Will she or won’t she take the plunge?
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Democratic pols and the nation’s school reformers are waiting to see whether Karen Lewis, the notoriously-bellicose boss of the Chicago Teachers Union, tries to put an end to Rahm Emanuel’s mayoralty by running against him.
The fact that a teachers union boss is even being mentioned as a candidate against one of President Barack Obama’s most-important allies is just one more sign of how strained the once-tight relationship between the Big Two teachers unions and the Democratic National Committee has become.
Since July, when a Chicago Sun-Times poll showed that Lewis could theoretically beat Emanuel by a nine-point margin, political observers have quietly wondered whether the onetime school teacher will try to oust the famously tough-talking former congressman and chief of staff for Barack Obama.
Lewis, likely lured by the American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten’s offer to donate $1 million of the union’s rank-and-file money to such a challenge, launched an exploratory committee to consider a run.
Education pundits such as Libby Nelson of Vox and Mike Antonucci (whose Education Intelligence Agency keeps tabs on unions) have doubts that Lewis can actually beat Emanuel.
On one hand, Lewis scored a rare victory against the mayor two years ago when she launched a two-week strike that halted his efforts to implement some of the school reforms he wanted to put in place. She has also earned a reputation for being a progressive champion.
The AFT will certainly help out if Lewis does decide to run, both with money and rank-and-file workers electioneering on her behalf. The fact that Emanuel has had run-ins with other public-sector unions over his pension reform efforts, along with the dismay among some Chicagoans over the city’s crime problems, could also help her cause.
Yet as unpopular as Emanuel may be in some parts of the Second City, Lewis isn’t exactly beloved by them either. In fact, she is renowned for her demagoguery. Two years ago, she blamed Emanuel and other school reformers for supposedly trying to “kill and disenfranchise children from schools across this nation.”
Her claims of being a progressive champion are belied by her own status as a member of Chicago’s political and economic elite. Besides pulling down $220,083 last year – or more than Emanuel’s annual salary of $204,726 – the Dartmouth grad owns a swank condo in Kenwood, a neighborhood that was also home to Obama before he became president, along with vacation homes in Hawaii and Union Peer, Mich.
The fact that Lewis has little in the way of a coherent agenda that addresses Chicago’s quality of life issues will be a problem for her if she goes from playing Hamlet to actual campaigning – against a mayor who has had some successes, including keeping the perilously snowy streets plowed during the winter.
While Emanuel hasn’t always had a good relationship with other public-sector unions, the government projects he has undertaken, along with the contracts he has struck with them (including a deal in June with an affiliate of AFSCME that features a 10 percent pay raise), have all but assured that the mayor will stay in their good graces.
Private-sector unions such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters that have had to deal with less-generous retirement deals. They are thus none too sympathetic to the complaints from public-sector counterparts.
The biggest problem of all for Lewis lies with the fruits borne from the school reform efforts undertaken by Emanuel and predecessor Richard M. Daley. Between 2005 and 2013, the city’s high school graduation rate increased from 39 percent to 66 percent. The percentage of Second City fourth-graders reading Below Basic on the National Assessment of Educational Progress declined from 60 percent to 49 percent between 2003 and 2013.
While Chicago still struggles to prepare kids (especially young black males) for success in college and in the workforce, its schools are better than they were in the 1990s. Few Chicagoans want to go back to the bad old days.
Whether or not Lewis runs against Emanuel, the fact that an AFT local boss is now looking to run against a big-city Democrat mayor is one more sign of the split between the Big Two teachers unions and a Democratic Party no longer unabashedly supporting their aims.
It has been a long time coming. Big city mayors, most of them Democrats, were among the first to embrace the modern school reform movement. They, along with young urbanites, and black families, recognized that fixing schools (along with fighting crime) was the most-important tool for rebuilding communities hit by middle-class flight in the late 20th century.
In 1991, then-Milwaukee Mayor John Norquist would launch the nation’s first school voucher program. Within a decade, colleagues such as Daley in Chicago, Michael Bloomberg in New York, and Bart Peterson in Indianapolis would either take over school districts or launch public charter schools.
The efforts of big-city mayors, along with those of governors, weakened the strong ties between Democrats and the teachers unions who have sustained it financially and politically. This would especially prove true with Obama, who witnessed what Daley was doing in his adopted hometown.
After winning the presidency in 2008, Obama would anger the NEA and AFT, first by choosing former Daley major domo Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, then by using federal law and funds to support reform efforts by states and cities that are weakening NEA and AFT power. These are among the reason why the NEA and AFT passed resolutions this summer calling for Duncan’s resignation.
The nastiest battles of all between teachers unions and Democrats have been in the big cities.
In 2010, the AFT helped end the political career of then-Washington, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (and his school czar, Michelle Rhee) by backing his rival, Vincent Gray, to the tune of $1 million.
Last year, the union’s New York City local weighed in on New York City’s mayoral race by backing William Thompson, who had once served as head of the board of education before it was placed under mayoral control.
But none of AFT’s efforts turned out well. In D.C., Gray would continue Fenty’s reforms, keeping Rhee’s understudy, Kaya Henderson, in place to run the city’s schools. In New York City, Thompson would lose the Democratic mayoral nod to Bill de Blasio, who would go on to succeed Bloomberg. The best the AFT has gained from the misadventure is a fat teachers’ contract.
No matter what Lewis does, it is clear that the long, strange love affair between Democrats and teachers’ unions is over. For the NEA and AFT, their marriage to the DNC has become about as inconvenient as Tipper Gore’s.