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CHICAGO—The
Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) emerged victorious in the June
11 run-off election of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), defeating the
incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC) in a landslide victory.
It had become clear, when the final
counts were announced on June 12, that the UPC, headed by Marilyn
Stewart, had suffered a total defeat. Karen Lewis, head of the CORE
slate, won the CTU presidency, and CORE won all four top union offices,
each garnering more than 12,000 votes to fewer than 8300 for each of
the UPC candidates. CORE also won all nine citywide offices, all six of
the vice presidencies for high schools, and all 17 vice-presidencies for
elementary schools.
The CORE landslide is especially
impressive in that the UPC had the benefit of incumbency and had no
intention of playing fair. According to estimates by Substance News
Online, the UPC supporters spent a quarter-million dollars to try to
re-elect Stewart, if one includes the blatant “outrageously corrupt”
use of staff time used in the effort, and spent over $100,000 on
mailings alone. The UPC resorted to vicious attacks, including
spreading lies and redbaiting, and collaborated with the Chicago
Schools CEO, Ron Huberman, in trying to ban union election campaigning
in the schools, which was ultimately unsuccessful.
CORE overcame these disadvantages by
strong organization and the strength of its program, most of which is
anathema to many leaders in the two national teacher unions. Key
elements of its program are a real opposition to corporate attacks on
public schools promoted by No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Obama’s Race
to the Top (RTTT); a willingness to contest district budget cuts (which
is currently in play as CORE’s first battle with the Chicago Schools
CEO and Board of Education); a principled reliance on grassroots member
mobilization and community coalitions as the primary tools of struggle;
and a strong advocacy for internal union democracy, including the
fostering of internal debate.
Building opposition to the attacks on
public schools and unions was how CORE got its start, when two years
ago it coalesced in response to Renaissance 2010, Chicago’s school
reform plan. Ren 2010 used the notorious NCLB to aggressively close
“underperforming” Chicago schools and replace them with charter
schools, most non-union and run top-down.
With bipartisan backing in both houses
of Congress, NCLB has set up a rigged, class-biased, national testing
system. Under NCLB it is inevitable that many urban schools would fail
to pass the tests, and by casting blame on the teachers, officials at
every level could attack teacher unions and their hard-won gains. As
schools closed and layoffs mounted in Chicago in the last few years,
due process was ignored, a problem that is occurring in districts
throughout the nation.
During the six-year term of the UPC,
the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) lost 6000 members due to school
closings. In its election campaign, CORE faulted the outgoing UPC under
Marilyn Stewart for not defending Chicago schools and teachers, a
criticism that is applicable to the leadership of other locals across
the country.
In response to the apathy of CTU
leaders, CORE turned to the Chicago community to find allies. It
organized the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), a coalition that
brought together 14 community organizations with CORE, to fight the
school closings. Over the past two years, GEM vigorously challenged
every planned school closing and successfully stopped the closing of 12
neighborhood schools. CORE showed that grassroots union mobilization,
allied with community actors, could achieve success.
The national significance of CORE’s
victory in the CTU, one of the largest teacher union locals in the AFT,
is that it challenges the two teacher unions to oppose the attack on
teachers. This is especially true given that President Obama—guided by
CORE’s nemesis, former Chicago Schools CEO and the current Secretary of
Education, Arne Duncan—has unleashed an attack on teachers that is more
severe than even NCLB under Bush.
The heads of both the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Educational Association
(NEA) content themselves so far with sniping from the sidelines, but in
the main have continued to support the Obama administration rather than
mount the needed mobilization to counter the measures.
In the next few years, the new CTU will
have to confront two elements of Obama’s education policy: Race to the
Top and his plan for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act (ESEA), known as NCLB under President Bush.
RTTT is a federal program, part of
Obama’s stimulus bill, that will competitively award a total of $4.3
billion to states that have demonstrated acceptance of the
administration’s educational priorities.
