Fred Hess knew well ahead of time that September 1987 would witness a train wreck of historic proportions for Chicago Public Schools. The board of education needed to negotiate new contracts with multiple unions, most important the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), and in midsummer, Hess had told the board that it could afford to offer a pay increase of 3.5 percent to teachers. Instead, the board announced a three-day reduction in the upcoming school year, thereby cutting teachers’ pay by 1.7 percent. The CTU demanded a 10 percent salary increase, and Superintendent Manford Byrd asserted that CPS could afford no raise at all. Hess labeled that claim “a bunch of bull,” and on September 4, four days before schools were to open, more than 90 percent of CTU members voted to strike.
The strike began on September 8, with Hess warning the Sun-Times that “it’s going to be a long strike because it looks like it has turned into a question of principle,” especially for Byrd. In a subsequent op-ed in the Tribune, Hess denounced “an administration that insists on adding central office administrators while cutting other employees’ salaries.” More than 430,000 students were out of school, and on September 11 a large group of parents and students from sixteen community groups picketed CPS headquarters, with the group’s spokesman, Sokoni Karanja, telling the news media that “our children are victims of a school system that is failing to educate them.”
Karanja was a forty-seven-year-old African American native of Topeka, Kansas, who had earned a Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1971 before moving to Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood, joining Trinity UCC, and founding a family-aid organization he christened the Centers for New Horizons. Nine months earlier, Karanja had become the Woods Fund’s first black board member, but this September 11 was significant because it illuminated the deepest social and political chasm in black Chicago: African American families with children in heavily minority public schools were fighting against a system made up of 41.6 percent black administrators and 47 percent black teachers.
Those numbers explained why Harold Washington had been so ambivalent four months earlier when he seemingly embraced school reform. The city’s public schools provided middle-class salaries and middle-class status to thousands of black Chicago families, while at the same time they were shortchanging tens of thousands of black students. The human toll was staggering: more than 40 percent of African American men in Chicago in their early twenties and 35 percent of young African American women were unemployed, many of them lacking basic job skills because the CPS had not offered them real schooling.
“Our education system is in shambles,” Rob Mier, Washington’s economic development commissioner, publicly acknowledged. “We’re producing a legion of functional illiterates.” Some critics described “a vicious circle of incompetence,” with CPS hiring teachers who had graduated from weak nearby state universities, which enrolled mainly ill-prepared graduates of Chicago high schools. As Fred Hess kept emphasizing, the abysmal state of public education in Chicago was the result not of a lack of resources, but instead of their dramatic misallocation: during the 1980s, “the number of central office administrators rose by 29 percent while the number of staff members in the schools rose by 2 percent.” By 1987, CPS’s central bureaucracy had reached an astonishing thirteen thousand employees.
On Thursday, September 17, two hundred angry parents picketed outside Harold Washington’s Hyde Park apartment building while others targeted the homes of Governor Jim Thompson, new board of education president Frank Gardner, and CTU president Jacqueline Vaughn. The next morning more than a thousand parents and children picketed outside CPS headquarters, but as the strike moved into its third week, neither the board nor the union were showing any signs of compromise. Superintendent Manford Byrd, furious at Fred Hess’s disparagement of CPS’s central administration, wrote his own op-ed for the Tribune, claiming that the system’s fundamental problem was “the extraordinary special needs of most Chicago public school students.”
That remarkable assertion—a school superintendent labeling the majority of his system’s children as “special needs” students—laid bare the deep class divide within black Chicago between middle-class professionals and “those people.” As Hess later explained, again echoing John McKnight’s analysis, Byrd’s explicit articulation of a “deficit model of ‘at-risk’ ” children revealed the attitudes of administrators “whose jobs depend on the existence of a pool of ‘at-risk’ students as clients.” Unable to see that students might bring strengths to school, CPS bureaucrats could not imagine that Chicago’s schools, “rather than the students themselves, might be to blame for students’ lack of success,” Hess explained. Only by reallocating power from CPS headquarters to local schools so as to “reemphasize local communities rather than large, hierarchical bureaucracies” could meaningful educational improvement be attained.
While most parents and community groups were angry with the CTU as well as the board, UNO simply backed the teachers’ demands. As the strike entered its third week, the parents’ groups, with support from Anne Hallett at Wieboldt and input from Al Raby, came together as the People’s Coalition for Educational Reform (PCER). On Thursday, October 1, in what the Tribune called a “dramatic confrontation,” a predominantly black group of PCER representatives, many of whom were close allies of Harold Washington, told both the board and the CTU that a 3 percent raise must be agreed upon to end the strike. First the board, overruling Byrd, and then a reluctant CTU, bowed to the coalition’s demand, and on Saturday morning it was announced that schools would reopen on Monday. Nineteen days of classroom time had been lost in “the longest public employee strike in Illinois history.”
On Sunday, Harold Washington summoned Casey Banas, the Tribune’s education reporter, to his Hyde Park home. The mayor wanted everyone to know he understood the significance of the parents’ protests. “Never have I seen such tremendous anger and never have I seen a stronger commitment on the part of people” to make Chicago a better city. But Washington also did not want to alienate the black educators Manford Byrd represented. “There’s no discipline in many homes. There’s no stimulus in many homes. And even though the educational structure is a poor substitute to supply what the family is not supplying, it must be done,” the mayor declared. He said he would personally lead a new, far more inclusive iteration of his Education Summit to reform Chicago’s public schools. It would begin the next Sunday at the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle campus (UICC). “We’re going to have a massive forum,” Washington promised.56
Obama and DCP had remained entirely on the sidelines throughout the protests against the shutdown. On the Monday of the strike’s final week, and after three months of trying, Barack finally had an appointment with Harold Washington’s top policy adviser, Hal Baron, to pitch his Career Education Network plan to the mayor. It was entirely thanks to John McKnight that Baron consented to see Obama, despite education aide and Roseland native Joe Washington’s negative attitude. “I did it purely as a favor to John McKnight,” Baron recalled. “John was just so high on him…. I think John wanted me to get him a meeting with the mayor, but he pestered me and I finally did a meeting with him myself.” Joe Washington joined Baron in Hal’s City Hall office, but Barack’s presentation was anything but persuasive. Baron remembers it as “cocky standard Alinsky bullshit” and “very glib.” He also recalls Obama saying, “ ‘We’ve got Roseland organized.’ ” After Barack left empty-handed, Joe Washington told Baron what he thought: “That guy doesn’t know shit about Roseland.”
Far more fruitful for Obama was his relationship with John McKnight. Barack’s reactions to now two years of immersion in the macho, conflict-seeking world of Alinskyite organizing—including