The Democrats’
Scott Walker?
September
11, 2012
Joseph Palermo
The 29,000 striking Chicago teachers are sending the message to Mayor Rahm Emanuel (and Secretary of
Education Arne Duncan) that their teacher bashing and privatization schemes for
public education have become so onerous and destructive to the teachers’
mission and profession that they have no choice but to fight back.
In this epic struggle to save a
profession that is vital to the long-term well being of the nation Mayor
Emanuel finds himself in a role similar to that of Governor Scott Walker of
Wisconsin: an anti-union corporate politician who is more than ready to play
hardball with a public employees union. Unfortunately for him, his fellow
Chicagoan, President Obama, for whom Emanuel served as Chief of Staff, is in
the fight of his political life right now trying to win four more years. The
timing of the strike couldn’t be worse for the Democrats, and therefore packs a
potent punch nationally because it lays bare how toxic the relationship between
teachers and Democratic Party leaders has become in recent years.
This strike is not about wages or benefits or any other matter that might
concern unionized workers in more prosperous times, this is a fight for the
very survival of a profession (and a highly feminized one at that) that has
been under relentless attack from sharks posing as “reformers.” Emanuel and his
fellow travelers appear to be more concerned about busting the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and turning
over quick profits to education corporations poised to make a bundle on their
privatization than they are on any common sense solution to the crisis they’ve
manufactured.
This strike also shines a light on
the deep and bitter conflict that’s been tearing apart the Democratic Party
since Arne Duncan launched his “Race to the Top” campaign. If Mayor Emanuel
comes off as being too Scott Walkeresque the repercussions of this battle,
since President Obama is personally so connected to Chicago and Emanuel and
Duncan, could cost him a lot votes and enthusiasm in the 2012 election.
The privatizers and
profiteers from “Stand for Students” had a hand
in lobbying the Chicago City Council to raise the threshold to three-quarters
of teachers voting for a strike action before they could go out. But last
June’s strike approval vote of nearly 90 percent put that scheme to silence
teachers to rest.
President Obama appointed his own
“Chicago Boy” to run his education policy in the form of Education Secretary
Arne Duncan, who was largely to blame for
putting the Chicago school system on the terrible road it now finds itself.
Duncan, in turn, appointed a gaggle of education entrepreneurs,
corporate-minded “reformers” and privatizers to key posts inside the U.S.
Department of Education, including Joanne Weiss, who was a partner and chief
operating officer of the NewSchools Venture Fund, who had previously headed
several education businesses that sold products and services to schools and
colleges. (Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School
System, p. 218)
Teachers and their allies in local
communities across the country, amidst the most severe contraction of jobs and
budget cutbacks they’ve ever faced, have been trying to warn the Democrats’
education wizards that they’re blowing it big time in beating down teachers and
trying to turn their profession into a “business.” The outcome the “reformers”
have been pursuing for many years is to reduce teachers to interchangeable cogs
in a corporate machine with few rights and negligible input into the management
of their own profession. Across the country they have set out to reduce
teachers’ job security while imposing punitive actions upon them. If teachers
don’t obediently jump through a new set of hoops designed for “accountability”
and the quantitative measurement of “student learning outcomes,” they are told,
then they are “impediments” to children’s learning.
Emanuel, like Duncan, has shown
repeatedly that he has no intention of really listening to the teachers’ ideas
or suggestions about how to work with them in a productive way. Like
Wisconsin’s Republican anti-union governor, Scott Walker, Mayor Emanuel would
love to see the CTU buckle under. He apparently would have no problem with
business executives managing the teaching profession in the same manner they
would a widget factory.
Hizz Honor doesn’t understand that if
you want good teachers you must not only pay them what they’re worth but treat
them with respect and dignity.
We’ve heard for years now that
teachers must make concessions and accept “painful” cuts and layoffs for the
fiscal health of state and municipal governments; due to budgetary shortfalls,
we’re told, teachers must “do more with less.” The howls for “accountability”
have come at a time of economic crisis and public sector downsizing, teacher
bashing and Tea Party ascendancy. The teachers have bent over backwards trying
to satisfy the whims of the corporate-minded Edu-business entrepreneurs and
their servants in City Halls and State Houses across the country, as well as
inside the Department of Education.
But the teachers’ concessions are
never enough.
Apparently, the “reformers” won’t be
contented until they’ve reduced teachers in America to the status of
interchangeable and fire-able Wal-Mart greeters. After all the layoffs and
teacher knocking we’ve experienced in recent years, a lot of it orchestrated by
that media darling Michelle Rhee and her well-funded acolytes, the least any
mayor or governor or president who claims to be a “Democrat” should do is show
a modicum of respect for the people who are charged with the awesome duty of
educating America’s children.
