The Chicago Teachers Union has gotten permission from its membership to strike. If it comes to that, the local union’s progressive leadership will also “confront the national leadership of their own union, the American Federation of Teachers, who are in President Obama’s and Mayor Emanuel’s pockets.” Chicago’s teachers understand that they can only win if the community views the teachers' cause as their own.
“Lewis and her team believe the only way to save teachers' jobs and public education is to make common cause with the surrounding community.”
Chicago teachers have voted overwhelming to empower their union to go on strike. Almost 9 out of 10 of the local membership supported the strike authorization – far more than the 75 percent required under a new Illinois state law. This means the Chicago Teachers Union leadership has the legal and moral authority to confront Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s and the Obama administration’s relentless campaign to privatize education, de-professionalize teachers, and destroy any vestiges of community control of public schools.
The Chicago teachers must also confront the national leadership of their own union, the American Federation of Teachers National Education Association
It is as if the national teacher’s unions are in a love affair with their executioners. ABC News certainly got that impression, when American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten heaped praise
Weingarten sounded like any corporate politician when she said that good things happen “when labor and business start working together.” In Chicago and throughout the nation, so-called “public-private partnerships” in education have had disastrous results for teachers, students, parents and entire communities. Barack Obama’s basketball buddy Arne Duncan fired 1,300 teachers
“Community control is anathema to school privatizers, especially when those communities are Black and brown.”
Duncan’s anti-Black, anti-union policies impressed Barack Obama so much, he made Duncan his Secretary of Education. When Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, won the mayor’s office, he promptly fired 1,000 more teachers, a disproportionate share of them African Americans.
Chicago once boasted a system of community control
Karen Lewis is one of those Black teachers. She’s also head of the Chicago Teachers Union, the leader of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators that threw out the old, collaborationist leadership, two years ago
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Glen For. On the web, go to BlackAgendaReport.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected] .
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