Education Deform and Social Justice Unionism

“To win rudimentary justice, women had to battle with brain, with wit, and sometimes even with force,” observes Margaret Haley, the pioneer of teacher unionism in Chicago and the United States. “If you happened to be born,” Haley continues, “wanting freedom for yourself, for your group, for people at large, you had to fight for it – and you had to fight hard.”¹ Haley captures here the fighting spirit of working-class struggle that has come to define the revitalized Chicago Teachers Union (ctu) under direction of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (core), which won power in the union in 2010. And as can be seen in the week-long teachers’ strike in Seattle last September and the amazing work done in winning a new contract through grassroots organizing by education workers in Los Angeles, this mode of social justice union praxis – combining a radical vision with mass action – is radiating out to other cities across the nation.

Teachers in Chicago and elsewhere in urban America are on the frontlines of a war over the future of public education. On one side, we have the corporate-sponsored neoliberal education “reform” movement that attributes all of the nation’s failings – poverty, inequality, and a decline in economic competitiveness in the world economy – to a crisis in public education, a crisis most acute in US cities. On the other side, we have those whom the reformers view as the main culprits for this crisis, allegedly bad teachers and the unions that protect them.

In September 2012, for the first time since 1987, Chicago teachers hit the streets against neoliberal reforms and austerity, going on strike for seven days. In terms of its mass character across the city, the popular support the union enjoyed, and the extent to which it resonated with workers in and beyond Chicago, it is no exaggeration to say that this is the most important strike to occur in the United States of the 21st century. This strike was the culmination of years of struggle by ordinary public school teachers and community organizations across Chicago, who have, since the mid-2000s, been fighting against the corporate-backed program whose aim is to dismantle the public school system and replace it with a largely privatized system governed according to a corporate model. The remaking of public schooling in this manner is a central component of neoliberal urban development.

The movement behind this corporate takeover of education, often misidentified in the media as an “education reform movement,” is about expanding capitalist profit by turning what were once universal public institutions, historically tasked with the responsibility for producing a nation’s citizenry and its labour force, over to corporate profiteers of a new booming industry. This movement is more aptly described by teacher activists as “corporate deform.” The deformers typically deploy a discourse of choice or civil rights as a way to capture a piece of the more than $500 billion that the federal government spends on the K–12 education sector in the United States. This corporate-backed agenda is a core component of the neoliberal restructuring of political, economic, and social life more generally that has been driven by an amalgam of right-wing and neoliberal think tanks, both major political parties in the United States, private charter school operators, and education management organizations, as well as global economic governance institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

The 2012 strike, which has rightly been held up in the three books under review as a successful model of the kind of action unions need to take to beat back corporate power and austerity policies, would have been impossible if not for the efforts of...