPS has been threatening for months to fire thousands of teachers. March may also bring a new teachers’ strike in Chicago.
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel accused Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner of “holding the children of Chicago hostage” by blocking the release of school funding. Rahm should know about holding children hostage: he used the last teachers’ strike, in 2012, as an excuse to close 50 schools. He holds sacred the high interest contracts between the city and the banks, while daily violating CPS contracts with the CTU. Now CPS proclaims: take their contract offer now or suffer the mass firing of up to 5,000 teachers.
CPS demands a four-year contract, an 8% cut in pay, pension and health care cuts, and no improvement in working conditions (class size, for example). And they are disputing the validity of the CTU’s December strike authorization vote.
On their side, the CTU bargaining team, that meets with CPS, includes allied community organizations. These organizations, supporting the CTU position completely, show that CPS will face a broad community front. Should CPS carry out mass layoffs, CTU will respond the next school day with a massive rally. Students are organizing independently to carry out actions. CTU is planning informational activities to show that, in a city rife with corruption, Chicago has access to slush funds that could resolve their revenue problems in the short run.
In the long run, this movement is recognizing that Rahm and Rauner and the rest of the gang of political-corporate miscreants that are running education no longer need to educate most of the students in Chicago. Education used to be a ticket out of poverty and schools used to be geared to providing fodder for the industrial work force. High technology is ending that dream and bringing in the austerity budgets. That is why Illinois, guided by both Republican and Democratic administrations, is lowest in the country in funding education. The high performing Chicago Public Schools, mostly selective enrollment schools with capacity to raise private funds, spit out enough potential graduates for the limited high stakes jobs available. The rest can be warehoused in buildings they still call schools, without resources for education, way stations on the way to homelessness or prison.
The movement is seeking a political solution to this problem, both in its demand that Rahm resign, and in the fight for an elected, representative school board. At some point we are going to have to come to grips with a national solution to these state and local problems. It’s everything or nothing, all of us or none. A movement for justice in education can only be national in scope to guarantee the localities sufficient funds and resources.
