Learn about the important stand being taken today by the Chicago Teacher's Union and what is at stake in Chicago and throughout the country.

Learn about this historic strike by reading, watching, or listening to Democracy Now's ongoing coverage.

Click here for an overview of today's events and the processes that have led up to it.

Click here to watch a VERY infomative interview with education expert and activist Pauline Lipman, which provides lots of political and historical context. Below, I have reproduced the transcript of this excellent interview:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re continuing on the teachers’ strike in Chicago, the largest—well, the first strike in a quarter of a century in the third-largest school district in this country. The mayor is Rahm Emanuel, the former chief of staff of President Obama.

Pauline Lipman is with us, professor of education and policy studies at University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education and on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice.

So, the teachers have just gone out on strike. Professor Lipman, put this in a national context, what this means, what the Chicago strike means for the nation.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yes, good morning.

As I said in the clip that you showed earlier, Chicago was the birthplace of this neoliberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, closing failing neighborhood—disinvesting in neighborhood schools and then closing them and turning them over to charter schools—the policies that both Phil and Rhoda just described. And it was really a model which was picked up by cities around the country and then made a national agenda when Arne Duncan, who had been the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, became Obama’s secretary of education.

Chicago is now an epicenter of the pushback against it, as I also said before. And very much at the center of that is a new Chicago Teachers Union, with a new leadership that is really challenging this whole agenda with a different vision of education, a vision of education that involves a rich curriculum for all students, that puts equity at the center. They’ve named what these policies have resulted in in Chicago "education apartheid," especially for African-American and also Latino students. So, this is a battle that is being watched by people around the country. And a really strong victory for the Chicago Teachers Union, backed up by parents and community members, will send a signal that we can actually turn around this agenda. So I think it has tremendous significance. And I get the news feeds from the Chicago Teachers Union, the reports of this strike, and it’s being covered not only nationally, but internationally.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Lipman, talk about the current leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union. Talk about Karen Lewis.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah, so, one thing is that, you know, in the corporate media in Chicago, we keep reading about union bosses. Well, the leadership of the teachers’ union are teachers, they’re not union bosses, first of all. Karen Lewis is a National Board certified teacher. She teaches and has been—had been teaching chemistry at Martin Luther King High School on the South Side of Chicago. She is well known in the—by students, former students, other teachers, beloved as a teacher.

She’s part of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, which is a new caucus that really came on the scene just about four or five years ago. But because the previous leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union was really not challenging this whole agenda, CORE acted like the leadership of the union. They fought the school closings that were happening every single year in Chicago. They fought for teachers who were laid off. And rank-and-file teachers, who simply had enough of these policies after just absorbing the punishment for 15 years, overwhelmingly elected Karen and the other leadership team from the CORE caucus.

And I do have to say also that Karen has just been incredibly courageous. She’s been vilified often in the media, and she has stood very firm and in a principled way fighting for the schools that Chicago students deserve.

AMY GOODMAN: So, talk about what this means for the nation, the whole Race to the Top that President Obama has adopted—

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —Arne Duncan coming from Chicago. Explain all of these ties.

PAULINE LIPMAN: Right, right. So, as you said, Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. And under his watch in 2004, Chicago launched a policy called Renaissance 2010, which was actually designed by the Commercial Club of Chicago in 2003. The Commercial Club is an organization of the biggest CEOs and bankers in the city, essentially. And Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators or expanding charter schools and having charter schools come in, and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to the high-stakes tests that Phil was talking about earlier.

And so, that agenda, which has been really devastating in Chicago and had already been very clearly very devastating in 2008, after four years, was the agenda that Duncan took to Washington when he became secretary of education, and it’s embedded in Race to the Top. So, Race to the Top has a set of provisions that really basically means states are competing for $4.3 billion in federal funds. And in order to get those funds, they must do certain things. And those things are the kinds of things that have been done and have failed and have been devastating in Chicago. They must close failing schools or turn them around, expand charter schools, pass legislation that allows charter schools to be expanded. They must have some kind of evaluation system of teachers that’s tied to testing students. And these policies now are the national agenda.

AMY GOODMAN: President Obama famously said in 2007—he said, to unions, "I will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States."

PAULINE LIPMAN: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: Have you heard from President Obama?

PAULINE LIPMAN: As far—I haven’t heard from him. But as far as I know, the Chicago Teachers Union has not heard from him, either. You know, Rahm Emanuel was his chief of staff, and he’s now the mayor of Chicago. And as maybe our listeners do or don’t know, the mayor appoints the school board in Chicago. And the school board is made up of, again, corporate CEOs, financiers, a hotel magnate, real-estate developers. And part of the agenda of forcing the teachers’ backs up against the wall, I think, is an attempt to actually weaken the Chicago Teachers Union, because the Chicago Teachers Union is not—the new leadership has not only reinvigorated the union in this city, it’s reinvigorating the trade—teachers’ union movement nationally.

