Are you curious about the “S” word? You’re not alone. A number of recent polls show that young people (18-30) are more positive about socialism than they are about capitalism. And, of course, voters under the age of 30 turned out in droves to back Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist, a few months ago. But what exactly is socialism? How do we get from here to there? And what role can student activists play?

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by Lee Sustar (via SocialistWorker.org)

THREE YEARS after their strike defeated an attempt to gut their contract and further entrench the corporate education deform agenda in city schools, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) members could soon be walking the picket lines again.

Like last time, a Democratic mayor, Rahm Emanuel, is poised to cut jobs and pay and gut classroom resources. But now they face a Republican governor, Bruce Rauner, who is seeking to crush the union outright.

CTU members–who in December voted by an overwhelming 88 percent margin to authorize a strike–vowed to walk out as early as April 1 if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) unilaterally pushed more pension costs onto teachers.

CPS backed off its threat–for now–after the union began preparing for an unfair labor practices strike. But the school board claims that unless the CTU makes major concessions, it will be compelled to take this step as a result of a budget deadlock in the state legislature, a squeeze on Chicago city finances and a long-running fiscal crisis at CPS itself.

The CTU–which is still planning protests for a day of action on April 1–counters that CPS is “broke on purpose.” The union points out that the district began the current school year with a $1 billion deficit as a result of the decades-long tax dodge by big business; a push for expensive, nonunion charter schools; and high-interest loans to CPS that benefit the big banks at the expense of kids. If CPS unilaterally imposes higher pension costs on workers, the CTU has stated that it will invoke its right to strike against an unfair labor practice.

A strike over a new contract could still come this spring or in the fall if no agreement is reached. The CTU has been working under an extension of the old contract, which expired in June 2015.

Emanuel and Rauner–whatever their own differences–are both targeting the CTU, presenting the union with one of the greatest challenges in the organization’s 79-year history.

Even so, the CTU can still prevail if it builds on the public support it won in the 2012 strike to lead a wider labor-community fight against sweeping budget cuts in education and across the public sector–this time making the fight against racism and inequality even more prominent. A solidarity meeting for the CTU, set for March 9, will focus on many of those themes.

With Emanuel still reeling from the disclosure of a video showing the 2014 police murder of Laquan McDonald and Rauner saddled with popularity ratings that show a majority of Illinois voters disapprove of him, the CTU can rally popular support behind a program of challenging austerity and taxing the wealthy to pay for schools and social services. 

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THE NUMBERS tell the story of the CPS financial crisis: a $500 million payment due to teachers’ pensions this year, the result of systematic underpayments by CPS for decades; borrowing, most recently some $725 million, at extortionate interest rates that will cost the system hundreds of millions of dollars; and a long-term drain of tax dollars away from schools to fund development schemes for businesses that don’t need the money.

In the past, the hard-charging Emanuel would have used the crisis to simply try to ram through cuts. But with his approval ratings dropping to 27 percent–the lowest of any Chicago mayor in the modern era–he has tried to reach a deal by giving considerable ground on issues important to the CTU, including a ban on economic layoffs and a freeze on the creation of charter schools.

But the CTU’s bargaining committee didn’t buy it when they voted on the city’s offer. Teachers on the committee rejected the deal unanimously, pointing out that retirement incentives would have resulted in a net loss of 1,500 CTU jobs, and the proposal that teachers pick up pension payments would have amounted to a cut in compensation once inflation is taken into account.

Chicago schools CEO Forrest Claypool, a veteran Democratic operative, has set an April 1 deadline for rescinding a portion of the pension cost that it has paid for decades and cutting $85 million from school budgets. This will involve the layoff of some 1,000 teachers and paraprofessionals. The union has responded by stepping up the action, including “walk-in” protests at some 200 schools.

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THE BATTLE is reminiscent of union struggles in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the CTU went on strike against payless paydays and the Illinois state legislature created the School Finance Authority to oversee spending, amid political turmoil in the Chicago Democratic machine following the death of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Of the CTU’s nine strikes between 1969 and 1987, most took place during that era–including three against Mayor Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor.

