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Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teachers Union president who led the landmark 2012 strike, died February 7. Her generosity, charisma, and indomitable strength of purpose were gifts to labor organizers across the country who watched, learned, listened, and stepped up themselves.
She inspired a whole host of educators who had been looking for a way forward in the midst of orchestrated attacks on public schools and educators. Around the country teachers were facing weaponized high-stakes testing, defunding, charter schools, and privatization.
Lewis and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) in CTU gave us a vision for the types of schools we were fighting for and a path to win those schools: rank-and-file, strike-ready, democratic unions. The 2018 red-state strike wave was lit by the sparks of Lewis's leadership in Chicago.
"When CTU went on strike in the fall of 2012," recalled Labor Notes staffer Barbara Madeloni, "I was teaching a class to future teachers at UMass Amherst. We were talking about unions and why they mattered. When I posted a photo of CTU members sitting in the street, arms locked, ready to be arrested to win their strike demands, students sat up and leaned in. The energy in the room popped.
"Suddenly, joining a union wasn't about insurance against lawsuits (yes, that is how many unions presented why you should join the union). Union fights weren't only stories from generations ago. This was an active struggle today. This was teachers fighting for students, in the job that these students were about to enter."
Lewis, a high school chemistry teacher, was elected president of CTU in 2010 on the CORE slate. She had joined CORE in its earliest form: a study group of activists against a giant wave of school closings in Chicago. (The Labor Notes book How to Jump-Start Your Union: Lessons from the Chicago Teachers tells this story in detail.)
The official union leaders had no plan to fight school closings. "I can't tell you how many times I've heard the 'there's nothing we can do' mantra," Lewis later recalled. "These teachers were talking about actually forming resistance." The group read up on disaster capitalism, social justice unionism, reform caucuses, and their own union contract.
"We went to every school closing hearing, every charter school opening, every board meeting, and we said 'No. Stop now,'" said Lewis. Each time they announced themselves as CORE, more members joined, especially from schools under attack.
Soon CORE was doing the work that union leaders should be doing--from challenging the district's bogus deficit figures to organizing a 5,000-person march that union leaders were forced to endorse. Members could see that "CORE has been doing the work of the leadership already," said Lewis. "So we felt they might as well elect us." And they did.
CORE and Lewis took leadership with a plan to reignite a fighting union--one that would take on not only its members' fights but also the struggles of the community.
The union's watershed report "The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve," released in February of 2012, outlined a new vision for public education in Chicago. Created in collaboration with students and community members, it called for robust funding, smaller classes, more nurses and social workers, and more educator voice in decisions on curriculum and other matters. The idea caught fire--countless other teacher unions have since crafted their own reports on "the schools our students deserve."
A crucial element was the union's new honesty on race. Chicago was entering an "era of educational apartheid," Lewis said, as the school closings came down hardest on Black students and Black teachers. Her personal cachet as a brilliant speaker and thinker, and as a Black leader, amplified the message powerfully.
Black educators, parents, and community activists began to trust Lewis and CTU; someone was finally telling the truth that they had been living. "The emergence of CORE allowed many of us African Americans to go, 'This is something we can get with,'" said middle school teacher Kimberly Goldbaum.
Lewis and the other new officers knew they would have to build to a strike, in a union that hadn't come anywhere close in decades. Their plan to win was based on harnessing the power of the rank and file: talking to members, getting members to talk with each other and take action together for demands in their own schools.
"We decided there are other things you can do besides file a grievance," Lewis said. "We started talking to people about what you could do. We started doing very simple things--let's wear red on Friday to show our solidarity, to show we support one another. Even people you don't get along with, start talking to them. If you start communicating with one another, you build strength within your building."
One key challenge to the strike preparation was a 2010 law that required CTU to win a vote by 75 percent of the whole membership (not just of those voting) in order to authorize a strike. It was supposed to be impossible--but they hit it out of the park. The 24,000 yes votes to authorize a strike--90 percent of the membership--revealed how effectively CORE's strategies had built power and unity.
And at the height of the strike, a poll found that two-thirds of public school parents supported the union over the mayor--proving the strength of the community ties that CTU had built. The numbers were even higher among Black and Latino parents. As Lewis put it, "They tied our hands and we still kicked their asses."
The strike was glorious, jubilant, strong. But what Lewis would later call her "proudest moment" came at the very end, when teachers, infused with a new spirit of democracy, spent two days reading and discussing the terms of the deal, rather than ending the strike immediately.
The officers didn't go out and promote the deal. "I'm not going to say this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and try to sell it to them. I'm not a marketer," said Lewis. "Our people know how to read, they know how to do math, and they understand these things." It passed.
