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become in the last three years; many of the caucus’s leaders had been fighting this fight for a decade, others far longer. CORE transformed the CTU by educating and agitating teachers about school reform and its place in a broader neoliberal project to dismantle public education, and these now-radicalized rank-and-file teachers would eventually provide the sober vision of what the union was up against—and the kind of confrontational unionism needed to fight it.
    At the same time, the union’s left leadership positioned the union as a representative of CPS students and their families. Even parents who weren’t actively involved inunion fights knew of the devastating effects that neoliberal education reform had had on their children, including those due to widespread school closures, particularly in poor neighborhoods of color. When the CTU presented itself publicly as an organization actively and uncompromisingly opposed to such reforms—in an explicit way that had not been done by previous union leadership—and made the case for why they hurt students, CPS parents began to back them. In the public battle over who actually represented the interests of poor and working-class schoolchildren, the union won out over the neoliberal education reformers.
    Because education reformers are pushing the consensus on education reform to the right by making their case directly to liberals (the traditional backers of teachers unions), effectively splitting those unions apart from the Democratic Party, teachers unions must appeal directly to the American public, on both local and national levels. This must be done not simply through slick public relations campaigns but through genuine partnership with communities. Teachers unions, guided by a vision of education equality and defending education as a public good, should bargain for improved conditions for all students.
    While the blame heaped upon teachers unions for the dismal state of much of the urban education system is certainly disingenuous, used as a justification for a project to dismantle public education, it is also true that teachers unions have largely failed the parents of public school students over the years. Too many teachers unions havepursued agendas of self-interest for decades, focusing solely on bread-and-butter issues even at times of great upheaval among communities outside of schools, from 1960s and 1970s-era conflicts in Newark and the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn to the CTU itself throughout its history.
    Where teachers unions could have played key roles alongside community members fighting for better schools, they often remained neutral or actively hostile to activists’ demands, pursuing an agenda that advanced their own interests. The long history of such actions has given the neoliberal reformers a clear opening for attacks.
    Teachers unionism without social justice concerns might have been able to survive during the peak of the Keynesian consensus. Now, however, there is a societywide sense that reform requires tacking hard to the right. The only way that collective bargaining in public education can withstand the neoliberal attacks it now faces is to pursue a social movement unionism that genuinely sees its central purposes as fighting for teachers
and
students and preserving public education as a public good.
    Otherwise, parents confronted with crumbling schools and unresponsive bureaucracies will continue to see the freemarket reformers as the only ones seeming to be seriously concerned about their children’s education (disingenuous though they may be); the reformers, meanwhile, will have free rein to continue their attacks on teachers unions, likely with parents’ backing.
    In short, the only way teachers unions can survive inthe twenty-first century is to adopt the kinds of broad social justice concerns—alongside parents, communities, and others—that the CTU has come to stand and fight for.
    1 John F. Lyons,
Teachers and