By Pauline Lipman, Ph.D. | Originally Published at The New York Times. September 12, 2012 9:34 AM Photographic Credit; Posters saying “Save our School” line the windows at Overton Elementary. Under CPS’s closing proposal, Overton students would be sent to Mollison. Both schools are on probation. As recently as 2010, CPS tried to close Mollison for low performance. Now it’s a “higher performing” receiving school. (WBEZ/Linda Lutton)

Chicago was the birthplace of neoliberal education reform — high-stakes testing, closing neighborhood public schools and turning them over to private operators, expanding charter schools, running schools like businesses, test-based teacher evaluation, prescribed standards, and mayoral control of schools.

Over the past 15 years, these policies were promoted nationally by corporate philanthropies, conservative think tanks, and recently by billionaire-initiated education reform organizations like Stand for Children and Education Reform Now. The Chicago agenda became the official national agenda when President Obama appointed Chicago’s chief executive schools, Arne Duncan, to be his Secretary of Education.

Educators have fought a national corporate agenda for 15 years and have had enough.

The first thing Duncan did was fly to Detroit and tell that financially devastated school system that they would have an infusion of federal funds, but only if they did things very differently – that is, implement the Chicago model. That model became the criteria for awarding $4.3 billion in federal funds to states, known as Race to the Top

Yet, closing schools has destabilized students and communities and had little positive effect on achievement. Test-based merit pay has been shown to have little validity as a measure of teacher effectiveness. And charter schools are doing no better, and sometimes worse, than regular public schools and are more racially segregated.

But more deeply, at the school level, there is plenty of research showing that these policies have reduced the curriculum to what is tested, demoralized teachers and degraded the teaching force, and left parents and students with no public school options in their communities.

These are not education policies, but rather business policies applied to schools with business goals: promoting top-down management, weakening unions, shifting the purpose of education to labor force preparation, and opening up the $2 trillion dollar global education sector to the market.

Despite efforts by educators, researchers, and parents nationally to contest this agenda, it has become the new status quo. This is why Chicago teachers are on strike.

After absorbing 15 punishing years of these policies, they have had enough. Compensation is not their biggest concern. They are fighting for respect and for a vision of public education that is grounded in equity, respect for teachers, a rich well-rounded education for all students, and the financing priorities to realize it.

Pauline Lipman, Ph.D. is Professor of Educational Policy studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of “The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism, Race and the Right to the City.

This piece was republished by EmpathyEducates with the kind permission of the Author, Professor Pauline Lipman. We are grateful for the depth of research and thought, as well as the insights and enduring commitment Dr. Lipman brings to policies that foster equality within education.