It’s really energized—electrified, really—teachers nationally, because this is not a traditional union, and it’s not a traditional labor struggle. It’s a union that has a different vision of education and is fighting for that. It’s a union that’s a social movement union, or trying to be a social movement union, in which it’s very democratic. Their bargaining team is made up—includes 40 rank-and-file members of the CTU. And it has energized the rank and file. So I was at the strike headquarters yesterday, and there were just hundreds of teachers showing up to pick up picket signs, talking about the issues. It’s not just Karen Lewis and her leadership that are leading this union; it’s the rank and file that are leading that union. And that is—

AMY GOODMAN: There’s going to be a large rally today at 3:00?

PAULINE LIPMAN: There is. There is. There’s going to be a rally from 3:30 to 6:00 at the CPS headquarters, and I’m sure there will be thousands of people. It will not just be teachers. It will certainly be parents and students and community members, as well, because there is—have been really strong ties built between the teachers’ union and community organizations, because they fought together with communities against school closings and for the schools our children deserve. And so, we’re expecting a really large rally, that—I’m expecting a really large rally, and I think parents and teachers are, as well, to really send a message to Rahm Emanuel that Chicago Public Schools—and he’s really behind it—that they really need to give in to the demands of the teachers and have better working conditions for teachers and better learning conditions for students.

AMY GOODMAN: How long do you expect this to go on, the strike to go on, Professor Lipman?

PAULINE LIPMAN: You know, that’s a really good question, and I certainly don’t have a crystal ball. I think a very strong showing on the part of the public backing up the teachers, who are very solid—as you know, 98 percent of the teachers in the union voted to authorize the strike. So, a very strong, solid showing, I think, should send a message to city hall that they need to settle this. But, you know, Rahm Emanuel is very unpredictable, so we don’t know.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you very much for being with us, Pauline Lipman, professor of education and policy studies at—

PAULIN LIPMAN: Thanks for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: —the University of Illinois, Chicago, also director of the Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education at the university, and she’s on the coordinating committee for Teachers for Social Justice. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report.

The Charter-Schooling Racket.

There are some charter schools that are doing good work, but these are the exception, not the rule. The fact of the matter is that the charter schools movement serves first and foremost as a front for the privitization of education—the placement of educational infrastructure into the hands of profiteers, industrialists, finance capitalists and loan sharks.

This article, which appeared recently in the New York Times, describes a case in point:

When the energy executive Dennis Bakke retired with a fortune from the AES Corporation, [get a load of the AES Corporation's Web site!—cft] the company he co-founded, he and his wife, Eileen, decided to direct their attention and money to education. [E]ager to experiment with applying business strategies and discipline to public schools[, t]he Bakkes became part of the nation’s new crop of education entrepreneurs, founding a commercial charter school company called Imagine Schools[,] now the largest commercial manager of charter schools in the country.

Here's a(n ineffective) public relationsy photograph of the Bakkes 'interacting' with the low-income students in one of the schools 'managed' by Imagine Schools:

As education expert Patricia Burch states in an article on the dark and clandestine market forces that are unleashing the worldwide privatization of education and that are misleadingly portraying this widespread, government-coordinated profiteering racket in terms of the benefits of parental "consumer choice" or of the putative benefits of "market competition" upon educational quality, among the reasons that this cynical ploy works is because

we tend to equate the public sector with large bureaucracy and the private sector with more efficient, flexible and network-oriented forms of organization. In fact, the providers now “trading” in the new education market place are situated squarely in the same institutional environment as schools. In broad strokes, this institutional frame reflects embedded routines and rituals for the organization of schooling.

This institutional template for schooling can have a conservative influence on schools and keep reform ideas from becoming or achieving anything new. In this context, rather than breaking the mold, private firms in the education market can end up reproducing the worst practices of public schooling, offering low-income students “more of the same” and at significant cost.  [Access article here.]

Returning to the Times article, we see that the Bakkes epitomize the ways in which the puppet-masters of the charter-schooling racket uses this notion of 'marketization' as a means by which to justify enriching themselves—tax free—to the detriment and even ruin of the urban children they are supposed to be helping:

Because public money is used, most states grant charters to run such schools only to nonprofit groups with the expectation that they will exercise the same independent oversight that public school boards do. Some are run locally. Some bring in nonprofit management chains. And a number use commercial management companies like Imagine.

