Abstract
This article examines the 2019 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike as a spatial counter-hegemonic project that reconfigures the relationship between education, urban governance, and public infrastructure. Building on Antonio Gramsci's concept of counter-hegemony and its recent spatial reinterpretations, I analyze how CTU used the strategy of bargaining for the common good not only to expand the scope of labor demands, but to contest the fiscal, racial, and spatial logics of neoliberal urban development in Chicago. Drawing on participant observation, content analysis, and case study methods, I trace how the strike's protest routes, coalition-building, popular education, and creative practices worked across scale to produce an alternative spatial imaginary rooted in care, redistribution, and collective life. While the strike did not achieve all its demands and was met with both internal tensions and external resistance, I argue that its significance lies in the everyday practices and solidarities through which educators asserted a different vision of what schools, and cities, can be. This case contributes to scholarship on teacher unionism, labor geography, and urban social movements by foregrounding space as a key terrain of both constraint and possibility in counter-hegemonic struggle.
Introduction
It is mid-morning on a grey and chilly October day, and we are marching towards the newly constructed Fleet Fields soccer complex that sits next to a large, razed parcel of land nestled into a bend of the Chicago River. I am in a crowd of striking education workers, adorned in red and purple, made up of members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and Service Employees International Union Local 73 (SEIU 73), representing staff across the Chicago Public School district (CPS). As we march, strikers drum on 5-gallon buckets while chanting, “If we don’t get it, shut it down! Chicago is a union town!” Teachers and staff are nine workdays into what will become an 11-day strike demanding better pay, smaller classes, increased support staff, affordable housing resources for students and staff, sanctuary school protections, and new restorative justice initiatives. Despite being 2 weeks into daily demonstrations, the marchers this morning are energized, packing intersection after intersection, and filling the formerly industrial area on Chicago's near northwest side with over 2000 strong from across the city.
Despite the power of the protest, its location—a soccer complex that abuts a construction site—is perhaps an unlikely place for a contestation around public education. At the time of the strike, this area was poised to become one of Chicago's newest neighborhoods: Lincoln Yards. Lincoln Yards is a controversial megadevelopment project approved for a sprawling 55-acre parcel along the Chicago River between the affluent neighborhoods of Lincoln Park and Wicker Park. The original project includes plans for commercial offices, luxury residential units, a new commuter rail station, and new park land. The city approved the creation of a new tax increment financing (TIF) 1 district specifically to provide developers with a necessary $1.3 billion in funds for infrastructure improvements for the project. For striking education workers, Lincoln Yards is emblematic of the city's continual prioritization of selective urban development in affluent neighborhoods over funding schools and essential urban infrastructures citywide, making visible how education is embedded in the spatial logics of neoliberal urban development.
Through their strike activities, teachers and staff highlight this contradiction in the city's priorities. Protestors carry signs reading: “Silly rich guy, TIFs are for kids!” above a picture of the Trix rabbit, as well as “TIFs for rich developers or a nurse in every school?” Over the loudspeaker, a CTU organizer declares, “We followed the money, and the money is here,” reiterating how Chicago's budgetary crisis, used to justify continued austerity in education, is a political fabrication. Another asks, “Can you imagine the type of city Chicago could be if we put that infrastructure investment in our schools instead of developments for the wealthy? This is why we strike.” By protesting at a site representing the city's investment in luxury real estate, organizers invite protesters to imagine an alternative urban reality where investments in schools create a different kind of city.
Yet, while striking teachers in Chicago's streets work to reimagine education's role in urban life, critics seek to discredit these efforts by advancing a narrower understanding of the role of schools and education workers as political actors. Editorials in the Chicago Tribune (2019) mocked decisions such as the protest at Lincoln Yards, arguing such issues are beyond the scope of education: “Affordable housing. Rent control. Money for youth homelessness. Believe it or not, these are all issues CTU … raised to fire up striking members … None of those demands has anything to do with collective bargaining of a teachers contract” (2019). They complained, “There are about 300,000 children in Chicago who have missed nearly two weeks of classroom instruction … That's the betrayal: Tough luck, kids, but we adults come first” (Chicago Tribune, 2019). These narratives position teachers as self-serving and overreaching, while constricting the remit of education to what happens in schools alone.
The disjuncture between the Chicago Tribune editorial and educators’ vision for a capacious, politicized education landscape reflects more than a symbolic disagreement or a short-lived flashpoint: it signals the emergence of a counter-hegemonic project aimed at reshaping the spatial terrain of education governance in Chicago. A growing body of scholarship has examined how CTU, through its transformation under the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), has helped to revitalize teacher unionism by advancing broader social justice demands and developing the strategy of bargaining for the common good (Alter, 2013; Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Blanc, 2022; Bradbury et al., 2014; Brogan, 2014; Maton, 2022b; McAlevey, 2016; Uetricht, 2014). Building on this work, I extend Antonio Gramsci's concept of counter-hegemony to analyze the 2019 strike as a moment in an ongoing spatial project that intervenes in urban governance and the geography of education in Chicago. The strike's demands, tactics, and messaging reimagined the role of public schools in the city as infrastructures of care rather than merely sites of learning or vehicles for accumulation. Through this reimagining, teachers made space itself a terrain of political struggle rather than a neutral backdrop. In this sense, CTU's organizing advances a spatial counter-hegemonic project that repositions education within broader urban struggles and reconfigures the relationships between schools, urban development, and city life. This lens allows us to read the 2019 strike not simply as a walkout or short-term disruption but as a spatial intervention in Chicago's contested future, rooted in a longer struggle over care, redistribution, and democratic control.
