Those efforts had fits and starts but ultimately failed to generate a significant shift in strategy from the CTU.Īccording to Ramirez, a cofounder of what would become the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), CTU leadership “was not asleep at the wheel, they were joyriding.” Sharkey, who would later go on to lead the CTU but was then a union delegate at Senn High School, noted at the time that “if we continue down this path, we won’t have a union for much longer.” CORE would go on to hold its first public event on June 7, 2008, which featured a keynote address by Jinny Sims, president of the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), who shared how the BCTF had won an illegal strike focused on lowering class size in 2005.Ī major reason for calling that first meeting was my experience as a union delegate at a predominantly black school that was callously closed by the district. Many of us had spent years working internally both within our schools and citywide to cajole and encourage union officers and staff to provide organizing support and resources for rank-and-file union members, alongside community allies, to wage a fight against these existential attacks on public education. The first attempt in 2004 was a plan to close twenty of twenty-two schools in the heart of the city’s black communities. For years, community organizations like the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) had called out city officials for the educational apartheid that anchored their efforts to close schools. Daley unleashed the first round of school closings in 2004. We were frustrated and fed up with the CTU leadership because they did not put up any significant opposition when Mayor Richard M. Young Magnet High School, and Kyle Westbrook from Walter Payton College Preparatory High School. Many of those present were elected delegates at their schools like Stacy Davis Gates at Roberto Clemente Community Academy, Kenzo Shibata at Lake View High School, Jesse Sharkey, Wendy Boatman and Brian Roa at Senn High School, Jennifer Johnson at Lincoln Park High School, Jose Frausto at Enrico Tonti Elementary School, Norine Gutekanst at Whittier Dual Language School, Jay Rehak from Whitney M. Ruiz Elementary School, invited ten members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) into a spartan room inside the United Electrical Workers union hall, on the Near West Side of Chicago, to consider the state of our union. In May 2008, as all of this reform was getting underway, myself and Al Ramirez, an elementary school teacher and union delegate from Irma C. It was over the same period that Chicago Public Schools opened 193 privatized charter, military, and contract schools. This has created incalculable harm by exacerbating violence and displacement, greatly undermining confidence in one of our most treasured public institutions. If successful, it would have reshaped Chicago in what would later become the new normal in New Orleans, where the city swapped its public schools for charters after reformers took hold following Hurricane Katrina in 2005.Ĭhicago mayors have since closed, reconstituted, and turned around (when all staff were fired and rehired) over two hundred schools, almost exclusively in the city’s black communities. It was an effort to completely reshape city schools in the image of the market by emphasizing school-to-school competition, merit-based pay, and a disastrous game of survival of the fittest by closing schools that didn’t test well or meet certain criteria set by the business class. Twenty years ago, Chicago was in the process of one of the greatest - and most misguided - experiments ever attempted to reform public education in America.
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