The Chicago Teachers Strike and Its Public

Introduction

“Chicago is the place to make you recognize at every turn the absolute opportunity which chaos affords—it is sheer Matter with no standards at all,” John Dewey wrote to his wife Alice on an early visit there.¹ Such a city, which had become the geographical nexus of American industrial democracy, pushed Dewey to consider the problems industrial modes of organization pose for democratic theory. His reconceptualization of democracy, and the refinements and clarifications to it that he made over the years, reflects an appreciation of the significance of work—of human transfiguration of chaotic matter into something useable, and of the corollary construction of human psychology as it meets with the world around it and resolves the problems it thereby encounters.

By the 1920s, democratic realists contemplating the landscape of American political life in the wake of several more decades of industrialization, technological advances, and human mobility wondered if a democratic public were even possible. One hope was that, using Dewey’s terms above, “matter” might have some “standards” after all; the application of science and social science to the problems of the day might yield knowledge that could be employed in political decision-making.² Of these realists, Walter Lippmann was recognized by Dewey as particularly insightful. As Dewey noted, Lippmann provided “a more significant statement of the problem of knowledge than professional epistemological philosophers have been able to give.”³ Lippmann’s book began with an epigraph from Plato’s Republic, and, like Plato, Lippmann suggests that secure knowledge is the foundation of a good polity, with the illusions provided by the workaday world standing as a serious threat to its stability. Taking up the challenges that Lippmann’s argument poses, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems provides a different account of the knowledge that should guide democratic politics, a modern account of practical judgment in lieu of technical reason.⁴

A century later, the terms of work have changed again, and the problems Dewey and Lippmann considered are freshly relevant. This paper considers the 2012 Chicago Teachers Strike as an instance in which a public, in Dewey’s sense, briefly emerged in response to perceived problems that raise precisely the set of questions regarding knowledge and democratic governance that Dewey and Lippmann addressed. The direct impetus for the strike was Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision to lengthen the school day and year without a proportional rise in teacher pay, but the strike tapped deeper concerns. Parents and teachers supported the strike in large part because they perceived “expert” advisors and the politicians they advised to be changing schools in ways that ran counter to parents’ and teachers’ own senses of what their children needed. For the past twenty years, Chicago has been a bellwether of the education reform movement, which has removed control of public schools from the hands of citizens and professional educators and placed it in the hands of expert manipulators of symbols. Like would-be philosopher kings, the businesspeople who sit on Chicago’s Board of Education and the politicians who put them there speak of schools in terms of a quasi-mathematical knowledge of educational problems and their solutions. The parents and teachers of Chicago’s children instead place their confidence in their ongoing experiences with the children they live with. Policy-makers and pundits tell us that parents and educators are misguided; that faith in experience-based knowledge of children and schools renders us dumb and immobile, chained to outdated conventions, determined to raise our children on myths because we cannot face the light of truth.⁵ To the reformers’ argument, Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems provides a refutation that is as powerful now as it was a century ago.

The Chicago Teachers Strike

In September 2012, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike. The strike was ostensibly prompted by a disagreement about the terms of a new contract, but interpreters recognized that this was no simple labor dispute.⁶ Commentators identified two major themes underlying the conflict: labor politics and the education reform movement...