reprinted from OccupiedStories.com
I
After just one day, the strike seems like some strange, hazy thing that happened to other people. The scope and size and sizzle of it, the drumming singing dancing chanting rally cry, the physicality of it, the get in the streets aggressive civil disobedience of it, and the white lightning energy of the thing, it all seems like some rogue spirit of the 1960s that possessed us all for a few days and then floated on back to the historical ether.
I wake up at 5. I stretch, read, make breakfast porridge and drink coffee. Simone sits on my lap for a few minutes and we watch the sky lighten out the back windows. I brush my teeth, bike to work in a chilly wind that resists my pedaling the whole way.
The students are not resentful or angry. They're happy. The parents don't yell or throw things at us or even give us dirty faces. They say hello and wave and offer up big smiles. They're happy, too.
I ascend the stairs to the library and shoot up the shades. A few things seem out of place, some of the chairs have been moved, but otherwise the library is unchanged.
The staff meets in front of the school, everyone wearing red. The idea was to re-begin the year with solidarity in our hearts. I'm late, and sort of half walk in with everyone else.
And just like that—as if the strike hadn't happened—we're back.
II
I wanted to end my rambling essay on the strike with some killer writing, the same lived in attention to detail that consumed my thoughts during the strike.
But I can't offer up the same minute to minute details, the conversations, my own drifting thoughts. I'm too tired, I'm preoccupied with my return to work, and the expositional needs of the wrap-up are many. Thousands of other writers can do this sort of thing better than me, but I lived through it, I'm up on the issues, and I've read much of the commentary, both before, during and after.
So here goes. The post-strike post-modern post mortem. Hold on to your butts.
The problems in Chicago's public school system haven't been fixed. The worst schools remain in the poorest neighborhoods. These are the schools that will, if the mayor gets his way and I have no reason to believe he won't, be shut down. Charter schools will move in—often placed in the same building the old public school used to operate in—and the mayor can wash his hands of the whole affair.
Charter schools are held to lower standards; they often game the system by ejecting lower performing students and therefore appearing to do better than they actually do; and they are staffed almost uniformly by non-union teachers.
So the lowest educational areas in the city, which correspond to the poorest areas in the city, will have their children taught by teachers being paid less, in schools with less scrutiny, less support, and less state and federal funding.
And this is supposed to be a good thing.
It's some type of bizarre shell game where everyone knows it's rigged, but no one can quite figure out how the barker keeps up the con. Everyone knows this privatization thing is racist, but no one is quite sure how. It's difficult to see through the murk. The "reforms" sound good, because if we call it reform—reform's a good thing, right?—then we can ignore the racism made manifest by the mayor's policies.
To his credit, the mayor I'm sure (mostly) believes that charter schools are the answer. But this is the scaffold—the howling crazy ghosts in the psychological sub-basement—that he's bought into to protect his psyche from self-harm. (Mitt Romney has a similar scaffold in place, the idea that capitol should morally be taxed at a lower rate than labor. The fact that this moral good accrues millions of extra dollars a year to his bank account is simply a collateral benefit. His philosophy just happens to benefit him.)
But Rahm's good intentions, and I'm being supremely generous here, mean nothing in the face of his hurtful policies.
He has powerful allies in this education reform movement, including the world's richest man.
These bad guys rooting around in public education are a deep-pocketed and influential bunch. There are two major strands to these "reformers." The first is the privatize everything people, such as the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom. These subscribers to the libertarian philosophy have a simple answer to all the world's problems: privatize and let the free market do its moral magic. They cherry pick from history for examples of success, and totally ignore their horrifying, misery-inducing failures (Chile, Argentina, Zambia, Indonesia, the list goes on and on). Their answer to the problems of public education in the U.S.? Shockingly, privatize and let the free market do its moral magic. They want universal private school choice. They want nothing less than the total dismantling of public education. They want to plunge us even further into a corporate mindset, where everything runs on (a deeply flawed) cost/benefit analysis, everything except their own profits.
And they are called reformers.
The second group is the anti-union people, like StudentsFirst, led by Michelle Rhee. They are a well-funded lobbying group strangely obsessed with teacher tenure, seeing it as the major obstacle to students doing well. As opposed to smaller class sizes, access to cutting edge materials, or even pushing for teaching to be a professional advanced degree. Nope, just tenure. Get rid of it, pay teachers less, and the quality of education will improve. Dispose of tenure and pollution will decrease, worldwide unemployment will disappear and people will begin to read novels again.
III
Back to Rahm, and his ease with the knock-around politics. The day we went back to school he began running ads saying that, because of the new contract, 100 to 150 neighborhood schools would have to close to pay for it. This is a cynical and disingenuous claim. One of the major reasons we went on strike in the first place was to protest the closing of neighborhood schools. (We used the aegis of teacher recall—where highly rated teachers from closed schools would have first crack at new job openings—as a way of addressing this issue. Like so many other things, we're not allowed to strike over school closings.)
We expect cynicism from our politicians, but goddamn, this is extreme. Rahm is laying the blame on the teachers for bringing about the thing he's been promising to do since elected. It's heinous, and he should be lambasted for it. Plus, the money being spent on this tacky, public victory lap could pay for some of the very things we went on strike for to begin with.
"He won. He won. I love him," C. says as we stand outside waiting for the official start time. The students know the drill. They stand near their lineup areas and listen to music through their handhelds, rap, pass gossip, flirt, inhabit the awkward end of adolescence with gaudy aplomb. A few wave, but most of the eighth graders try their best to look insouciant and uncaring.
C. is our security guard. He's conservative politically but in an unpredictable way. Two weeks earlier he confessed to me that he hated the mayor. That he said "screw you," to him at some Puerto Rican fundraiser. So this newfound love is a put-on, a gag, a dig. He loves to watch me get annoyed when he says a bunch of nonsense. "He's going to close all those schools," C. says.
"You don't even like Rahm," I say as Daryl laughs.
"I love him," C. says. "He won. He beat the teachers. Ha!"
"Those neighborhoods will have to organize and protest," I say. "We can't use the strike to save them all. It's too large and unwieldy a weapon."
"You guys should have kept the strike going," C. says, in a moment of rare candor. "Maybe you could have helped keep those schools open."
"Maybe," I say.