The following year, the union's 2013 election became a referendum on the strike and on CORE's whole strategy. Chicago media flocked to cover the opposition. But Lewis and CORE won a ringing endorsement: members reelected them with 80 percent of the vote, even more than they had gotten the first time around.
The strike electrified teacher (and other) unionists across the U.S., and CORE's influence resounded through networks like Labor Notes and the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators.
When Lewis spoke at the opening plenary of the 2014 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, she drove home the importance of building a militant, bottom-up labor movement. The speech is characteristically funny, engaging, and powerful. She takes apart the oft-repeated lie that "You should be happy to have a job": "So that anything anybody does to you, strip away your dignity, keep you on your knees, you should be happy? I'm not singing that song." Watch it here.
She was a teacher of teachers, and an organizer of organizers. She always came back to three questions: "Does it unite us? Does it build power? Does it make us stronger?"
In 2015, Lewis was considering a run for mayor of Chicago (and was regarded as a serious contender to win) when she was diagnosed with brain cancer. A years-long struggle ensued, to which she succumbed on Sunday.
The news of her death came as CTU was in the midst of protracted and brutal negotiations over the return to school buildings. Members voted to authorize another strike if the district insisted on locking out PreK-3rd grade educators (the first wave in a phased return) who were demanding to work remotely for their safety and that of the community. This collective action forced the district to accept a delay and bargain with the union over the terms of return.
Members voted yesterday to accept the agreement, which increases vaccine access for educators required to enter buildings, delays the return to buildings for some educators, establishes union-dominated building safety committees, guarantees Americans with Disabilities Act accommodations for educators who are primary caregivers to individuals especially vulnerable to Covid, and establishes metrics for what would prompt the district to close school buildings and go fully remote again. The agreement was hard-won; enforcing it will require the kind of building-site organizing Lewis championed.
The energy that Karen Lewis brought to the teacher union labor movement vibrates through unions across the country. When you see fire in educators who are standing with students and community to demand justice, look in those flames for her unwavering determination--and her wide smile.
The Chicago Teachers Union released the following statement today regarding the passing of President Emerita Karen GJ Lewis:
Our union is in deep mourning today at the passing of our sister, our leader and our friend, President Emerita Karen GJ Lewis. We are sending heartfelt condolences to her husband, John Lewis, and her surviving family and friends. She will be dearly missed.
Karen taught us how to fight, and she taught us how to love. She was a direct descendant of the legendary Jackie Vaughn, the first Black, female president of our local. Both were fierce advocates for educators and children, but where Jackie was stately elegance, Karen was a brawler with sharp wit and an Ivy League education. She spoke three languages, loved her opera and her show tunes, and dazzled you with her smile, yet could stare down the most powerful enemies of public education and defend our institution with a force rarely seen in organized labor.
She bowed to no one, and gave strength to tens of thousands of Chicago Teachers Union educators who followed her lead, and who live by her principles to this day.
Karen had three questions that guided her leadership: 'Does it unite us, does it build our power and does it make us stronger?' Before her, there was no sea of red--a sea that now stretches across our nation. She was the voice of the teacher, the paraprofessional, the clinician, the counselor, the librarian and every rank-and-file educator who worked tirelessly to provide care and nurture for students; the single parent who fought tremendous odds to raise a family; and the laborer whose rights commanded honor and respect. She was a rose that grew out of South Side Chicago concrete--filled with love for her Kenwood Broncos alumni--to not only reach great heights, but to elevate everyone she led to those same heights.
But Karen did not just lead our movement. Karen was our movement. In 2013, she said that in order to change public education in Chicago, we had to change Chicago, and change the political landscape of our city. Chicago has changed because of her. We have more fighters for justice and equity because of Karen, and because she was a champion--the people's champion.
Our hearts are heavy today, but it brings us joy to know that Karen has joined Jackie Vaughn, Marion Stamps, Addie Wyatt and Willie Barrow as the vanguard of Black women who have forged a heroic path of labor, justice and civil rights in our city. Karen now sits among them, still guiding our every move, and still guiding our vision for the schools our students and their families deserve.
Labor leader and fierce critic of corporate education reform Karen Lewis, who headed the Chicago Teachers Union from 2010 to 2018, has died, the union said Monday. She was 67.
"Karen did not just lead our movement. Karen was our movement."
--Chicago Teachers UnionThe Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) said in its statement that Lewis "bowed to no one, and gave strength to tens of thousands of Chicago Teachers Union educators who followed her lead, and who live by her principles to this day."