But the threat to the CTU goes deeper than the budget squeeze or attacks by Emanuel and Rauner. Chicago teachers find themselves at the center of multiple, converging crises: the failure of pro-business neoliberal policies to revive the city’s economy after the Great Recession; growing resistance to racist police violence; cracks in the two main political parties, as evidenced by the Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump phenomena; and the struggle by organized labor for continued relevance after decades of decline.

Perhaps the closest analog for today’s struggles is the Great Depression of the 1930s, when Chicago teachers–then organized in several unions–embarked on series of battles that would lead to the founding of a unified Chicago Teachers Union in 1937. Then, as now, the corporate establishment and the politicians sought to force teachers to bear the brunt of conditions in schools crippled by budget cuts.

For his part, Bruce Rauner, a hedge fund boss worth nearly $1 billion who bought himself the governor’s office in the 2014 election, wants to turn back the clock to the days when public-sector unions had no right to collective bargaining.

Although he has been in office for 14 months, Rauner has refused to reach any budget deal with the Democratic legislature unless lawmakers capitulate to his demand to include anti-union measures. The result is huge cuts in spending in vital social programs and state institutions. One consequence: layoff notices were sent to all faculty, staff and administrators at Chicago State University, where the student body is heavily African American.

The governor is doing his utmost to provoke a confrontation with the CTU by pushing a plan for bankruptcy that would void union contracts and seeking to block CPS from selling bonds to finance school operations.

The Democrats control the Illinois legislature and the state constitution limits his authority, so Rauner is trying to create a crisis in which he can assert executive power to impose a contract settlement on the CTU, directly or through a judge’s order–and/or create the political conditions for a legislative settlement in his favor.

In this context, the CTU’s fight cannot be won through conventional trade union bargaining–at least as it has evolved since the CTU won formal collective bargaining rights in the late 1960s. Rauner has already proposed that the Illinois National Guard do state workers’ jobs in the event of a public employees strike–a throwback to the 19th century, when governors regularly used the state militia, the Guard’s predecessor, to put down strikes by railroad workers and coal miners.

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THE CTU enters this fight with a reservoir of popular support. According to an opinion poll, three times more Chicagoans trust the union on education issues than Rahm Emanuel.

Moreover, the union has forged links with numerous community, issue-oriented and faith-based organizations, many of them grouped into the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM).

Labor support for the CTU is much more uneven, however.

The teachers do have solid relationships with several different unions, including the liberal Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Healthcare Illinois-Indiana, the home health care workers union that Rauner is out to destroy. Another ally is the reform leadership of Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents city transit workers who were hammered by Claypool a few years back when he was their boss. The National Nurses Organizing Committee, the activist union representing workers at Cook County Hospital, was a prominent backer of the CTU strike in 2012 and remains an ally today.

The list of the CTU’s labor supporters is notable by who isn’t on it, however. The Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), which groups together the city’s main unions, is missing in action, as are most of its affiliates. The CFL and the state AFL-CIO did mobilize against Rauner’s attempts to push through local anti-union “right to work” laws, but they have been mostly quiet since then. In Chicago, several big unions, including the Teamsters Joint Council and most of the building trades, back Emanuel.

The CTU’s most natural ally in its fight is American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Council 31, which is trying to negotiate a contract with Rauner that covers some 100,000 state workers.

Rauner’s contract demands are intolerable and would gut the union. But it is Rauner, not AFSCME, that is pushing for a strike. The union, by contrast, is backing legislation that would eliminate its own right to strike, but bar Rauner from locking them out–leaving the final contract decision to an arbitrator.

Certainly, AFSCME’s opposition to Rauner’s austerity drive puts it on the same page as the CTU. But AFSCME’s abandonment of the strike, labor’s most powerful weapon, is in sharp contrast to the CTU’s strategy.

