battle with AFT locals on strike. Today, there is no street fighting between black parent activists and teachers union members, but there is little active support by the latter of the former’s struggles. Most teachers unions do little to actively embrace the causes of community groups fighting for racial justice in public schools and would never describe the conditions in urban public schools around the country as “like apartheid,” despite the overwhelming evidence that this is the case. Evenprogressive-minded union locals are afraid to push their membership on the issues of racial inequality, and they would never want to engage in genuine power-sharing with community organizations that might push them to take risks that don’t sit well with union staff.
The CTU is one of the few teachers union locals around the country willing to name the policies of its district—in which 91.2 percent of students are students of color, 87 percent are poor students, and 90 percent attend schools classified as “hypersegregated”—as racist. In speeches, policy papers, and statements to the press, the union has described Chicago’s schools as “apartheid-like.” In a June 2013 speech at the City Club of Chicago, Karen Lewis said, “Rich white people think they know what’s in the best interests of children of African-Americans and Latinos.… There’s something about these folks who use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference while announcing they want to fire, lay off, or lock up their parents at another.” 23
The union has supported community groups in filing Title VI civil rights complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights around school turnarounds and closures in black and Latino neighborhoods. Its November 2012 report in particular, titled “The Black and White of Education in Chicago,” attacks CPS for exacerbating racial inequality by examining the racial composition of neighborhoods andschools targeted for closures and turnarounds; it points out that the larger a school’s population of students of color, the more likely it is to be shuttered. Since 2001, some 88 percent of CPS students who have been affected by closures or turnarounds have been African American.
Teachers of color have long been the ones willing to work in these hypersegregated conditions. But according to the union’s data, the percentage of black teachers in CPS has declined from 45 percent in 1995 to 29 percent in 2011, leading to a lawsuit filed in late 2012 against the district by three fired black teachers and the union. The steep decline in the number of teachers of color in CPS schools has serious implications for the black “middle class” in Chicago as well as for students of color; as it organized in the years before the 2010 election, CORE agitated around this issue and has made it a central organizing task since taking office.
Brandon Johnson was once a middle school reading and social studies teacher and is now an organizer for the union. He realized the extent to which black teachers were under attack in Chicago through his conversations with activists who had fought for black teachers to become full members of the union and full employees of the CPS during the Civil Rights era. A retired teacher who had witnessed the struggles to bring black teachers into full membership in the union told him, “This is in direct retaliation to what we built in the ’60s and ’70s. They’re trying to kill you.”
“I was really livid,” Johnson said, “to think that there was a system that does not value an entire race ofteachers—especially when 90 percent of students are students of color, and a good portion of them black.”
The union’s Black Teachers Caucus was an independent rank-and-file organization that agitated against the conservative union’s leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, fighting for both improvements in black students’ learning
The CTU is one of the few teachers union locals around the country willing to name the policies of its district—in which 91.2 percent of students are students of color, 87 percent are poor students, and 90 percent attend schools classified as “hypersegregated”—as racist. In speeches, policy papers, and statements to the press, the union has described Chicago’s schools as “apartheid-like.” In a June 2013 speech at the City Club of Chicago, Karen Lewis said, “Rich white people think they know what’s in the best interests of children of African-Americans and Latinos.… There’s something about these folks who use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference while announcing they want to fire, lay off, or lock up their parents at another.” 23
The union has supported community groups in filing Title VI civil rights complaints with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights around school turnarounds and closures in black and Latino neighborhoods. Its November 2012 report in particular, titled “The Black and White of Education in Chicago,” attacks CPS for exacerbating racial inequality by examining the racial composition of neighborhoods andschools targeted for closures and turnarounds; it points out that the larger a school’s population of students of color, the more likely it is to be shuttered. Since 2001, some 88 percent of CPS students who have been affected by closures or turnarounds have been African American.
Teachers of color have long been the ones willing to work in these hypersegregated conditions. But according to the union’s data, the percentage of black teachers in CPS has declined from 45 percent in 1995 to 29 percent in 2011, leading to a lawsuit filed in late 2012 against the district by three fired black teachers and the union. The steep decline in the number of teachers of color in CPS schools has serious implications for the black “middle class” in Chicago as well as for students of color; as it organized in the years before the 2010 election, CORE agitated around this issue and has made it a central organizing task since taking office.
Brandon Johnson was once a middle school reading and social studies teacher and is now an organizer for the union. He realized the extent to which black teachers were under attack in Chicago through his conversations with activists who had fought for black teachers to become full members of the union and full employees of the CPS during the Civil Rights era. A retired teacher who had witnessed the struggles to bring black teachers into full membership in the union told him, “This is in direct retaliation to what we built in the ’60s and ’70s. They’re trying to kill you.”
“I was really livid,” Johnson said, “to think that there was a system that does not value an entire race ofteachers—especially when 90 percent of students are students of color, and a good portion of them black.”
The union’s Black Teachers Caucus was an independent rank-and-file organization that agitated against the conservative union’s leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, fighting for both improvements in black students’ learning
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