For my students at Telpochcalli Elementary School on Chicago’s Southwest Side, the most devastatingly difficult lesson is not mathematics or science, social studies, literacy or any other subject printed on a class schedule. It is the lesson that they are not important enough to warrant the basic human rights afforded to other students. It is the lesson that a child a mere ten miles away has access to all of the tools and support they need to thrive—support which our students and their families can hardly dream of.
It is also a lesson that we must kindle and grow our own fires of justice and equity if we are to survive.
On Wednesday, October 16, Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU workers walked out of schools for the last time until we win our demands from Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the City of Chicago Unified School District. As our union Vice President Stacy Davis-Gates has said in the days leading up to the strike, “We are not asking for anything that every student outside of Chicago does not already have.”
Erin Franzinger Barrett
The author's daughter, Xiobhan Franzinger Barrett, holds her self-painted strike sign while chanting, “Strike, Strike, Strike a Strike!”
Our destination is equity and we will challenge anyone who places themselves in our way.
I see this fight for equity and justice being carried out by my students. I have followed that fight out of my classroom into a greater justice and labor movement. It led me to work with other educators and student activists to form and grow the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) and Chicago Youth Initiating Change (CYIC).
A few short years later we took control of the Chicago Teachers Union and helped lead a critical historic strike in 2012. That strike acted as a catalyst to rekindle workers’ use of the strike as a tool for justice and greater social change all across the country and in other countries across the world.
In 2019, as in 2012, we have issues with compensation, teacher evaluation (which has forced veteran black teachers from the system), and other bargainable issues. These include hiring more counselors and nurses, implementing hard class size limits, and housing assistance for teachers and students. All are addressed in the demands put forth by Chicago Teachers Union.
Lightfoot was elected on a platform that pledged to meet nearly all of our demands. When she was elected, many Chicagoans cautiously hoped that she would keep her campaign promises. Instead, she has elected to play hardball at the negotiations: not attending any bargaining sessions so far while her team did not commit to any enforceable promises around class size and staffing.
The mayor continues to emphasize that they will not budge on these equity issues and that we cannot strike over them as it would be illegal.
A little history lesson here: in 1995, the city of Chicago worked with state Republican lawmakers to push through a legislation package that created a separate school code and educational labor relations code for cities “having a population in excess of 500,000.” There is only one city that meets this criteria in the entire state of Illinois: Chicago. The result has been separate and unequal codes for the largest district in the state, which also happens to contain the majority of the black and brown students in the state.
But like many teachers and community members, I do not care about this legal definition. To support law and order over the basic human rights of our students is unconscionable. Even as Lightfoot’s team has declined to discuss these issues and the mayor has accused us in the media of “stalling negotiations” for bringing up student housing issues, we have already pushed them to move on these issues through our threat of strike.
Facebook/Lori Lightfoot
Teachers hope to hold Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot accountable to promises she made to Chicago Schools on the campaign trail.
Should we take these minor concessions as victories and stay in our classrooms? Equity is not a piecemeal negotiation. We will continue to bargain. We will march in the streets and organize with our communities. We will search for mutually acceptable solutions. But we will compromise nothing when it comes to the humanity of our students.
When I was about to turn seven, I remember listening to some of my father’s Irish rebel songs. I would sit with my ear to the speaker and sing along at the top of my lungs. At one point my father asked me what I thought about them, and I responded with my own question: “It doesn’t say, but don’t they all die at the end?”
“Yes, they definitely do.”
“Why would they fight if they knew that they were almost certainly going to lose and die?”
“Our ancestors dreamed of a day where a child of a child of a child of theirs would be born into a free Ireland,” he told me. “That dream kept us fighting and it’s not just an Irish dream, it’s a dream that belongs to all of us.”
As we dress our own kids and ready ourselves for the picket lines; as our students and former students put the finishing touches on their strike signs; as our students’ families head to work wondering how this will end and dreaming of the future their children deserve, I hope you will join us. Lift your voice, send your donation or pizza, pour your heart out unto your page or computer screen. Cry for equity, and then look at your own community and let us know how we can help galvanize this same struggle in your streets. Love and Justice.