Instead, AFSCME has looked to the legislature for relief. Since a handful of Rauner’s Democratic allies in the legislature have refused to support the no-strike, no-lockout bill, labor spent heavily in the Democratic primaries set for March 15, even as Rauner’s wealthy backers pour their own money into the race.

The result is that rather than mobilize AFSCME members for an inevitable confrontation with Rauner and present themselves as proud defenders of public services, the top AFSCME leadership has urged members to appear moderate and merely paint Rauner as a villain who should be ousted from office.

The problem is that the next election for Illinois governor isn’t until 2018–and the struggle will come to a head long before that. In any case, Rauner, who was already wealthy and powerful before taking office, doesn’t care if he is re-elected. He was installed in office by his superrich circle of allies in order to demolish the state’s welfare system and stomp on unions.

If Rauner succeeds but gets tossed out of office as a result, he’ll count it as a win, go back to asset-stripping companies and relax at one of his seven homes around the world.

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THE RELUCTANCE of the big unions to fight alongside the CTU may reflect the opportunism or caution of their leaderships–but it doesn’t mean that there is a lack of support for teachers.

The union has the potential to tap widespread solidarity by appealing directly to members of other public-sector unions in the city–after all, their children attend CPS schools.

Just as importantly, the union can draw on the widespread anger at Emanuel over his complicity in the epidemic of racist police violence against African Americans. That anger erupted late last year when the video of Laquan McDonald being executed by cops emerged, and Emanuel’s once-undisputed power was shaken by the worst crisis in Chicago politics since the 1980s.

CTU support for the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t automatic, however. Some CTU members are married to police officers, and a vocal minority criticized union President Karen Lewis and CTU officials after a November union rally where a young African American activist was given a chance to speak and decried police racism and violence. Since then, the union supported and mobilized for anti-police protests.

Still, the exposure of a widespread cover-up of the McDonald video since then has shattered Emanuel’s aura of political invincibility. The mayor’s African American allies on the City Council, who were key to helping Emanuel win an unprecedented runoff vote to stay in office, are now far more worried about their angry constituents than appeasing the notorious bully of City Hall.

Tapping into this rebellious mood will require building on the political arguments that the CTU has made since Lewis and other Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) activists took office in 2010: that CPS has been systematically underfunded for years by pro-business tax policies; that it became a nest for corruption and political patronage by funneling resources to clout-heavy charter schools; that bankers have been feasting on CPS by locking in the schools at high interest rates; and that Emanuel and the city have made Black and Latino communities pay the price.

The anti-banker mood, given voice by the Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign, can be brought into this fight. It’s the banks and bondholders, after all, who dictate austerity policies to politicians. And in the case of Rauner, a banker is directly responsible for laying waste to state and city finances.

The struggle will be harder than it was in 2012, when Emanuel badly underestimated teachers’ resolve and the widespread sympathy for their union. This time, the CTU is up against both Rauner and Emanuel, and they are preparing for a showdown.

Nevertheless, by once again drawing on public sympathy–and this time, turning it into more active support, with protests, sit-ins and the like–the CTU can win. By linking its fight to broader working-class issues of fully funded public education and racial and economic equality, the CTU can defend good union jobs and build a wider movement for social justice.

Rahm is proposing the biggest property tax increase in modern Chicago history — in a city that already has the highest sales tax in the whole nation. Rahm says it’s “inevitable” if the city is going to stay in the black. The corporate press says the city’s finances are a mess and “tough choices” — more cutbacks, thousands of layoffs, big tax hikes on ordinary Chicagoans — must be made. What do socialists say about all of this?

First of all, we say that this is not a complicated issue. It’s actually quite simple. Chicago is not broke. We live in one of the most wealthy cities in the world. Some of the biggest corporations in the world and richest individuals in the US call our city home. Scarcity isn’t our problem — it’s backward political priorities that favor the wealthy few to the detriment of the majority.

We say: not a single cent increase in taxes or fees on ordinary working-class Chicagoans. None. Period.