But regulators in some states have found that Imagine has elbowed the charter holders out of virtually all school decision making — hiring and firing principals and staff members, controlling and profiting from school real estate, and retaining fees under contracts that often guarantee Imagine’s management in perpetuity.

The arrangements, they say, allow Imagine to use public money with little oversight. “Under either charter law or traditional nonprofit law, there really is no way an entity should end up on both sides of business transactions,” said Marc Dean Millot, publisher of the report K-12 Leads and a former president of the National Charter Schools Alliance, a trade association, now defunct, for the charter school movement.

“Imagine works to dominate the board of the charter holder, and then it does a deal with the board it dominates — and that cannot be an arm’s length transaction,” he said.

Such concerns have thwarted efforts by Imagine to open a school in Florida, threaten to stall its push into Texas, and have ended its business with a school in Georgia and another in New York, as well as other states.

Imagine is not shy about the way it wields its power, which it calls essential to its governing philosophy. “Imagine Schools operates the entire school, and is not a consultant or management company,” its Web site says. “All principals, teachers, and staff are Imagine Schools people. The Imagine Schools culture is meant to permeate every aspect of the school’s life.”

Mrs. Bakke, who is paid $100,000 as vice president of education at Imagine, says it works in “close partnership” with the boards of the schools it manages. “The governing boards are definitely in charge, but they look to us, frankly, because as you know, nonprofit boards are well meaning but don’t always have the experience and expertise running the schools,” she said in an interview.

She said that she and her husband, who is paid $200,000 as the company’s chief executive, sank $155 million into Imagine and that they were able to run schools efficiently. “We offer a great deal for communities and for taxpayers,” Mrs. Bakke said, “because we’re providing education at less than what a traditional school is spending.”

She says the company should be judged by its educational results, not its business and financial arrangements. 

 And if that doesn't sound sketchy enough for you, read on:

Mrs. Bakke said her company “is operated as a not-for-profit.” But Imagine is not a nonprofit group, and it has so far failed to gain status as a charity from the I.R.S.

Imagine applied for federal tax exemption in 2005 and has repeatedly said approval is imminent. It typically takes four to six months for such approvals. “We’re not sure why it’s taking so long,” said Mrs. Bakke, who is 56. “We suspect it’s because we’re trailblazers in a sense, and they haven’t had an application quite like this.”

The I.R.S., as is its policy, declined to comment. 

And how about the relationship of Imagine Schools to individual schools and their boards of directors? Read on:

In Texas, parents trying to open a charter school for elementary school students thought that Imagine was going too far.

“Imagine did a few things that indicated they thought the charter belonged to them, which was not our understanding at all,” said Karelei Munn, who is part of a group working to establish a charter school in Georgetown, Tex., near Austin. “We were looking to control our board, and they were looking to control our board.”

Ms. Munn and other members of the group holding the charter broke their ties with Imagine and are trying to form a school on their own.

Regulators in Texas have been slow to approve a second Imagine school, citing concerns that include an e-mail message from Mr. Bakke to the company’s senior staff members that was reported on by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch last fall. In the message, dated Sept. 4, 2008, Mr. Bakke cautioned his executives against giving boards of schools the “misconception” that they “are responsible for making big decisions about budget matters, school policies, hiring of the principal and dozens of other matters.”

Instead, he wrote, “It is our school, our money and our risk, not theirs.”

Mr. Bakke, who is 64, suggested requiring board members to sign undated letters of resignation or limiting board terms to a single year.

In a statement after the e-mail message was disclosed, Mr. Bakke apologized to board members “who felt offended or maligned,” saying he had “overstated my personal frustration in ensuring that the dedicated, caring people who hold the seats of charter governing boards at Imagine Schools understand and support our mission and operating philosophy.”

As Texas continues its consideration, the e-mail message helped upend Imagine’s plans to open a school in the Hillsborough County School District in Florida, which encompasses Tampa.

“That e-mail was very, very bad for them,” said Jenna Hodgens, the local supervisor of charter schools. “All the things we had been questioning, things about control of the school, he answered in his own words.”

The Hillsborough school board rejected the application in December. “Charter schools are not private schools, they are public schools and are governed as such,” said Susan Valdes, who heads the board. “Some, though, are starting to forget that — and they’re getting away with it. But not here.”

And that's only the beginning. I highly recommend reading the entire article, in order to learn about the nature of the Bakkes' company and its shady investment and governance practices. Imagine Schools is basically a giant loan shark.

Let's get these sleaze-balls and hucksters away from our schools already.