Chicago occupies a central place in the history of labor struggles. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was set in the Windy City, the Haymarket affair is widely considered to be one of the most significant labor events of the nineteenth century, and countless unions were born in the city’s seemingly endless industrial struggles. And in 2012, Chicago hosted the most dynamic and successful strike to occur in the United States in at least fifteen years, and the largest teachers’ strike in nearly a quarter-century, all while fundamentally challenging a global movement to privatize and standardize public education.

Mass public education was brought about by a combination of progressive reformers’ concerns about the morality of working-class youth, and the agitation of the labor movement for an end to child labor. It became officially universal around the turn of the century, but the widespread abolition of child labor did not take full force until the end of World War II. The fact that farm labor was (and continues to be!) exempted from this regulation meant that large cities historically had (and have) lower truancy rates. But as education journalist Dana Goldstein has pointed out, Chicago also featured a vibrant teachers’ union movement from more or less the historical moment that universal public education became part of the national elite consensus, and the city hosted the nation’s first ever teacher’s strike in 1902.

But although this background sets a precedent, it is the struggles of the the latter half of the twentieth century that more accurately presage the contemporary struggle. The 1902 strike, for example, occurred prior to the great migration of Black Americans from the south, and the teacher’s federation founded by Margaret Haley, like most trade unions prior to the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1935, was imbued with the logic of white supremacy. It is the period from 1968 until 1987, when the children of the revolutionary unionism of the 1930s entered the teaching profession, that enables us to assess the present situation in Chicago public education and to situate the 2012 strike in the context of public education and the labor movement as whole in the United States.