During the 2012 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike, the country witnessed unions’ ability to come together with working class parents and community members to score resounding victories, not just for teachers, but for other underserved groups. However,with the emergence of the global COVID-19 pandemic, this solidarity was put to the test when it became unsafe for students and teachers to share physical space. Unions advocated for school shutdowns but failed, in many cases, to champion other solutions and emergency benefits that would protect families from the economic, health, and learning challenges faced during COVID. Now in the aftermath of pandemic learning disruptions, parents and teachers have lost trust that they will receive support from each other. Teachers’ unions fumbled their opportunity to strengthen this key alliance, and unless they make amends, they will find future campaigns harder to win.
The 2012 CTU Strike
In 2012, the newly-elected radical caucus of the CTU led educators in a strike that illustrated how central cross-community relationships are to policy victories. These new leaders, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), based their strategy around member-driven agendas and working class solidarity. At that point, they had already spent years fostering unity with other workers and with their students’ families, whom they believed were their natural allies.
As CORE negotiated its contract in 2012, leadership approached the negotiations as an opportunity to also push for policies promoting educational justice. Almost 90% of Chicago Public Schools families were low-income, and CORE wasted little time centering racial and economic justice in its platform and joining working class coalitions. When teachers chose to prioritize agenda items they shared with other community groups, their actions yielded widespread public support. Tens of thousands of people volunteered and marched alongside the union, which translated into bargaining power. The strike modeled how teachers could combat policies they opposed when they invested in their community; the community invested back and gave teachers the tools to fight another day.
A State of Emergency
With the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic, over 40 states ordered schools to close, with the rest recommending immediate closure. Teaches and students suddenly had to navigate virtual learning. With no end in sight to the dangers of in-person contact by summer of 2020, the education policy sphere needed to reconcile safety with optimal learning conditions.
Almost from the start of virtual learning, local unions set the tone of the national discussion against returning to in-person schooling: 65% of educators said schools should remain closed. More than a third had a health status increasing their COVID risk, and 69% had a loved one with such a condition. Many felt it was simply unsafe to go back.
Parents, however, were skeptical: over 75% were “somewhat” or very concerned their child would lose learning opportunities. Half were worried about losing access to services obtained through schools. And tellingly, 65% of parents worried about their ability to keep balancing their work with supervising their child at home. Parents working low-wage jobs often still had to leave home for work every day and come up with childcare. Under remote learning, parents were torn between their work responsibilities, either at home or out of the house, and their children struggling to teach or even look after themselves.
Class-Consciousness Split Among Teachers
As parents were feeling the burden of childcare, work, and safety, there were certainly policy options available that could have offered respite and made remote schooling less difficult. Progressive actors were asking how pandemic response could be improved by expanding it beyond direct COVID mitigation through social safety nets like eviction moratoria and subsidized healthcare for all. These policies could have had a huge positive impact on families and shown working class parents that teachers could be close allies.
But despite scattered instances of teacher organizations supporting such initiatives, the larger and more powerful state and national unions fell far short of endorsing them. Why? For one, teachers have long worked to establish the professionalism of their field, sometimes at the expense of their solidarity and connection with the working class. While frontline jobs were usually not remote in 2020 because they were considered essential, many white collar roles were awarded the health protections of remote work without much fuss. Rather than pushing the government to better protect all frontline workers, some teachers felt they belonged in the category of white collar workers and deserved to be given the privileges awarded to others of their education levels.
Alternatively, as CTU President Jesse Sharkey remarked, “Going straight to a line of ‘We have our demands and we’ll strike if we don’t get them’ is probably going to be hard for [parents] to hear.” Amid the stressors of the pandemic, the two largest unions in the country could have feared that, unlike in earlier instances of solidarity, large swaths of parents would not stand with teachers regardless of chosen stance. Coupled with rising political polarization and a conservative president, union leadership could reasonably have deemed the odds of achieving such sweeping progressive overhaul as too low.
Fallout
Despite teachers’ fervent protests in favor of remote teaching, unions did not launch a unified national campaign. Instead, there was a patchwork of areas that received more pressure next to districts where little headway was made. Remote-only instruction dominated urban districts in September 2020, but made up only 1% of districts by the end of the school year.
Unfortunately, the damage had already been done. Services fell through the cracks: estimates say that “only about 15% of children from low-income households who qualified for free or reduced meals were getting them.” Chronic absenteeism increased over twofold since before the pandemic and especially among students of color. In terms of performance, the average learning gap in math between White and Black students increased by 30%.
As schools began pushing to reopen and teachers continued to dig their heels in, the tide started to turn on teachers. Even as more evidence emerged that schools could be relatively COVID-safe, some unions insisted that they wait to return to classrooms until their teachers could be vaccinated, if not longer. While many parents were not theoretically against continued remote learning, after almost a year of challenges with what seemed like little support returned to them from teachers, parents mostly felt as if their kids’ well-being had been forgotten. In fighting so hard for what was framed as their own safety, teachers had thoroughly alienated parents and found themselves labeled as villains standing in the way of education.
What Comes Next
Teachers have seen firsthand over the last two years that without community support, winning becomes that much harder. Isolated victories may change policies, but maintenance of intergroup alliances creates many future opportunities to keep winning.
Parents’ suspicion originating during the pandemic that unions have not been fighting with student needs in mind has become an excellent tool for politicians furthering their own agendas. Unless unions can fix what has gone wrong, tensions around new issues like racially-aware curricula will continue to be exploited against student and teacher policy interests.
The solution is both simple and arduous: fight disunity with unity. End distrust by being worthy of trust. Teachers—and especially higher-up union leadership—need to return to the strategies of the CTU: find common ground with potential allies, bring support for their causes, create member- and community-driven policy platforms, and then run campaigns and use union influence to fight for those shared goals. It has implemented beneficial policies in the past; it can do so again.
About the Author
Daniella Paradise (she/her) is a Junior Online Editor for GPPR and a first year MPP student at the McCourt School of Public Policy. She has worked in political organizing, continuing education, law, and academic research. She is now busy with dreams and plans for a more equitable future for public education. Daniella has a BA from Smith College in History and American Studies.
