Jan Resseger explains the history and context of the truly historic teachers’ strike in Chicago that recently ended. She explains it with clarity, as only Jan can do.
This was not a strike for higher salaries. The mayor offered a 16% increase before the strike began, and that is what the Chicago Teachers Union accepted.
This was a strike for students. This was a strike to reverse a quarter-century of disinvestment by Mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel.
This was a strike against 25 years of austerity in a booming city that had billions for developers but nothing for students and schools.
This was a strike against corporate reform, which starved the public schools for the benefit of charter schools.
This was a historic strike. To understand why, read this post.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Many thanks to Jan Resseger for this intelligent summary and for supporting teachers in these terrible times for public schools. However, the summary is not convincing that the strike was historic or effective in lowering class sizes or in winning the staffing of nurses, social workers, and full-time librarians in all schools. Jan does not report the byzantine bureacratic process installed in this contract wherein teachers will have to grieve for class size “relief” down to 28 or 32 if their classes pass the “trigger” of being 3 students above those already too-high levels. This is a slow remedy to an urgent issue that undermines teaching and learning every day in classrooms. Also, CPS has until July 2023 to install such support staff in all schools, 4 years down the road, while the damage continues every day. If the CTU went on strike not for wage increases because it accepted the 5-year minimal 16% offered, then the strike had to make major gains in all other areas, not small tweaks to class sizes and kicking the support staff shortage 4 years down the road. Teachers already have enormous power in their hands which can begin authentically recovering public schools from the decades of privatization, looting, and tech/testing sabotage. When teachers walk off the job en masse in solidarity with each other and with the families they serve, society grinds to an unsustainable halt. No locale can function unless its under-paid and under-appreciated teachers are hard at work every day supervising and educating our children. That awesome power teachers already have has not been used so far in the Chicago strike or the LA strike or the others, all of which settled too soon for too little when so much repair is needed.
more and more it feels as if the only response in educational policy is exactly that: a slow remedy to an urgent problem
“Slow” is no remedy to fast decimation of public schools, public colleges, and the teaching profession. The time for an all-out war was years ago against the bipartisan Dem-GOP NCLB, RTTT, and ESSA. Now that teachers are more likely to strike en masse in strong solidarity, we have a lot deep deficits to make up.
“This was a strike to reverse a quarter-century of disinvestment by Mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel.”
So then why did they wait to strike when the most progressive mayor we’ve had since Harold Washington got into office? Why didn’t they strike again after Rahm pretty much reneged on everything supposedly gained during the 2012 strike? They’ve had 7 years to go after Rahm since then, but instead they threw a tantrum at Lori because they didn’t get their favored candidate (Preckwinkle).