Before the late Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) president Karen Lewis was a folk hero for teachers and workers everywhere for her stellar leadership of the CTU during and after the historic 2012 strike, she was at the helm of a union weakened by decades of moribund business unionism and neoliberal school reform.

In 2011, just one year prior to the strike, the CTU experienced one of the most intense, coordinated, and well-funded attacks on workers’ bargaining rights in Illinois history. The bill known as SB7 initially attempted to strip the union of the right to strike altogether. Legislators and astroturf groups eventually settled on requiring 75 percent of all Chicago teachers to vote in favor of a strike to authorize one (rather than, say, a simple majority or even 75 percent of voting teachers), the highest bar to clear for any workers in the state. One of our key allies, former president of Service Employees International Union Health Care Illinois Indiana Keith Kelleher, told us that he thought “the CTU was fucked” after the SB7’s passage.

Additionally, two decades of corporate-led school reform, initiated in 1983 by Ronald Reagan’s administration, spurred a wave of privatization and undermined contractual rights for teachers across the country. That year, secretary of education Terrel Bell published the Nation at Risk report. In 1987, Reagan’s next education secretary, William Bennett, took specific aim at Chicago, calling our schools the worst in the country — a less aggressive version of Donald Trump’s racist, dystopian rhetoric about the city during the George Floyd protests.