In deciding upon the cash winners,
Secretary Duncan clearly favors those states that have lifted caps on
the number of permitted charter schools and allow for teacher
evaluation and pay to be tied to student test scores. Already, former
Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan passed a version of merit pay in
Chicago with support from outgoing CTU President Stewart.
Tennessee and Delaware won the
first round of the race and were awarded $500 million and $100 million,
respectively, but a second round is currently in progress, and states
are again vying to win the cash allotments.
While some states dropped out of the
second round, unable to secure the agreement of unions, numerous unions
in both the AFT and NEA have nonetheless signed off on RTTT. Illinois
is still in the running, having lifted its cap on charter schools from
60 to 115 with significant union support.
Leaders of CORE rightly argue against
RTTT participation. Unfortunately, as Nate Goldbaum reported in CORE’s
April newsletter, AFT President Randi Weingarten encouraged local
unions to work with legislators in securing the grant money.
Besides RTTT, urban schools will also
face Obama’s abysmal plans for ESEA reauthorization (known as NCLB under
Bush). Now that the NCLB has already successfully attacked urban
schools, Obama wants to get rid of the old NCLB bar whereby every
school must demonstrate perfect student proficiency by 2014 or face
corrective action, an impossible feat for almost any school.
Many applaud this supposed repudiation
of NCLB, but Obama and Duncan know that NCLB’s absurdities would soon
negatively impact almost all schools across the nation and face greater
opposition.
In its place, Obama has called for the
“turnaround” of the lowest-performing 5% of schools in a state, where
turnarounds can include school closure, charter takeover, removal of
staff, and work requirements that could be imposed without contractual
negotiation.
School performance will be based upon
the same NCLB-mandated tests, a corporate practice that will guarantee
that there will always be schools facing punitive action (again, most
likely those schools educating disadvantaged students in urban centers
like Chicago).
At least at the start, the CORE-led CTU
can expect little help from its national union leaders. The AFT
leadership nationwide and in many locals is reluctant to contest
turnaround efforts. In Chicago, for example, the CTU had not contested
one school closing prior to CORE’s efforts.
In a New Jersey case that received
national attention this year, AFT teachers at Central Falls High School
did contest a turnaround requiring the district’s one-sided
imposition of work requirements. The district summarily fired the
teachers, and signaling which side he was on in the struggle, Obama
supported the firings.
Although Randi Weingarten publicly
defended the teachers, she did so incompetently in most media venues,
losing the opportunity to educate the public on what it means to be
designated a “failing school,” which is due to the lack of validity and
class bias of NCLB’s assessment measures. In the end, the teachers were
rehired only when they capitulated to every district demand.
After the Central Falls debacle, the
retreat of the AFT is apparent everywhere. According to a feature in The
New York Times Magazine, “The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand” by
Steven Brill, in last April’s contract negotiations in Washington D.C.,
AFT head Randi Weingarten helped to negotiate away tenure and seniority
rights—making it possible for Chancellor Rhee to fire a tenured teacher
if deemed ineffective by her and her staff—and agreed to teacher merit
pay tied to student test scores. In Colorado, Weingarten endorsed
teacher evaluations tied to test scores as the state geared up for
RTTT.
The CORE-led CTU has an opportunity to
present its alternative union philosophy in the AFT National
Convention, held in Seattle, July 7-11. Many locals in both the AFT and
NEA do not promote democratic debate in the union, and leaders in the
bureaucracy are able to continue with an ineffectual program of
collaboration with district officials and Democratic Party politicians.
But without a real struggle from the rank and file, teachers will
continue to suffer as successive defeats turn into an historic crisis.
We need a fighting union that stands up
for students and teachers, presents a view of education as a
collaborative social effort that contributes to the flourishing of the
individual and society, and works to change society in ways that
contribute to that flourishing. For that reason, teachers need
rank-and-file caucuses like CORE in every union local, whether AFT or
NEA.
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