Harold Meyerson wrote a great story about the strike in the Washington Post. Please read it.
The mainstream media, the pundits and the editorial writers were so hostile to the strike that it is refreshing to read someone who really understands what happened in Chicago. Meyerson sees the strike not just as a job action, but as a strike against the national faux-reform movement, which demands incessant testing and pushes privatization.
He gets it.
And as you would expect, someone writes in response and says the teachers are not the union, the union is not the teachers. Oh, please. Who were the 98% of teachers who voted to authorize the strike? Who was it that donned red T-shirts and overflowed the streets of Chicago? Let me say it slowly: The union is the teachers. The teachers are the union.
Regardless of what the media said and wrote, teachers tell of the support from police, firefighters, transit workers, parents, and ordinary citizens who honked their horns and gave a thumbs-up.
Meyerson understood who supported the strike, who opposed it, and what the issues were (and continue to be).
The mainstream media did not. They echoed one another, and their sponsors.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Harold made my day. This should be required reading for all ‘reformers’. I’ll get to work promptly on writing the test or quiz.
This should be the definitive article about the Chicago teachers strike. Harold Meyerson and Ben Joravsky deserve a lot of credit for their coverage. The national media (particularly the NY Times, WSJ, and CNN) gets an F for their coverage and for promoting hysteria. Also, Diane, as a historian, how does this strike compare to other strikes you have written about/lived through? Much better than OCean Hill-Brownesville in 1968, right?
The Ocean Hill-Brownsville strike involved issues of race and religion and ideology. It lasted for 2 months! The teachers did not get sympathetic coverage then either. But the difference is that in Chicago, the CTU was really taking on a national movement to crush teachers, their unions, and public education. So, in my view, they were not only fighting for better conditions for students, but fighting a major national battle. That issue remains on the table. Other unions will have to step up to the plate.
For some aditional context (9-11) column:
In Chicago, a Democratic civil war.
“What’s brewing is a battle between Democratic Party management (chiefly mayors, backed by a significant portion of the public) and Democratic Party labor, also backed by a significant portion of the public”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/harold-meyerson-in-chicago-a-democratic-civil-war/2012/09/11/cf396964-fc44-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html
Yes, he gets it!