Not a single cut to our schools, roads, transit, libraries, health clinics, and so forth. Not one.

Not a single layoff for teachers, bus drivers, librarians — for city workers of any kind.

The solution to Chicago’s budget woes are simple: tax the rich. And then tax them some more.

Tax big-ticket financial transactions on LaSalle Street just like they tax us when we buy socks. Tax luxury assets in excess of $1 million. Tax the big landlords in the loop with high-powered lawyers to get them out of paying property taxes.

And while we’re at it, we could stop wasting precious city funds on handouts to the rich — you know, stuff like: TIF’s, corporate subsidies, tax breaks for the likes of Boeing, and interest/service fees for the fat cat banks that hold Chicago city debt.

City officials offered a deal to the hunger strikers at Dyett High School, but that only strengthened their resolve.

by Bob Simpson 

THE WORDS of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing” echoed down Drexel Avenue on Chicago’s South Side on the mild summer evening of September 8. Down the street from the Chicago home of President Obama, the Dyett hunger strikers and their supporters, holding candles in the deepening darkness, shared this song that is often called the Black National Anthem:

Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
let our rejoicing rise,
high as the listening skies, let it resound loud as the rolling sea
sing a song full of faith that the dark past has taught us,
sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

It was an opportunity for the hunger strikers and their supporters to reflect on the centuries-old African American struggle for freedom and their role in the struggle–Day 23 of the hunger strike to create the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology at the now-closed Dyett High School building in Chicago’s Washington Park.

The hunger strike is now at Day 28 as of this writing, and the Chicago Board of Education has finally opened talks with the strikers. There is a cautious optimism that perhaps the Dyett struggle, which in one form or another has been going on for at least six years, will reach a milestone in its journey toward education justice.

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WHEN DYETT was closed earlier in 2015, there were no more open enrollment neighborhood high schools left in the South Side Bronzeville neighborhood it once served.

The hunger strikers have been willing to put their lives on the line for quality education, an African American tradition that goes back to slavery times.

“Even when we were in slavery black people fought for schools. And our ancestors evacuated the South to come here, to find a better life for their children…The institution that our ancestors fought for and won–we’ve got to reclaim it.”
— Jitu Brown a hunger striker and member of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett

The Kenwood Oakland Community Organization plays a key role in the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett (which I will refer as the Coalition for the rest of this article), the organization that is out to transform the now-closed Dyett High School into a 21st century freedom school. These are their demands for reopening the school:

1. Green Technology in school name and in school curriculum.
2. Global leadership/world studies curriculum.
3. Duane Turner as the school principal, who was selected by Coalition to Revitalize Dyett.
4. Fully elected local school council in year one.
5. Coalition to Revitalize Dyett represented on design/planning team with six members in prominent positions. Those who paid protesters to support closing Dyett cannot be on planning team.
6. The school must retain the name Walter H. Dyett.
7. Vertical curricular alignment with the six feeder schools identified in the Coalition proposal.
8. Community school (open till 8 p.m. daily, with programs and resources for parents, students and the community).

These demands grew out of the struggle to save Dyett High School and the detailed proposal the Coalition wrote to meet the educational needs of an African American community living in what Mayor Rahm Emanuel likes to tout as a global city.

The proposal envisions a rich full curriculum of the humanities, the arts, math, music, world languages, science and physical education as well as green technology and the development of leadership skills. The governance of the school would be based upon a participatory model that includes parents, teachers, students and staff. There would be close collaboration with the community at large.

As Coalition member Pauline Lipman said at a speak-out supporting the hunger strikers, the proposal could serve as a model for working class education throughout the city.

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“School closings are a hate crime.”
–Irene Robinson, Dyett hunger striker

YEARS BEFORE being closed at the end of the 2014-15 school year, Dyett had been a highly regarded neighborhood middle school where parents from around the city also sent their children. Dyett is located in Bronzeville, a historically African American neighborhood that has become contested terrain because of its location between the glittering towers of downtown Chicago and affluent Hyde Park where the University of Chicago is located.

