“Chicago Teachers Strike for Us All” trumpeted the Huffington Post. “A Gold Star for the Chicago Teachers Strike” proclaimed the Wall Street Journal, as well as “The Union Wins in Chicago.”

While the strike was certainly not a total victory for the union—school days under the proposed new contract will be lengthened and teacher evaluation plans will go ahead largely as planned—they were nonetheless able to secure a reasonable pay raise to help make up for their increased work load, as well as to outmaneuver Rahm Emmanuel on his controversial plan to tie teachers' pay to evaluation scores.

But with the teachers strike in Chicago now over, and the Chicago Teachers Union looking more and more likely to settle on the latest proposed contract, those of us concerned with the future of the labor movement need to seriously begin looking at the changes this particular strike embodied – not only for schools, but for the economy itself.

The New Schools

The debate surrounding charter schools in Chicago – while not explicit in the teachers' press releases – were nonetheless an ongoing subject of contention during the strike.

The appeal of charters isn't particularly difficult to understand, of course.

As their budgets have shrunk during the recent economic crisis, local governments across the country have found the idea increasingly attractive.

Between 2000 and 2010, in fact, the number of students enrolled in charter schools across the country has risen from nearly .5 million to over 1.5 million, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Because charter schools pay lower average salaries to their teachers, supplement public funding with increased private donations, and introduce private management firms into the school structure to help keep costs down, many charter schools have proved to be significantly less costly than traditional public schools. In fact, while the schools themselves are still considered public, nearly 16% of charter schools are managed by for profit Education Management Organizations.

The rise in charter schools in recent years can also be accounted for by the amount of Federal money being invested in them. As of 2002, nearly 2/3 of charter schools had received federal money in their start-up phase; as of 2010, over $130 million had been awarded to various charters around the country.

These shifts towards charter schools, we must remember, have come from both democrats and republicans alike. And for good reason – from their perspective.

The New Economy

The new emphasis on privatization in our schools finds its roots in broader changes occurring within the economy, and many school reformers intuitively recognize that we no longer live in a society in which strong, publicly managed programs can be the solution to many of our the economy's needs.

During the reign of Keynesian policies - the era of the GI bill and the public works programs - it was not only possible to enact policies which provided a strong social safety net for the population, but structurally necessary.

Possible because capitalists had little recourse or opportunity to move their production overseas (following the Second World War, the infrastructure of most other industrial countries had been bombed out) – meaning higher tax rates were easier to impose on less mobile capitalists.

And necessary because the United States was still reeling from the Depression, with millions of its citizens returning home who needed jobs.

It goes without saying, of course, that we no longer live in that society. We live in a time when it is not only possible to offshore production and service work, but often more profitable; a society in which capital is less and less bound up by nation states, and more and more needs to circulate globally in order to remain competitive.

As Peter Brogan writes in his piece, "What's behind the attack on teachers and public education?":

"An arena of economic investment and capital accumulation [in] the global market for educational services is tremendous! Two and a half trillion dollars globally as of last year, and in the U.S. it’s close to $600 billion that [investors are] looking to get their hands on. This is why what have been called 'venture philanthropists,' most prominently the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edyth Broad Foundation and the Walton Foundation have been the chief financial backers of the 'school choice,' the so-called 'education reform' movement. Education needs to be recognized as a vital arena for economic development and capitalist accumulation."

Privatization has thus become the great policy goal behind our economy's ability to remain competitive within a global market place, as well as meeting the growing needs of industry in training the new workforce.

The Strike, in Context

There was a disconnect during the teachers strike between what may be considered more "political demands" and purely "economic" ones.

While individual members of the CTU have rightly come out against the charter school system, the union still chooses to frame its opposition in terms of "shifting funding away from public schools;" in other words, to couch the debate in terms of its economic impacts on public schools; and indeed, this must be the case, as the union is expressly prohibited from striking over anything else.

Simply stated, however, the knee jerk reaction of defending our traditional public institutions - be they public schools or even the unions themselves - is not realistic.

Unless teachers, parents and students can begin re-imagining what schooling should look like in this new economy; unless they can begin organizing around a new vision for education - one which neither looks to the past of a dreary assembly line public school or to the hyper alienated and profit driven system of the charter school - they will be swept aside by the steady march of capitalism.

In a time when not just unions, but the very institution of public school as we have known it is undergoing enormous changes, it would bolster the teacher's defenses to add more to their rightful fight over pay, class sizes and job security - and to offer a deeper critique and more far-reaching proposal for reforms to the education system.

There is a frenzy in this country over the state of our public schools, and for the union to focus this strike purely around economic issues - caring rhetoric surrounding children aside - was naive and short-sighted, as it cedes liberals a monopoly on school reform, allowing a Seattle Times editorialist to claim, without challenge, "reasonable reforms, such as stronger teacher evaluations and innovation through public charter schools, transcend partisan politics."

This limitation - the union's inability to move beyond traditional "bread and butter" issues - is directly related to the CTU's legal status and structure. If unions continue to see themselves as they are legally defined - more or less as legal bargaining agents tasked only with bickering over wages and benefits - they will remain unable to effectively combat the coming changes to the schools.

John Jacobsen writes for seattlefreepress.org.