CHICAGO — The teachers gathered, all in their red T-shirts and red plastic ponchos, out in front of the Hyatt Regency hotel on Wacker Drive, hard by the river here, on the third day of their strike. Autumn had come blowing in early off the big lake, and it had brought a chill drizzle that had brought out the ponchos, and many of the picket signs seemed in imminent danger of blowing off in the general direction of Joliet.

That they were gathered at the hotel — and not at the headquarters of the Chicago Public Schools several blocks away, or in front of any of the shuttered school buildings themselves — was a signifying development in that it demonstrated that the strike had tied itself to issues far beyond pay and benefits, and even beyond class size, and even beyond the galling insult of measuring a teacher's worth by how the students perform in the (admittedly quite profitable) monkey-show that is the educational testing industry. You see, Penny Pritzker, one of the many dilettante corporate millionnaires who have attached themselves to the educational "reform" movement, also is a high-ranking executive of the Hyatt corporation. In her day job, fairly defined as "raking it in with both hands," Pritzker was granted a number of lucrative tax breaks by the administration of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, who also, as it happens, was the guy knuckling the Chicago Teacher's Union on behalf of the school "reform" movement. The teachers were not shy about associating Pritzker's tax breaks, her work in "reforming" the public out of the public schools, and Emanuel's conspicuous involvement in both of them. In every real sense, the Chicago teacher's strike was as much an attempt to arrest the tightening grip of oligarchy as anything that ever happened in Zuccotti Park. Once again, at the very least, people were yelling at the right buildings.

"It's funny," said Patrice Thomas. "The world 'reform' seems like it means a different thing to some people. To us, it means air-conditioning when it's hot, and class sizes that are somewhat manageable."

Thomas is a special-needs case manager at the Barbara Vick Center, an early-childhood education center on the city's South Side that serves 300-odd children between the ages of three and six, a significant number of them with special needs.

"It's been long, tiring days, but it's exhilarating, too," she said. "It's been a nice camaraderie of staff and teachers and parents and students coming together. I feel that politicians are lined up against us, but the support we have received from our parents and our students and the rest of the public-service personnel that work for the city, they're all for us. It couldn't have worked out better."

Thomas is supposed to work a seven-hour day, but that has become a very elastic number as budget cuts elsewhere have affected the Vick center, especially its special-needs students. "They have cut significantly the budget for care-professional support — that's the aides that assist the special-needs students and the special-needs professionals over the past year.

"I don't think a lot of the people who say they're "for the kids" know what we're really fighting about. We're fighting for the working conditions. We happen to be in a great school, where our working conditions aren't bad, but I've been in schools, I've gone to meetings in schools, where you wouldn't send your worst enemy into those schools and our teachers have to try and work in those schools and our children have to try and learn in those schools. We have classrooms with no air-conditioning in those 90-degree days where it wentover 100 degrees, and students are expected to learn. We have classrooms with 45 students in them. This is what people don't hear about. That's what they don't know we're fighting for."

The strike has forced a lot of things to the surface, not the least of which is the entirely unsurprising revelation that Rahm Emanuel is every bit as much of an imperious dickhead as an elected official as he was as an apparatchik under both presidents Clinton and Obama. Quotes have leaked from various bargaining sessions that demonstrate quite clearly that Emanuel is in this fight for the power it will bring him, and to cement alliances with the various corporate panjandrums financing the "reform" movement, especially by funneling money to corporate-backed charter schools in and around the city. He is busting a union, pure and simple, because he's found a union he can bust while still getting to speak at a Democratic convention. The Democratic Party in general has been forced to cut bait on how closely it wants to ally itself with the "reform" movement at the expense of the public school teachers and their unions, which always have been reliable political allies of the Democrats in local and national elections. (The early indications, alas, is that the Democrats see even more advantage in "standing up" to people like Patrice Thomas than the Republicans do. The Democrats have found a place where they can all be Scott Walker. Huzzah for triangulation!) But the strike also has smoked out for good and all the raw, class-based bias within the "reform" movement and its cheerleaders in the punditocracy.

Consider, for example, this editorial from the Chicago Tribune, in which the teachers are told, essentially, to give it up because the locomotive of "reform" is a'comin' and they're picketing right there on the tracks....

These principles are set in law, federal and state. They're at the heart of the Democratic education reform agenda championed by the Obama administration in its Race to the Top challenges. They're at the crux of a sweeping 2011 Illinois education reform law. That law breezed through the Illinois Senate 54-0 and the Illinois House 112-1. That's right: only one vote against these reforms. Democrats and Republicans passed that law and other reforms not to antagonize teachers union members, but because these changes help ensure that only the best teachers are leading classrooms across the state. Don't let this arc of history get lost in all the red shirts and red-meat speeches. Helping kids learn, helping kids progress. That, rather than merely pushing students along from one year to the next, is the aim of these reforms in Illinois and across the nation.

This is altogether remarkable — a fait accompli in which not very much has been

accompli-ed at all. Not a much in the editorial about whether or not the "reforms" are working, just that they're "inevitable," which can be credited at least as much to the well-financed lobby behind the "reform" movement as anything else. Unions are outdated. Get them out of the way and then... well, what? Time after time, from No Child Left Behind to the Race To The Top, the "reformers" have set up their patent-medicine stands and peddled their nostrums to the politicians, and time and time again, it is demonstrated that, at best, even the most lavishly financed and promoted of these "reforms" do no better than fighting the same damn problems to a draw.

And what, I always ask, is the alternative? From the "reformers," we get pie in the sky dined upon by golden unicorns. Once we jettison the deadwood out of the system, the "good" teachers — the ones who can get the right answers installed into their students according to standards set by, among other companies, the corporation that's keeping The Washington Post afloat — will be paid what they are worth by a grateful citizenry. Horse hockey. People don't want to pay teachers because they don't value the work that teachers do. If they don't respect the sacrifices most of those people on the picket line are making now, what makes anyone think they won't gripe just as loudly in that glorious future over what the "good" teachers are making, especially if private sector wages everywhere else remain stagnant and income inequality grows?

For example, consider, if you have the stomach for it, the latest waste of pixels from David Brooks, the Squire of Cleveland Park, who bestirred himself within his "vast spaces for entertaining" to deliver the following pronouncements in the New York Times

this morning.

The Chicago teachers' strike is a test of this proposition. The Chicago school system is a classic case of a bloated, inefficient Economy II organization. The average Chicago teacher makes $76,000 a year in a city where the average worker makes $47,000 a year.

See what happened there? The joker just jumped out of the deck and squirted cider in your ear. Note the typical grifter's use of the concept of "average." (Bill Gates and I. What's our "average" income?) Looking for an example of bloat and inefficiency, Brooks fastens on the fact that teachers make $74,000 a year, which is probably less than he makes every year to put audiences people into a coma on the banquet circuit. And, at the same time, he doesn't notice the real flaw in his syllogism — which is not that the average teacher makes $74,000, but that the average working person in Chicago only makes $47,000. Of course, the latter disgrace is a direct result of economic policies for which David Brooks has made himself rich leading cheers, but we are not supposed to talk about poverty, the crumbling middle class, and what appears to be a permanent level of income inequality when we talk about why the Chicago teachers walked out because, really, as all the smart people know, it's about people like Patrice Thomas, and how greedy they are.

God, some days, I really hope there is a hell.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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