Free Strike for America by Micah Uetricht Page A

poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.
    Duncan even created a director of philanthropic engagement in the Department of Education—in his own words, “signal[ling] to the philanthropic world that the Department is ‘open for business.’ ” 8
    From the very top of the national Democratic Party to the local level, the consensus is unabashedly in favor of transforming public education into a market commodity.
    Chicago has long been what education policy scholar Pauline Lipman describes as “incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education agenda”—part of a larger process of restructuring the city to better serve the needs of capital. Since the 1990s, this has been marketed as education reform. The 1995 Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act put the mayor in full control of CPS, with the power to appoint a school board and a CEO, and made an early push for a more central role for high-stakes testing. Arne Duncan, CEO of CPS under Richard M. Daley, crafted the Renaissance 2010 push. By 2009, ninety-two schools had been designated as Ren2010 schools, and some three quarters of them had been converted into charters. The program set up a system of labeling and sorting schools in order to identify those that were to be deemed failures—essentially settingCPS up to become a portfolio manager of schools, obeying the logic of the market by determining which schools in its portfolio were failing and thus needed to be closed. 9
    Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education have continued this push, particularly around school closures. In 2013, the board voted to shut down forty-nine elementary schools and a high school program—almost all of which are in African American neighborhoods—while the district continues to advance a plan to open sixty new charter schools. The combination of public school closings and charter school expansion will likely erode the union’s membership, redirect public money to privately run charters that lack basic mechanisms for public accountability, slash teachers’ salaries and benefits, and cause massive disruption in the neighborhoods where the closures would take place.
    This agenda has been carried out in Chicago under total mayoral control, with almost no formal accountability to Chicagoans themselves. Ren2010 and the 2013 school closures might have been difficult to achieve if Chicago’s mayors had to worry about public accountability. Writing about Chicago, “a national model of mayoral control,” Lipman says, “Mayoral takeover is a case of the use of the coercive power of the state to enforce a neoliberal program.” 10
    Chicago is perhaps the most Democratic of all American big cities, with a storied history of a political machine tied to that party. But it was also in the vanguard of the shift to aneoliberal managerial Democratic Party that aimed to placate new constituencies of capital rather than organized community interests or labor. That shift has seen education reform become synonymous with the free market and attacks on organized teachers.
    Recognizing the Failure of Teachers Unions Nationally
    The two major domestic teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, of which the CTU is a member), have continually failed to even attempt to resist the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on education. Even as the party is turning against them, they continue giving the Democrats millions of dollars—around $30 million in publicly disclosed donations and outside spending in the 2012 election cycle—seemingly expecting little in return.
    There have been rumblings of a potential rupture in the teachers union–Democratic Party coalition for years, as teachers have grown increasingly agitated at the party’s attacks on their profession. Indications of this have cropped up as more and more Democrats are becoming outspoken about their reticence or outright hostility toward