When I began teaching in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in 1998, I did not think of myself as a union activist. I was a 20-something bilingual teacher with no formal training, trying to survive my first year in a classroom of 36 students while attending graduate school at night. Like many young teachers, I spent most of my energy worrying about lesson plans, classroom management, and whether I could make it through another week.

That changed over time, across many transformative experiences, small and large. They happened in classrooms, in community meetings, in a basement writing group with immigrant mothers, on picket lines during the 2012 strike, and eventually during a boycott of standardized testing. Looking back, I can see how those experiences shaped both my understanding of public education and my belief in the power of collective action.

Early Teaching and Organizing Experiences

My first teaching job was at Ruben Salazar Bilingual Education Center in 1998, situated between the Gold Coast, one of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, and Cabrini Green, an overwhelmingly Black public housing project. Despite its location, the school did not draw from the Gold Coast. Instead some students came from Cabrini and many were bused in from Pilsen, a predominantly Mexican community on Chicago’s southwest side where many schools were overcrowded due to booming immigration from Mexico during that era. 

I was hired after passing a Spanish language proficiency test, despite having no formal training as a teacher. CPS was scrambling to recruit Spanish speaking educators, and at the same time I took the job I joined a cohort earning certification and master’s degrees through a Type 29 alternative licensure program. 

Like many new teachers, I was simply trying to make a living. It was my first salaried job, and I was thrilled to take a break from waiting tables to make $32,000 a year. I taught during the day and went to classes at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) three nights a week. I knew nothing about pedagogy and suddenly I had 36 students depending on me.

At the time, I had a flattened idea of bilingual education and did not understand its nuances. I quickly learned that dual language approaches were distinct from transitional bilingual programs. They pushed back against a long tradition of subtractive bilingualism in American schools, where children were expected to abandon their home language in order to succeed academically. Dual language programs were a source of cultural dignity. In the 90s, there were only a handful of programs in Chicago that had a similar mission and vision. There was a strong sense that education was connected to larger struggles in the community. 

The political energy I encountered at Salazar came from the circle of dual language educators and activists around me. Salazar partnered with artists and grassroots organizations committed to preserving the language and celebrating the diversity among Spanish-speaking peoples, rejecting stereotypes of Latinos. This was a formative time for my political approach to education, because my teaching felt connected to broader social struggles.

I do not remember the union playing any meaningful role in this time in my life. I cannot even recall who the school’s delegate (comparable to a steward position in other unions) was at the time. I had no prior experience with labor unions of any sort. Today, I understand this was a period of “labor peace” in CPS, though that was not important to me at the time. The most recent CTU strike had ended more than a decade earlier. 

Whittier School: Solidarity in Practice

My second teaching job, beginning in 2001, was at Whittier Elementary, a dual language neighborhood school in Pilsen. Many families came from the same communities as my students at Salazar. At the time, public education in Chicago was undergoing major changes. The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed with bipartisan support that same year, tied school evaluations to standardized testing. Locally, things were even worse, as Mayor Richard Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative pushed forward school closures and charter expansion. 

At Whittier, everyone understood the stakes. Teachers were committed to their students and families played an active role in the school. Yet the system was stacked against us. Nearly all students qualified for free lunch. Many parents worked extremely low wage jobs. Most children were English Language Learners. The neighborhood also experienced frequent gang violence, and I attended funeral after funeral with students whose family members had been killed. Meanwhile, NCLB was rapidly changing the educational landscape, weaponizing the label of “failing” schools, and parents started receiving alarming letters about test scores. Distrust spread through communities. At Whittier and many other schools, the label “failing” reflected systemic inequality more than the work happening inside our classrooms. 

The years I worked at Whittier (2001–06) were pivotal in my political transformation. Not only did I participate in anti-war protests after 9/11, but I also moved into a housing cooperative with other like-minded teachers, organizers and activists. I was particularly active in Latin American solidarity efforts: I attended protests at the School of the Americas in Georgia and I traveled to Venezuela during the Bolivarian Revolution. This experience transformed me because, for the first time, I witnessed a society where everyone from taxi drivers to teachers to families living in the slums of Caracas felt that change was possible. The energy and hope of people on the streets demanding justice was intoxicating. 

At Whittier, organizing was beginning to emerge from within the community. A group of parents, mostly immigrant mothers from Mexico, started speaking out. Many were undocumented and living under difficult conditions, yet they publicly insisted that their children deserved a strong public school. By 2002, they were asking why the local alderman (city council member) supported a nearby charter school while neglecting Whittier. Watching these mothers organize was my first real exposure to grassroots activism in education. 