Lewis was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2014, which brought to a halt her bid to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
It was under her leadership that Chicago teachers in 2012 staged their first strike in 25 years. That action, Rethinking Schoolswrote in an editorial at the time:
showed the importance of teachers using their collective power to demand that all children get the education they deserve. It demonstrated the necessity of an alliance among teachers and parents and community organizations. It exposed the bipartisan corporate "reform" agenda promoted by key sections of the Democratic and Republican parties.
It also signaled that a new teachers' union movement is in the making.
In short, it was a wake-up call to anyone concerned with the future of public schools.
"She understood that the union had to organize families and communities, not just their own members," education historian Diane Ravitch wrote Monday. "She fearlessly confronted the powerful."
From WBEZ:
Lewis was born on July 26, 1953. A proud daughter of Chicago Public School teachers, she went to Kenwood Academy in Hyde Park on the South Side. She left her junior year to go to Mount Holyoke College and then transferred to Dartmouth College. She said she was the only African American woman in Dartmouth's graduating class of 1974.
Before becoming president of the teachers union, she was a chemistry teacher in Chicago Public Schools for more than 20 years.
CTU's statement spoke to Lewis' impact on the city and public education advocacy more broadly, and referenced the "Red for Ed" movement:
Karen had three questions that guided her leadership: 'Does it unite us, does it build our power and does it make us stronger?' Before her, there was no sea of red--a sea that now stretches across our nation. She was the voice of the teacher, the paraprofessional, the clinician, the counselor, the librarian, and every rank-and-file educator who worked tirelessly to provide care and nurture for students; the single parent who fought tremendous odds to raise a family; and the laborer whose rights commanded honor and respect. She was a rose that grew out of South Side Chicago concrete--filled with love for her Kenwood Broncos alumni--to not only reach great heights, but to elevate everyone she led to those same heights.
But Karen did not just lead our movement. Karen was our movement. In 2013, she said that in order to change public education in Chicago, we had to change Chicago, and change the political landscape of our city. Chicago has changed because of her. We have more fighters for justice and equity because of Karen, and because she was a champion--the people's champion.
News of Lewsis' death sparked an outpouring of condolences as well as celebrations of her work:
\u201cNo one deserves to rest in peace than Karen Lewis.\u201d— Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (@Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor) 1612796990
So saddened to hear of the passing of the great Karen Lewis. She fought so hard for Chicago students, families and the teachers who love and support them. She set off a wave of trade union militancy. She also knew a disaster capitalist mayor when she say one. RIP. https://t.co/hFxVAcNXeA
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) February 8, 2021
\u201cKaren Lewis was a brilliant, unrelenting, perfect labor leader. I was so lucky to know her, to strategize and plan with her, to march and rally with her. She showed up early for the Wisconsin Uprising because she was ALWAYS on the right side of history.\n\n#wiunion @CTULocal1\u201d— John Nichols (@John Nichols) 1612801053
\u201cRest in power Karen Lewis, an unapologetic labor leader who left her mark on the South Side and reshaped mayoral politics and teacher organizing. \n\nShe would say, \u201cWe are the city of big shoulders and so we intend to put up a fight.\u201d\u201d— South Side Weekly (@South Side Weekly) 1612803127
\u201cRest in Power Karen Lewis, longtime CTU president and hero of the labor movement.\u201d— DSA \ud83c\udf39 (@DSA \ud83c\udf39) 1612795782
\u201cRest in Power to Karen Lewis. What a titanic loss. She, more than any individual, is the reason why today teachers, workers and families look to the CTU for hope in a time of relentless darkness.\u201d— Dave Zirin (@Dave Zirin) 1612796430
\u201cWow. Karen Lewis. One of the most important figures in sparking the new teachers union movement, and giving another life to the US labor movement. We all owe her an immense debt. RIP.\u201d— Jonah Furman (@Jonah Furman) 1612796097
\u201cJane and I are deeply saddened by the passing of Karen Lewis. She lived her life on the front line of the struggle for justice in education, and to honor her memory we must recommit ourselves to building the fairer future students and families deserve.\u201d— Bernie Sanders (@Bernie Sanders) 1612800721
The American Federation of Teachers, of which CTU is an affiliate, shared a video highlighting Lewis' fight for educators and students:
\u201cToday we mourn the loss and celebrate the life and work of @CTULocal1's Karen Lewis. May her memory be a blessing, and her lifelong dedication to education and working people an inspiration to us all. Rest in power.\u201d— AFT (@AFT) 1612802416
"May her memory be a blessing, and her lifelong dedication to education and working people an inspiration to us all," the union wrote. "Rest in power."