Abstract
The broad success of the 2018–2019 #RedforEd (“Red for Education”) movement in achieving more equitable outcomes for not only teachers but also other constituents in the community has generated interest in the role of teacher strikes in defending the common good. My article contributes to this conversation by interpreting the demands made by teachers and paraprofessionals and school-related personnel (PSRPs) in the 2019 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) strike through an ethics of care. Enlisting the notions of caring-for, completion, and competence from care ethics, this analysis elucidates the strike demands–namely, smaller class sizes, more bilingual education teachers and special education teachers, and adequate staffing of PSRPs providing wraparound services for high-needs students–as aiming at securing conditions for CPS faculty to provide better care for their students. This article also brings to light the varied and complex requirements placed on CPS faculty in their caring work in schools and as such, proposes an educator’s ethical commitment to care for students as one plausible reason for some educators to leave the classroom for the picket line. I suggest, further, that educators, by striking, are enacting a political form of caring termed caring-with alongside fellow citizens and advocating collective responsibility in caring for all persons as care receivers and care givers. The 2019 CPS strike can therefore be seen as a response not only to disinvestment in public schools and teachers, but to the broader crisis of care deficit and democratic deficit in society.
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Some of these teacher protests, such as the one by West Virginia teachers in 2018, were branded as “walkouts” instead of “strikes,” as it is unlawful for public employees in some states to declare work stoppages or strikes.
See Huget (2020) for an insightful analysis of the moral conflict that care workers, including teachers, confront when they go on strike. She argues that care workers are caught between impossible options of prioritizing the current needs of their dependents and prioritizing their long-term ability to provide better care.
The first edition contained the subtitle “A feminine approach to ethics and moral education”.
Several special education advocates expressed disappointment that the 2019 strike deal was “not strong enough to provide real relief” to the area of special needs (FitzPatrick 2019).
While agreeing with CTU on the importance of staffing schools with PSRP, CPS maintained that the issue of hiring support staff was out-of-bounds in union contract negotiation and that the district wanted to maintain flexibility in staff hiring (CPS 2019a).
Future work that looks more closely at the lived experiences of CPS faculty caring for students in schools might reveal a broader care deficit brought forth by the city’s long-term disinvestment in public services.
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Acknowledgements
I want to thank Dr. Megan Laverty for introducing me to care ethics and for providing invaluable guidance on developing this article, and Dr. David Hansen, Dr. Sigal Ben-Porath, Dr. Jane Gatley, Emy Cardoza, Juan Antonio Casas, Buddy North, Rebecca Sullivan, Kirsten Welch, and Ting Zhao for their insightful feedback on it.
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Quek, Y. An Interpretation of the 2019 Chicago Teachers’ Strike Through the Ethics of Care. Stud Philos Educ 40, 609–627 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09779-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-021-09779-4