Worth Striking For

The Context of Worth Striking For Isabel NunezI WAS A FIRST GRADE TEACHER in Southern California in the early 1990s, and it was the most fulfilling work I've ever done. This was back in the days before curriculum standardization-or even standards; my first graders took one standardized test a year and the results were only used to help us teach them better. I spent 5 years abroad and returned to an educational landscape that was nearly unrecognizable.My current students, who are teaching now, have a hard time imagining what this was like: the freedom and autonomy that I enjoyed in my classroom. My graduate students will sometimes ask me 'What did you do at staff meetings?' Well, we did have staff meetings, and we did complain about how long they were, but we did NOT analyze test score data. We had the luxury of talking about students as people, not as numbers.From No Child Left Behind to the current push for teacher evaluation via test scores and ranking, it has been a really tough decade or so to be an educator. Every few weeks brings another devastating discovery, whether a new round of school closures or a ridiculous-sounding idea from a conservative think tank-which by now we've learned is likely to turn up as a serious policy proposal. I used to laugh at these, but now I tremble.Watching all the dots connect has been worse still: It's not well-intentioned error; it's a strategic assault on public education as an enterprise. Most recently, the offensive has been targeted at teachers themselves. I'm already seeing the signs of despair in my graduate students as the public discourse casts teachers as enemy number one-even while high-stakes testing makes it harder to actually teach. The efforts to undermine teachers' unions and tenure, programs like Teach for America which ask just a few years' commitment to the classroom: All of these point in one direction. If the reform movement is successful, teaching will no longer be a career, but a job-and a low-paid, temporary one at that. Since for most teachers, neither of these is an adequate descriptor for what is truly a vocation, the struggle in which we are now engaged is for our very survival as professionals.I was feeling demoralized, disillusioned, and dangerously close to despair in 2012. There is very little exaggeration when I say that the Chicago teachers' strike saved my life. Being in Chicago then, as the city's teachers took to the streets, was transformative. The summer vote by Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members authorizing the strike garnered more than 90% of Chicago teachers' approval. It flew in the face of a statutory requirement that 75% of members authorize a strike-a legislative move that was designed to be debilitating to teachers' unions. In fact, Jonah Edelman, the astroturf reform group Stand for Children CEO, had bragged in Aspen that he'd succeeding in ensuring that the CTU would never strike. He envisioned a state-by-state capitulation that would neutralize the power of unions nationwide. Well, the teachers had something to say about that.During the strike itself, teachers showed incredible courage and dignity, never flinching in their support of their students and their schools-this despite the threat to their bank accounts and the attacks on their already battered reputations. One of my own students shared how she cried as she read the callously critical comments on the strike from some Facebook 'friends' - until just then she saw herself on the news in front of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) headquarters and was re-energized. As the strike came to a close, CTU president Karen Lewis explained that this is not just about teachers, connecting the event to the wider struggle for basic fairness to workers, a fight that is only intensifying.This was our inspiration for writing Worth Striking For: Why Education Policy is Every Teacher 's Concern. Pamela Konkol, Gregory Michie, and I initially proposed a book of education history on the strike to Teachers College Press. …