Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines

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Why are unions important? This is the question that Jackson Potter and Albert Ramirez, two Chicago Public School teachers, explore in their independently produced documentary on Chicago’s flagship school policy known as Renaissance 2010. 

Produced from a desire to educate the general public on Ren 2010 and to motivate educators and citizens to get informed and involved, the film succeeds as much more than a simple defense of unions—in actuality both directors are highly critical of the political inertia and partisan infighting of the Chicago Teacher’s Union. What the film ends up demonstrating—aside from the undemocratic, anti-union, and socially destructive character of Ren 2010—is that ordinary rank and file educators have the capacity to use their creativity and insider perspectives to form dynamic critiques of the system. Moreover, while simultaneously challenging their audience to get out and “do something,” the directors show that regular folks like themselves, can act as effective democratic agents. In this spirit, the film functions as an inspiring call to intervene and resist. 

Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines begins with a fictitious scene that playfully features the directors in their natural habitat. We see a tired looking teacher at work in his classroom hunched over a pile of papers, slogging through the days marking, when a colleague shows up and invites him to a union meeting. The teacher’s response is weighted with the frustration felt by many educators regarding their position in the system. He declines the invitation as he wonders aloud what difference his presence at the union meeting would make. In response his interlocutor also begins to wonder about the purpose of the union. 

With this the documentary begins in earnest by transporting us to a colorful Chicago Federation of Labor meeting complete with a union mime and a pro-union Uncle Sam who declares that “What’s good for the country is what’s good for the people.” 

The diverse assortment of commentators at the union meeting speak to the need for an apparatus which can collectively bargain, ensure a living wage, protect benefits, and provide a democratic space which guarantees the right of workers to be heard. 

From the Front Lines then outlines Renaissance 2010 and its impact on both the physical and social landscape of the schools and neighborhoods. Through interviews with educators, students, city officials, and community members interspersed with footage from around Chicago, the film vividly captures an urban mélange of school board meetings, union rallies, school buildings both old and new, and the currently ubiquitous images of half finished high end condos juxtaposed against the last remnants of vanishing public and low income housing in the vast tracts of rapidly appreciating land in Chicago’s south and west side neighborhoods. 

The film skillfully locates the push for Renaissance 2010 in the desire of the cities elite class, spearheaded by Mayor Richard Daley and his corporate partners at the Commercial Club of Chicago, to use school closings as a lever for privatizing public education as well to gentrify some of Chicago’s poorest and historically most neglected communities. We learn that Ren 2010 has been designed to close schools in these targeted neighborhoods and to reopen them, or “flip” them, as mainly charter and contract schools—to what some have referred to as “real estate anchors.” 

From the Front Lines highlights that, contrary to the slick language used by its proponents, such as Chicago school CEO Arne Duncan, Ren 2010 is not about serving the interests of kids at targeted schools, but about serving a population of students that the city anticipates moving into these neighborhoods as they gentrify. In the film, University of Illinois Chicago Professor David Stovall suggests that Ren 2010 “is really about moving the undesirables out and moving the target population in and giving them new schools in the process.” While their schools are closed these “undesirables” are being steered into increasingly crowded container schools to the detriment of both those who are relocated and the original students at these schools. These receiving schools are effectively becoming warehouses for dislocated students and centers of heightened gang tension as well as increased police surveillance and control. 

According to the film, the policy is designed to serve the interests of Chicago’s business elite in at least two fundamental ways. First, Ren 2010 is part of a policy web that sets up schools that are primarily designed to give the basic skills and cultural codes necessary to work in the neoliberal urban information and service economy. Second, Renaissance 2010 institutionalizes the neoliberal push for cost effectiveness, leanness, and efficiency. The drive for charter and contract schools fits the ideological map of neoliberalism by paying lower wages to teachers and auxiliary employees, limiting special educational services, slashing extra-curricular activities, favoring assimilation over bilingual education, providing less money per pupil, and by recruiting and hiring less experienced first and second year teachers to further reduce payroll. Teachers in these schools are not allowed to unionize, are required to negotiate their salaries individually, can be fired at any time, and are required to work longer hours than their public school counterparts. As a result, teacher turnover is incredibly high creating deficits in “institutional memory” which hinder the development of community in these schools and fails to give the students the kind of adult consistency that youth so desperately need. 

So why are unions important? With over 30,000 members, the Chicago Teachers Union has the potential to lead the fight for preserving public education and for helping make it the center of a project of democracy building. But even as control over the Chicago Public Schools has become increasingly wrested from teachers and communities and consolidated under mayoral and corporate control, the teachers union remains politically ineffective over a policy direction that is a direct threat to the union, as well as the public schools and students it represents. By no means does the film suggest that unions are the only answer to reclaiming schools in the public interest. But it does question what kind of a role it will play as Ren 2010 alters the geography of education. How long can teachers afford to wait to steer their union toward saving their schools? 

Renaissance 2010: From the Front Lines is a timely intervention which provides oppositional and critical language for a policy whose narrative has thus far been primarily shaped by the interests of Chicago’s corporate elite. But the film is more than a critical intervention and a call to action; it is a reminder of how dedicated, creative, and talented our teachers are even in the face of a system that provides ample amounts of top down control and surveillance but very little support for their ideas or recognition for their service. Jackson Potter and Albert Ramirez are to be commended for the dedication they have shown to their students, fellow teachers, and communities. Here’s hoping it inspires a diverse and receptive audience to intervene, educate, and resist in the interests of equity and democracy.  

Z 

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Alex Means is a former Chicago school teacher.