Around that time I met Hal Adams and Janice Hurtig, local researcher-activists who facilitated community writing groups where parents gathered to write about their lives and share their stories. In the fall of 2002, we launched a writing group in the basement of Whittier. About eight mothers and one father attended the first meeting, which was conducted in Spanish. The meetings became healing spaces, where people shared vulnerable aspects of their lives. I was humbled by the group, and realized that I didn’t have the same role as I did teaching children. There was no syllabus, and I was not in charge.

The writing group gradually built solidarity among participating parents. One winter day, we painted the school’s small and dilapidated field house, hoping it might become a community space. Years later that same building became La Casita, the site of an occupation led by Whittier mothers demanding a library and community center instead of demolition. Looking back, the organizing energy was already there. Teachers, parents, students, and community members across the city were searching for ways to push back against school closures, turnaround schools, high stakes testing, and privatization. At Whittier, this started with the moms. The frustration was building, and so was the desire to fight for something different. 

A Crisis at Suder

After a decade of teaching dual language and after the birth of my first child, I decided to pursue a Montessori teaching credential. I did not want to work at a private school and I obtained a job at one of the few public Montessori schools in Chicago, Suder Elementary, which served a majority-Black student body. My next major turning point came there. The school was wonderful but the principal was toxic – bullying and retaliatory. I had no idea who the union delegate was, and when problems arose I felt completely alone. 

Near the end of my first and only year teaching there, I wrote a fuck-you letter to the principal (cc’ing her superiors) saying I would not return to the school the next year. I was seriously considering leaving teaching altogether. Around that time, however, I was recruited to apply for a position at another of the city’s public Montessori schools, Drummond Elementary. When the hiring process began, Drummond’s principal discovered that I had mysteriously been “resigned” from CPS in the human resources system without my knowledge; the principal at Suder had illegally completed the paperwork in retaliation for my letter. I filed a grievance through CTU, the first time I ever understood this was even possible. But I had no real grasp of how the process worked or who could help me. In the end, the issue was resolved in a strangely anticlimactic way: I brought the hated former principal Tootsie Rolls (her favorite) and she signed a form reversing the resignation. I was then able to take the job at Drummond. 

What stayed with me from that experience was the feeling of isolation. I did not feel protected by a collective organization. If the union existed, I did not know how to access it. Within just a few years, that would begin to change. While working at Suder, I had met Karen Lewis at an event sponsored by a local organization called Teachers for Social Justice. Within minutes, it was clear she was someone I wanted to organize alongside. She spoke bluntly about the systemic racism in education, and the mayor’s relentless push to privatize public schools. She put words to frustrations many of us had been feeling but had not yet articulated. Her delivery was direct and also deeply eloquent. She had a remarkable ability to make a room full of people erupt in laughter while delivering a sharp indictment of the system. Within a year, Lewis was elected president of CTU as the head of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE).

The 2012 Strike

My next major turning point came at Drummond in the fall of 2012, when CTU went on strike for the first time in 25 years. In the months leading up to the strike, CORE organizers held teach-ins across the city explaining the issues at stake: school closures, privatization, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, and the overuse of standardized testing. This list of demands was striking in part because a state law passed in the 1990s limited CTU to bargaining over wages and benefits, expressly prohibiting any other topics of negotiation.

The early days of CORE leadership in CTU reminded me of the political energy I had witnessed years earlier during my visit to Venezuela in 2003 – an atmosphere where people believed real change was achievable. When the delegate position opened Drummond in the 2011–12 school year, I stepped forward. I had no grand ambitions; I simply wanted to be part of the movement that was beginning to reshape our union.

Those of us most interested in the union’s activities held community meetings in the back room of a nearby bar, Jack and Ginger’s, owned by supportive parents. Teachers spoke with parents about the pressures schools were facing and the broader vision behind the strike. Those conversations built trust in part because they were so unprecedented, as political conversations across the teacher-parent divide were highly uncommon.

When the strike began, Chicago saw something remarkable: tens of thousands of teachers, predominantly women, filling the streets in a “sea of red.” For the first time in my career, I felt proud to be a public school teacher in a world where the common idea was, as George Bernard Shaw put it, “those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” As a woman in elementary education, I often felt I chose the “expected” caregiving profession, and I longed for a job where I was treated with respect. The strike was a display of strong, intelligent, no BS, badass teachers demanding to be heard. We were not going to stay silent and allow society to diminish our profession as if we were glorified babysitters. By the same token, other teachers, who had thought of themselves as apolitical professionals, began to see our situation as a classic conflict of workers against bosses. Regardless of where we started, our consciousness changed together. We were not isolated individuals in our separate classrooms; we were part of a collective movement. 

