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CTU must become militant again

Substance Staff - June, 2008

We need to remind our readers — both local and national — that Chicago has been providing the nation with many of the ugliest templates in the attack on public education that has only been embodied in ‘No Child Left Behind’ since the Bush administration took power seven years ago. Before there was ‘No Child Left Behind,’ Chicago — with the praise of President Bill Clinton in two State of the Union addresses — was the Democratic Party’s national model for corporate ‘school reform’, union busting, and privatization.

These problems didn’t begin when George W. Bush became President, and they will not end when the Democratic Party ousts Bush and his regime from power. Chicago is not only an eccentric home to strange preachers and some interesting notions. It is a hotbed of nasty policies and their promulgation, and the Chicago Teachers Union is central to the fight against those policies if the union and its members return to our militant roots.

We cannot afford to surrender the power teachers have through the Chicago Teachers Union to change the course of history, here in the belly of the beast where, in many ways, corporate 'school reform' began. That beginning was in 1995 when the Illinois General Assembly, through the 'Amendatory Act', abolished the last vestiges of democracy in the governance of Chicago's schools and gave Mayor Richard M. Daley dictatorial control over the city's more than 600 public schools.

Only the Chicago Teachers Union -- with militant, committed leadership -- can stand up to Daley and turn back the corporate juggernaut.

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