Gentrification efforts were stepped up in Bronzeville in the late 1990s and resulted in a wave of Bronzeville elementary school closings. Bronzeville became a living laboratory for the city elite on how to do school closings, resulting in the infamous 50 school closings of 2013. Most of those affected have been Black and Brown students.

“I live in a city where the only mistake of me and my children is being black. I live in a city where the mayor and alderman don’t respect working families, no matter which way you try to say it.”
–Hunger striker Jeanette Taylor Ramann

According to Jitu Brown, the problems for Dyett began in 1999 when, against the wishes of its local school council, it was changed to a high school, but without the necessary resources. Dyett was to be starved into destruction. In 2011, CPS announced that Dyett would phased out. The last handful of students were reduced to taking courses like art and PE online.

The practice of starving neighborhood schools in Black and Brown working class neighborhoods, labeling them “failing” and then opening up charter, contract and turnaround schools to replace them is part of an overall privatization drive closely linked to a general disinvestment in local businesses and social services necessary for strong and positive social relations.

“We’re not just seeing school closings here, we’ve seen the closings of hospitals and trauma centers, the elimination of grocery stores and more. We’re looking at a systematic disinvestment in our families, our youth, our elders, our communities.”
–Jitu Brown

School closings are designed to destabilize working-class communities. Neighborhood schools are part of a complex set of intergenerational human relationships that help hold communities together that are under siege from outside forces. As people leave the neighborhood in desperation, this opens the way for profitable city-subsidized redevelopment schemes that push out remaining working-class residents (mostly people of color) in favor of mostly white affluent newcomers.

School closings are part of the general disinvestment that fuels violence and social alienation, especially among young people. In an interview with hunger striker Irene Robinson, she said this to me:

Children naturally want to love. But this society has inflicted so much hate on Black and Brown communities that the violence you see stems from that. It’s manufactured…Dyett was our school. It had been there for 30 years. There was so much love and memories there. They didn’t just close a school, they closed the doors on the future of our children. They killed so much memory. They can never pay us back for what they have done to our children.

It is class and ethnic cleansing by economic means–but communities do not go down without a fight. Led by KOCO, community residents came up with a plan to save Dyett. Eve L. Ewing, a Harvard Ph.D. student writing her thesis on South Side Chicago school closings, focusing particularly on Bronzeville, explains:

After CPS’s plan to close Dyett was announced four years ago [2011], a coalition of community members led by KOCO created a proposal for it to reopen as what they have called a “global village academy,” an open-enrollment neighborhood high school where teachers, parents and local school council members would work together with educators from the local elementary schools to share resources to create a continuous educational pipeline for students from preschool to 12th grade. The district ignored the idea.

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BUT FACING more protest, the Board of Education finally agreed to solicit ideas for how to save Dyett, the last open enrollment neighborhood high school in Bronzeville. The Coalition to Save Dyett, in close consultation with parents and community members, wrote an ambitious proposal for a global-leadership/green-technology high school with partners that included the Chicago Botanic Garden, University of Illinois and Chicago Teachers Union. There were proposals from two other groups, neither of which were very inspiring.

The Board promised an answer in August 2015. When it postponed its decision until September, after the start of the school year, the Coalition concluded the fix was in. Drastic action was needed. The hunger strike began with the strikers sitting outside of the Dyett building in a small circle of folding chairs, meeting the media, consulting with their supporters and organizing actions like the nonviolent disruption of a mayoral town hall budget meeting which saw Mayor Emanuel flee out the back door. The strikers have received help from a variety of organizations, including the Chicago Teachers Union.

On September 3, when CPS announced that Dyett would be reopened as an “art and technology” high school, the strikers were not impressed. This so-called “compromise” was engineered with the help of South Side politicians close to the mayor. It was a patched-together public relations scheme with no community involvement–just another hasty backroom deal, Chicago-style. The Coalition was not consulted and told flatly by Chicago school chief Forest Claypool that there would be no negotiations. The group was even locked out of the press conference announcing the “compromise.”