The Fight Against High-Stakes Testing

CORE organizers encouraged us to identify issues that resonated widely within our schools. Jackson Potter, co-founder of CORE, once told me, “Find something everyone is upset about – even if it’s small.” Testing was that issue at Drummond, and at many other schools. Teachers and parents began meeting informally to discuss the growing burden of exams. The conversations built trust and laid the groundwork for more collective action. 

At one of our back-of-the-bar meetings, I met Matthew Luskin, a CTU organizer who introduced me to parent activists like Sharon Schmidt and Julie Woestehoff from organizations such as PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education). Soon, we were hosting meetings at a Chicago Park District building to discuss issues like excessive standardized testing. Out of those conversations, which continued after the 2012 strike ended, the testing opt-out movement in Chicago began to take shape. 

Standardized testing had been steadily expanding under federal and district mandates ever since NCLB became law in 2001. At one point I documented 15 different tests being administered to kindergarten students alone. 

As a Montessori teacher, this was particularly troubling. Maria Montessori’s philosophy emphasizes “following the child,” observing students’ natural development rather than forcing them into rigid measurement systems. Testing culture felt completely incompatible with that approach. I spoke at a Chicago Board of Education meeting early in 2013, holding my newborn third child in my arms. I noted that I was a mandated reporter and accused the school district of child abuse for prioritizing high-stakes standardized testing and forfeiting dozens of hours of quality classroom instruction.

The 2014 Testing Boycott

In 2014, a small group of teachers at my school made the decision to boycott – refuse to administer – the Illinois Standards Achievement Test (ISAT), a particularly pointless standardized exam. We were inspired by Jesse Hagopian and others in Seattle, and locally by teacher and CORE activist Sarah Chambers and her co-workers at Saucedo Elementary. Karen Lewis had told us that CTU itself could not legally call for a boycott, but she made it clear that if teachers took action they would not stand alone.  

Before we acted, Matthew Luskin asked us a simple question: “If you lose your job tomorrow, would you still do this?”

My answer was an immediate “yes!” even though I was the primary breadwinner for my family. Knowing that my partner stood firmly behind me gave me the courage to move forward despite the uncertainty. We announced the boycott publicly. The backlash against our collective statement was intense. CPS sent us threatening letters accusing us of insubordination and warning that our teaching licenses could be revoked by the State of Illinois. Some coworkers were furious, believing we had drawn negative attention to the school. Heated debates erupted at parent meetings and in online forums.

Yet something unexpected also happened: Opt-out letters flooded in from parents who decided their children should not take this standardized test. On the first day of testing, as many as 75 percent of eligible students at Drummond were not sitting for the exam. Instead of quiet testing rooms, the school was filled with students in “holding rooms” reading books. (We were prohibited from offering instruction to those not testing.) 

CPS then escalated the conflict by sending investigators from the Law Department to question students at Drummond. Children, some as young as nine, were pulled out of class and questioned about whether teachers had encouraged them to opt out of the test. Parents were not informed and were not present for the interrogation of their children. The spectacle horrified many parents at the school and drew widespread media attention.

At the height of the controversy, support began pouring in. Organizations like More Than a Score, Raise Your Hand, Parents for Teachers, and PURE rallied behind us. More than 150 university professors signed a solidarity letter. A large public event was organized at well-known, local, activist-run restaurant Wishbone, where hundreds of supporters gathered to defend the teachers involved in the boycott. 

Ultimately CPS backed down. No teachers were disciplined for refusing to administer the ISAT, much less fired. And no teaching licenses were revoked. 

While we were successful in our campaign to draw attention to the misuse and overuse of standardized testing, Drummond was suddenly divided. I had to show up for work with some coworkers scowling at me and giving me the silent treatment because they felt that I had fractured the school community. A few parents blew up our social media page denouncing my actions, targeting me as an individual even though two other teachers at Drummond had refused alongside me to administer the ISAT. I was the subject of disdain at a particularly contentious Local School Council meeting. I felt like an outcast. I had to hold on to the hope that someday we would see the benefits of the boycott. And indeed the solidarity of fellow teachers, parents, and union comrades carried us through. 

The testing boycott helped accelerate broader changes in Chicago’s schools. High-stakes testing in kindergarten through second grade was eventually eliminated, and standardized exams lost their power to determine grade promotion for students. While testing has not disappeared entirely, its role has been significantly reduced. Perhaps more importantly, the episode demonstrated the potential of teacher-parent alliances and grassroots organizing within and beyond schools. 

Conclusion

Today’s issues are in many ways different from those that formed my political consciousness as an educator: Trump and MAGA have launched a massive attack on immigrants, queer and trans people, and unions, among so many other horrors inflicted globally. But the connections – with activist parents, community groups, and union radicals – that helped transform my politics as a teacher can serve as a model to younger educators looking not only to keep a job but to change society for the better.