Why you don't have to support or even like the Chicago public school teacher unions to nonetheless oppose school closings in Chicago.

Some people are obsessed with the teachers unions -- their expense and their imputed rigidity -- and what ills they imagine have been done to Chicago schools. When the Chicago Public Schools system and Mayor Emanuel say they want to close and combine schools to save money and improve education, those people are especially inclined to fall for this rhetoric.

But there are many considerations here. There are many interested parties whose interests deserve to be measured and whose voices deserve to be heard.

From the POV of the urban parents of elementary school children currently attending neighborhood schools, having their kids closer to home, traveling less through a dangerous city, matters. The coincidence that teachers in unions don't want to move far as well is perhaps just a lucky accident for them -- for while teachers may have some clout through their unions (not enough in Chicago to apparently make a difference here) parents have virtually no clout. Even if you assume that the teachers' union cares only incidentally about the well-being of the children, and this battle is between the interests of the city politicos on the one hand and the union on the other, one has to acknowledge that the children are going to suffer the collateral damage in this battle.

So if you care about the kids, you may wish to stop these closings, whatever your feelings about the teacher unions.

From the POV of activists for social justice, it has to be noted that black communities and black employment is often collateral damage in fights of this sort -- when they are not the outright target of racist politicians and political ideologies. Blacks are disproportionately employed in the public sector, so right wing attacks on public sector employment has at least the unintended effect of doing harm to the black community. These community schools in black and minority neighborhoods have not only some black and minority teachers, but black and minority contractors, black and minority janitors and staff -- including the kitchen workers with whom Amelia was protesting. Close these minority schools and you do lots of harm to minorities in their communities -- one more page in the long racist history of US social policy, one more sequence of dominoes falling -- jobs, families, neighborhood businesses imploding in turn.

So if you care about minorities and their communities, if you care about not continuing to turn back on the little progress we have made in this country since the '60s, you may wish to stop these closings, whatever your feelings about the teacher unions.

From the POV of unionized service workers who are lucky to have bathroom breaks, and have to count themselves blessed if they have any health insurance at all, the existence of a teachers union in the US is of enormous symbolic value. Once the teachers' unions fall, it is arguably the end of the line for working people in this country. The decline in unions since the 1970s has arguably led to the greatest transfer of wealth and income in any modern nation in history in this time frame. From 1979 to today, the share of the uber-wealthy has skyrocketed at the expense of the bottom 80%. Virtually every stakeholder outside of the Mayor's office and his political consultants has been brutalized by the impacts of ugly corporatism. The teachers' union is the last middle class union maintaining a line in the sand before all working people are over-run. Whether or not you support or can even tolerate teachers' unions, you cannot deny their symbolic value. They are the Maginot Line in the working person's last stand in America.

So if you care about unionized poor people, you may try to stand up for teacher unions, even if you don't like what teacher unions have done in the schools.

And what if we truly opened the experiment up and include many variables not part of the current discourse? That is, after all, what public intellectuals are supposed to be doing for activists, so let's try.

For example, what if we asked what public education would look like in a world in which racial segregation was not prominent in our society? What if we asked what public education would look like if we doubled the financial resources we devoted to education? What if we asked what public education would be like if we doubled pre-natal and then pre-school programs for children of uneducated, under-resourced mothers? What if we asked what public education would look like in a world in which private education was vastly reduced or eliminated?

What if we gave a nod to our concerned Conservative brethren and vastly improved their capacity to improve private giving to the needy?

Or even, on a less theoretical level, what would public education look like in the US if the actual education of children was correlated by sensible public policies aimed at preparing them for the occupational structure of the nation, as it is in much of Europe?

Or what would happen if educational policy decisions were made that honestly and respectfully took in consideration the many costs, tangible and intangible, incurred by everyone involved? In Chicago, you must admit, the powers-that-be don't care an iota about the astonishing cost to all these children and their families, or to the displaced staff at this schools, or the the communities devastated once more by neglectful social policy. Or worse; perhaps they are happy to see such devastation.


Were we to admit any of these changes into the equation, we would be forced to acknowledge that it might make a significant difference.  And I daresay that in most of these scenarios involving increased resources and support for the education of inner-city kids we would find that the best thing for these kids and their families -- and for their educational, as well as life, outcomes -- would be to have good schools nearby, in the neighborhood.  Would this even need to be asked?  Where would you locate their schools if you could get it right? 

Were I somehow in charge of the crisis in Chicago, I am sure that I would be concerned deeply about the harm to education that is coming about due to the unfortunate rigidities imposed by union work rules in the schools. If people had not lost trust in the Mayor, the CPS, and the power structure, perhaps one could demand that the union flex more for the children, but as it is, the negotiation is bitter and dishonest and teachers feel that such concessions will never get into the classroom but will be diverted to more pernicious ends. But whatever I decided in that arena, I hope that I would also care deeply about the needs of the kids, the needs of the staff, the needs of the communities in which those schools reside, the spillover effects onto union and non-union working and poor people elsewhere, and to the whole fight for social justice against the powers-that-be who will continue to treat black and poor communities with abuse and neglect unless you stand up for them.

The only people who should stand with the Mayor and with school closings in Chicago must be both so angrily anti-union, as well as so narrow in their concerns, that they would do grave harm to many in order to satisfy their anti-union and anti-teacher vendetta. The cost-benefit moral calculus is so much wider than this, and the vast majority of the costs and benefits argue for keeping neighborhood schools open.