This was not what the community had been fighting for. The strike continued. The strikers went on with their protests, rallies and news conferences. Some of the hunger strikers flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with Education Secretary Arne Duncan. They are thinking about taking their case to the United Nations after Chileans who battled school closings in their country told them of the success they had when the UN became involved. The battle had gone international.

Then, on September 11, the hunger strikers got a call from the Chicago Board of Education saying it was finally ready to talk. The results of the meeting were inconclusive, but the hunger strikers expressed cautious optimism to their supporters at a meeting held that evening at Operation PUSH.

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BUT WHAT is it about the Dyett High School proposal that is so abhorrent to the mayor and the city elite?

“Our model is of a sustainable school deeply rooted in the community. This proposal comes from the people of Bronzeville who speak from the heart about a school that lives in a village of tightly interconnected feeder schools, community institutions, local school councils of dedicated and loving adults, relationships, and the meaning of place…This is a model that nurtures leadership, it teaches perseverance, expects the best and supports solidarity. It is a model based on a broad notion of success for the students, their families, neighborhood, city, country and world.”
— Excerpt from the proposal submitted by the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett

This vision of education runs completely counter to the corporate-driven model favored by the mayor with its rigid top-down curricula; its brutal regimen of high stakes testing; its racist allocation of resources; its sneering contempt for Black and Brown people; and its privatization of public education. The mayor’s vision rips communities apart and divides them. It is designed to blunt the intellect and shrink the imaginations of Black and Brown working-class youth so they will submit to the demands of austerity capitalism.

As hunger striker Irene Robinson put it, “They starve our schools. They hurt our children. And they don’t care if we die.”

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ONE AFTERNOON before we marched to President Obama’s home for the candlelight vigil, I sat down for a conversation with Rico Gutstein. Gutstein, a University of Illinois education professor, helped design and coordinate the writing of the proposal for the Walter Dyett High School for Global Leadership and Green Technology. Gutstein emphasized that the ideas came from a carefully conducted community process.

The idea of a sustainable neighborhood school lies at the very heart of the Dyett proposal. Gutstein outlined some of its basic principles:

Principle 1: The curriculum should be based in the culture, traditions, language of the local community. It should use that as starting point for a critical look at what is really going on there and asking profound questions about power and injustice. By addressing these questions in depth, students can begin to learn the academic disciplines necessary to advance their own lives and the community in which they live.

Principle 2: There needs to be high quality teaching by teachers who are actually allowed to teach, not simply treated as disposable test monitors and collectors of misleading “data” from the deeply flawed corporate-created barrage of high-stakes testing.

Principle 3: The students will have thorough wraparound supports with counselors, social workers and other professionals who can help address their social and emotional needs. But the Coalition wants to go beyond simply the therapeutic model. The Coalition envisions a series of internships, apprenticeships and colloquia that would help students find themselves by giving them actual responsibility as they learn practical skills for navigating human relationships and meeting the challenges of social justice.

These experiences would begin in the 9th grade with a local community organization and change the 10th grade year to an organization dealing with citywide issues, then an organization that deals with national issues at the 11th grade and finally move to one that has a global focus as seniors. As students grow, mature and discover more about themselves, they also gain understanding of their complex relationship to a global society.

Principle 4: One of the contradictions of U.S. public education is that while it is supposed to prepare students to live in a democratic society, the actual organization of most schools is based on a totalitarian model of control and management from above.

A sustainable community school seeks to end the adversarial relationship between teachers and administrators, among teachers themselves and between the adults and the youth. This is done through an intense collaboration that emphasizes how all members of the school are part of the same struggle. Gutstein quoted a teacher friend of his who said, “My students don’t resist me because we are too busy resisting the system together.”

