Navigating a restless sea: The continuing struggle to achieve a decent education for African American youngsters in Chicago

Journal of Negro Education, The, Winter 1994 by Ayers, William, Klonsky, Michael

In September 1987, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) failed to reach a contract agreement with the city board of education and its members went out on strike. Teachers' strikes in Chicago had become commonplace. This was the ninth walkout in 18 years. The sense of a permanent state of "negotiated conflict" between the teachers and the school board had come to be part of the local political landscape, one that was punctuated each August by loud demands and dramatic posturing followed by a miraculous last-minute solution or a relatively brief strike. This time would be different. The strike dragged on through September for

record 19 school days. Forty-one thousand employees were idled for a cumulative 570,000 days--the longest public employee strike in Illinois history. Instead of the typical temporarily satisfactory solution and return to business as usual, the 1987 strike contributed to a strong and growing view that Chicago was saddled with a failing school system that was spinning completely out of control.

The 1987 strike became the catalyst for large numbers of people to express their rage and frustration with the full range of school problems, and that expression was immediate and sustained. For Chicago's parents, the strike was never the real issue, but merely the precipitating event or a heightened level of struggle. Their goal was not a contract settlement between the board and the union. Instead, parents and community activists raised the broader issue of the quality of Chicago schools and the related question of how to make schools accountable to the people they were supposed to serve. New organizations emerged: Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE), based on Chicago's north side, held a series of rallies, at one point surrounding city hall and demanding the mayor's intervention in the strike; the People's Coalition for Educational Reform (PCER) organized "freedom schools" throughout the south and west sides, enacting and recreating the civil rights legacy and serving some 30,000 youngsters in September. Several groups held rallies at Pershing Road, at the State of Illinois Building, and even at CTU headquarters. As the strike wore on, the demonstrations grew in size and intensity and a broad range of forces were galvanized into a working reform coalition with African American leadership.

Mayor Washington, who had initiated an event dubbed the Mayor's Education Summit the previous year, called a meeting for the week following the end of the strike. Over 1,000 people converged on the meeting--organizers had planned for a few hundred--demanding a strong voice in reforming the schools. The mayor created a 54-person Parents' Community Council (PCC) to hammer out and recommend to him a reform agenda. Coretta McFerren, an African American southside Chicago activist with children and grandchildren in the public schools and an organizer of the "freedom schools" during the strike, regularly convened PCC meetings with a cheery greeting: "Welcome to the revolution!"