Jeff Bryant is an Associate Fellow at Campaign for America’s Future and the editor of the Education Opportunity Network website. In this piece, he looks at a move in Chicago to undo some of the work of neoliberals in the city.
There was an ironic moment in former President Barack Obama’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Chicago when he brought up the passing of his wife Michelle’s mother Marian Robinson who, he noted, was raised in the South Side of Chicago and attended Englewood High School.
He likely brought up the details of Robinson’s upbringing as bona fides of her roots in a big city Black community. But the irony was that Englewood High School was closed in 2005 by Obama’s basketball friend—who later served as his secretary of education—Arne Duncan when he was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008. That moment, as obscure as it was, came across as yet another signal—not lost to other astute observers—of how the Democratic Party is struggling to turn from its love affair with neoliberal policy to embrace a new politics of progressive populism that claims to care about families and workers.
That struggle is especially tricky in the education policy arena where Democrats have a lengthy history of imposing neoliberal policy ideas such as charter schools, vouchers, and standardized testing that led to labeling public schools as failures, closing them down, and ramping up charter school industry corruption.
Nowhere has that neoliberal agenda been more controversial than in Chicago, where Democratic political leaders such as Duncan and the city’s former Democratic mayors, including Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, imposed deeply unpopular policies largely driven by budget austerity, business narrowmindedness, complicated financial deals with Wall Street banks, and the privatization of public assets.
In the city’s newest political flare-up, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and leaders of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are engaged in a contentious contract negotiation in which the union has called for a progressive agenda that not only includes pay increases for teachers and school staff but also steps to mitigate climate change, end the gender pay gap for CPS employees, eliminate homelessness for families of CPS students, provide paid parental leave for CPS employees, and aid new immigrant families.
So far, negotiations over pay have drawn the most media attention. The union has asked “for a 9 percent pay increase,” Chalkbeat reported in August 2024. The CPS CEO Pedro Martinez appeared poised to offer raises of “between 4 percent and 5 percent,” according to WBEZ. However, CTU stated in its September 9 contract negotiations update that CPS has yet to address about 50 percent of the union’s proposals.
CPS’s resistance is especially frustrating to progressive advocates in Chicago who’ve been advocating for strengthening the public schools system since at least the 1990s. Despite their success, the hurdles these advocates continue to face have left them frustrated.