Restorative justice would be an important component in rethinking relationships within the school. Although Gutstein did not elaborate on what restorative justice means, here is one definition from the Chicago youth advocacy group Alternatives [2]:

[P]eer conferences, restorative conversations and circles create non-judgmental spaces for a student who broke a school rule, those affected, and members of the school community to discuss what happened, build accountability, and collaborate to find solutions that will repair the harm caused. This approach empowers students to be leaders in violence prevention, conflict resolution, and school safety.

Principle 5: Although often derided as a liberal cliché, the phrase “It takes a village to raise a child” is taken literally in a sustainable community school. Gutstein emphasized how the experience, knowledge and wisdom of the adults in the school community and in the larger community is the foundation upon which one can build parent committees, the local school council and various advisory groups. Teachers can then learn from parents and people in the community about building the curriculum and shaping the goals of the school. All of this requires parent spaces within the building.

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WHY GREEN technology in Bronzeville?

I asked Rico Gutstein this question directly because I know there are people who wonder about that. His answer was quite direct: “For one thing, it’s a food desert. That’s the starting point.” There are few general supermarkets in working-class communities of color, and when nutritious, organic food is available, it is too expensive for tight working-class budgets.

Organic urban agriculture is at the heart of the Dyett green technology plan. The Windy City Harvest farm is right next to the Dyett Building, and along with three other urban farms is a partner in the Coalition. When Dyett High School was open, students worked in the Windy City farm through the school year, but mainly in the summer where they held a weekly farmers’ market.

The Chicago Botanic Garden, a Coalition partner, would like to create a rooftop garden and also use the atrium spaces to grow food. The Coalition plans to integrate their urban farming concepts into an already existing CPS culinary arts program. Students could not only learn how to work in restaurants and food stores, but could prepare for careers in organic urban agriculture and green urban planning that works with the already existing food distribution infrastructure to transition into creating a new food infrastructure that works for working-class communities.

In 2013, the United Nations issued a report saying that we must phase out the current system of industrialized agriculture with its reliance on fossil fuels, chemical fertilizers and pesticides if humanity wants to feed itself. The Dyett organic urban agriculture plan is right on time.

In addition to the urban agriculture component, The Coalition would like the Dyett building to be certified as LEED platinum, the highest green building rating. This would be a multiyear process, which would involve the students in planning and creating the ecological systems necessary to achieve this. Energy conservation and renewable energy sources are critical for meeting today’s environmental challenges. Once again, the Dyett vision is right on time.

It’s important to understand that the Coalition’s vision goes far beyond preparing students for the option of getting green jobs, as important as that is. There is also an all-encompassing philosophical or spiritual component that will go along with everything they plan to do–that the earth is our mother and human consciousness must be in harmony with that basic reality.

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“Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan? Why don’t they want our children to have a high quality school? Why don’t they want our children to succeed, to feel good about what they are doing in school?”
— Irene Robinson

WHY INDEED? Why on a planet undergoing terrifying climate change, and whose human population still suffers from the twin curses of poverty and violence, would the mayor and Board of Education oppose a school based on green technology and global leadership?

The Coalition proposal speaks of young people entering the global stage as actors who have studied social and physical reality in depth, of young people learning academic and artistic disciplines on behalf of environmental sustainability as well as peace and justice.

Does anyone seriously believe we can achieve environmental sustainability, peace and justice within the confines of our present, badly broken racist social system? Either in the community of Bronzeville or in the world at large?

The system may be badly broken for most of us, but it works well enough for the corporate elite, which is who Mayor Emanuel and the Board of Education truly represent.

The Dyett proposal speaks of young people using their education to become global leaders, transforming their world and bettering the planet. This is education for liberation and is implicitly revolutionary in its implications. What if other communities began to demand such an education, an education that challenges a corrupt and brutal system of oppression? What then?

Perhaps this answers Irene Robinson’s question, “Why are they fighting us so hard about such a good plan?”

*THIS ARTICLE RECENTLY APPEARED AT SOCIALISTWORKER.ORG