This CTU strike might finally open up
the space for a real debate on the state of America’s public education system,
free of the propaganda coming from corporate sponsors who want to profit on the
privatization of the system. We need to see far less of Michelle Rhee and far
more of Diane Ravitch and Randi Weingarten if we’re going to have an informed
debate about this vital topic that affects our nation’s future. So far the
“debate” has amounted to misleading ads bankrolled by corporate sponsors
depicting America’s teachers as loafers and moochers and America itself as an obese idiot waving a flag.
If the teachers’ unions are so big
and powerful as we hear constantly from media news outlets then why is Michelle Rhee’s voice so much louder than Randi Weingarten’s or Diane Ravitch‘s?
Mayor Emanuel has thrown in his lot
with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and Florida
Governor Rick Scott and the rest of the anti-teacher, anti-public employee Tea
Party crowd. That development cannot be a good thing for the long-term health
of the teaching profession and labor unionism in America generally, as well as
for the Democratic Party’s chances in the 2012 elections. Did Emanuel forget
that he’s siding with President Obama’s political enemies on this issue? Or has
he cynically calculated that by beating up on teachers he’s mining for
political gold with “independents?” Whatever the political calculus in Rahm
Emanuel’s head he’s dead wrong. It pits workers against Democratic politicians
and when has that ever been good for the party?
Absent in the cacophony of
teacher-throttling is the fact that teachers, who are the majority female
workers, deserve union representation as much as any other workers do. These
women and men in the teaching profession have to put food on the table and take
care of their families, buy or rent a home, have decent transportation, and
presentable clothes, etc. The union is the only vehicle making it possible for
them to have a semblance of workplace dignity and protect their livelihoods.
We’ve seen how teachers are treated in the “right-to-work” (for less) states
and it’s abysmal.
Why these corporate Democrats like
Emanuel have it in for teachers when they comprise such an important bloc of
the Democratic Party’s base is a puzzle that can only be solved if one takes a
hard look at the profiteers and privatizers among their ranks. Yet again we
witness elite “Democrats” standing up “courageously” to beat down a vital
element of their own base. No doubt mainstream commentators will swoon over
Emanuel’s “courage” to “stand up to” those evil teachers and their unions. Stay
tuned for articles from David Brooks and the rest extolling the virtues of
Emanuel’s “tough” stand in screwing over his own party’s base. (If you’re a
partisan Republican what’s not to love about the spectacle?) Would Republicans
ever do the same thing to their own base?
Emanuel and Duncan and Rhee and the
rest are aligned with private schools and their kids would never set foot in a
public school. They have a corporate mindset betrayed by the fact that all of
their “reforms” end up, in one way or another, lining the pockets of education
profiteers and pushing the systems toward privatization, mediocrity, and
despair. What the Chicago Boys don’t get is that teachers need to have morale,
they need to feel valued or else they cannot do their jobs.
In the face of these demoralizing
attacks teachers across the country have endured in recent years it’s great to
see their morale channeled into the tough but rewarding and powerful step in
uniting together in solidarity by going out on strike. It’s about time! Workers
don’t follow down the strike path lightly and it reveals to the nation the
extent of the onslaught teachers have had to put up with from corporate
“reformers” in recent years. They have pushed these professionals toward
despair and demoralization and now they have a politically charged strike
action on their hands. They can pretend to care about the children now and
speak about what a terrible “inconvenience” it is to have schools shut down –
but since when was any strike action by exploited workers ever “convenient?”
If Mayor Emanuel, Secretary Duncan,
and President Obama truly believe it’s better to have a workforce of
demoralized people fearful of losing their jobs at the administration’s whim
and tyrannized by standardized tests teaching the nation’s children than
working in good faith with their union representatives they’re fatally
misreading the politics of this teachers strike in Chicago and its potential
ramifications. There are communities of educators across the nation that are
boiling in anger and ready to go out on strike themselves when the time comes.
This conflict is not isolated in the Windy City but has national significance.
Emanuel, Duncan, and Obama will be
fools to enter into an informal alliance with some of the most reactionary
anti-union politicians in the country. How this anti-union stand is going to
help President Obama win re-election or help the Democratic Party in the
long-term is anybody’s guess. The last time Bill Clinton bent over backwards
standing up “courageously” to his base to side with the Republicans on key
issues – such as “free” trade and deregulation – the Democrats were rewarded
for this “courage” by losing the House, the Senate, and the Presidency.
This is a good time for teachers,
parents, students, and community activists across the country to stand with the
teachers of Chicago and send a loud message to Emanuel and Duncan and Obama
that only through productive relations with the people doing the hard work in
the trenches of our public schools can real progress be made. Democratic
leaders on the wrong side in this fight will regret it both in the short term
(November 2012), and in the long run.
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