Thousands of striking Chicago teachers rallied on Saturday to keep the pressure on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to wrap up an agreement with their union to end a strike that closed the nation's third largest school district for a week.
The rally brought labour leaders, community activists and striking teachers to Chicago's Union Park for one of the largest demonstrations against Emanuel's education reforms since the strike began on Monday.
Led by Chicago Teachers Union president and former high school chemistry teacher Karen Lewis, 29,000 unionised teachers, counsellors, nurses and support staff staged their first strike in 25 years, leaving 350,000 Chicago students out of school.
"You have proven to the world that you're not going to take it anymore," Lorretta Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, told demonstrators the day after the two sides reached a tentative deal to end the strike.
Emanuel angered the Chicago teachers by trying to push through proposals to radically reform their performance evaluations and weaken job protection for those teachers whose schools are closed or perform poorly academically.
The mayor retreated from some of his proposed reforms, although details of what he has agreed to with the union have not been made public.
Many Democratic mayors and politicians have supported Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. Other Democrats have sided with the unions, which are major financial supporters of the party and are needed to help Obama win re-election on November 6.
Emanuel denied that there had been any pressure from the White House to settle the strike. "The short answer is no," said his spokeswoman, Sarah Hamilton. "There was no pressure, and no pressure would have worked, because they know that the mayor firmly believes that what we are doing to reform and improve our schools is the right thing."
The union is wary of Emanuel, whom Lewis has called a "bully" and a "liar."
Organisers hoped Saturday's rally would rival some of the huge demonstrations last year against the efforts of Wisconsin's Republican Governor Scott Walker to curb the power of unions. The Wisconsin protests were unsuccessful, but drew tens of thousands of government workers, including teachers.
Activists and supporters from other unions joined the sea of strikers wearing red T-shirts at the rally. "This is not just a Chicago struggle, this is a struggle for workers everywhere," declared civil rights leader Jesse Jackson. "You've led a new struggle for courage."
Che "Rhymefest" Smith, a rapper turned community activist, told the crowd that a Chicago teacher had fought for him to go from dropout to a high school graduate.
"A lot of our dropout students are not students who don't want to get a diploma, they're students who were failed by the system, not by our teachers," Smith said. "I see a system that is not only failing our students, it is failing our teachers."
If all goes well in the negotiations between the Chicago School Board and the union this weekend, Lewis said she would ask some 800 union activists on Sunday to suspend the strike and teachers would return to classrooms on Monday morning.
Lewis told reporters on Friday that the union was making sure all of its "i's are dotted and t's are crossed." Gideon MacKay, who teaches on Chicago's West Side, said he hoped Sunday's meeting would lead to a new contract, or at least a suspension of the strike. "It's been draining," he said. "We're teachers. That's what we do, we teach."
The strike is the biggest US labour dispute in a year and has galvanised the national labour movement. It also has shone a light on a fierce debate over how to reform struggling urban schools across the country.
High school teacher Colleen Murray said the rally was meant to send the message that teachers were united. "I'm hoping to see a fair evaluation process that recognises that teachers cannot control all of the variables that go into student achievement," she said. Both sides agree Chicago public schools are not doing well. Students perform poorly on standardised tests of math and reading, and the high school graduation rate is 60 percent, compared with 75 percent nationally and more than 90 percent in some affluent Chicago suburban high schools.
Comments
Comments are closed.