As the Strike Approached in Chicago, Teachers Taught Labor
“I asked the kids, ‘Do you want to know what we’re fighting about?’” said one teacher. They did.
As the strike vote got closer, Anna Lane realized that she was going to have to throw out her lesson plan. Lane, a history and civics teacher at Kelly High School, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, was in the middle of teaching a unit about how the city funds public-education initiatives. But as labor negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) started to make the local news last month, Lane’s students began asking questions that her original syllabus didn’t cover.
CPS and Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, had why the union was fighting so hard for a raise, and at).