This article is part of a larger research project on the intersections of urban politics and education landscapes in Chicago. To construct a case study of the 2019 CTU strike, I draw on information gathered through participant observation and content analysis of policy documents, press releases, and media coverage of contract negotiations and the strike itself. I analyze the messaging and narratives about the strike that circulated at the time as well as the actions and strategies that unions and their allies employed during the contestation. Fieldwork for this article draws on participant observation at approximately 25 public events and protests related to CTU and SEIU 73's labor contestations from August 2019 to February 2020, including morning pickets at schools, weekend mobilizations, mass actions, and the multi-day Art Build leading up to the strike. While my role was primarily as an observer and supporter, I occasionally assisted with small logistics, such as distributing signs to local businesses. I was invited to many events through a long-standing relationship with a CTU organizer, and I consistently introduced myself at actions as a researcher studying the relationship between education politics and urban governance in Chicago. These experiences shaped the perspective I bring to the analysis of spatial practices, coalition-building, and strategic experimentation during the strike.
I proceed through four primary sections. First, I outline the conceptual framework of counter-hegemony, drawing on Gramsci and recent spatial reinterpretations of his work to theorize Chicago's education landscape as a contested urban terrain. Second, I situate CTU's experience within broader debates on educator-driven social justice unionism and bargaining for the common good, engaging this literature as a foundation for interpreting CTU's transformation through a spatial counter-hegemonic lens. Third, I analyze the hegemonic spatial logics that CTU's organizing seeks to contest, focusing on how the education landscape has been mobilized to facilitate racialized gentrification, disinvestment, real estate speculation, and austerity governance in Chicago. Finally, I turn to the 2019 strike as a case study, examining how its demands, practices, and messaging operated as spatial interventions within a broader counter-hegemonic project. I conclude by reflecting on what this case contributes to debates on teacher unionism, urban governance, and the remaking of public education as a foundation for more just urban futures.
Theorizing spatial counter-hegemony
This article builds on a growing body of scholarship on educator-driven social justice unionism and bargaining for the common good (Alter, 2013; Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Blanc, 2022; Bradbury et al., 2014; Brogan, 2014; Dyke and Muckian Bates, 2023; Konkol and Ramirez-Alonzo, 2021; Maton, 2016, 2022b; McAlevey, 2016; Novelli, 2004; Peterson, 2015; Stark, 2019; Uetricht, 2014; Weiner, 2012; Weiner, 2013). This literature emphasizes how teachers’ unions, including CTU, have advanced expansive political demands, built powerful coalitions, and reinvigorated unions through rank-and-file democracy. Placing this work in dialogue with Gramscian theories of counter-hegemony and spatial politics, I argue that these well-documented organizing practices also operate as spatial projects that rework urban space, scale, and governance. Specifically, I suggest that counter-hegemony must be understood not only as an ideological project, but also as a spatial one, produced and contested through material practices, spatial imaginaries, and multiscalar struggle. In what follows, I draw on Gramscian debates alongside recent scholarship in urban social movements and labor geography to develop a framework for analyzing teacher organizing as a spatially grounded counter-hegemonic project.
Gramsci's (1971) concept of hegemony refers to the ability of ruling groups to maintain dominance not only through coercion but by cultivating consent across civil society. This consent is sustained through a network of institutions, practices, and ideologies that shape what appears as ‘common sense’ or those taken-for-granted assumptions that structure everyday life. Hegemony is not static but rather must be continually maintained and reproduced. In addition, it is always contested, and Gramsci emphasized the ways in which this struggle involves both political, economic, and cultural dimensions. In thinking about the tensions between hegemony and its challenges, Gramsci highlights the long “war of position” by which embryonic conceptions of the world come to cohere and eventually develop into properly counter-hegemonic projects which involve “a multi-dimensional attack on the dominant ideology, perception, culture, and discourse of the hegemon” (Woldeyesus and Endris, 2021: 123).
While many have emphasized the ideological and cultural dimensions of hegemony, recent scholarship has further highlighted its spatial dimensions, foregrounding how power is exercised and contested through space, place, and scale (Ekers and Loftus, 2012; Featherstone, 2012; Jessop, 2005; Karriem, 2012; Kipfer, 2012; Morton, 2007, 2012; Sevilla-Buitrago, 2017). As Jessop (2005) describes, “Gramsci's philosophy of praxis involves not only the historicisation but also the spatialisation of its analytical categories” (421), a method that Ekers and Loftus (2012) refer to as “spatial historicism.” In this reading, Gramsci's spatialized understanding of hegemony does not simply rely on metaphor (Morton, 2012: 83) but is instead inherently “spatio-temporal and multiscalar” (Kipfer, 2012: 87), emphasizing historical and geographical specificity as well as material interconnections across scale, place, and time.
Following these insights, counter-hegemonic projects do not simply oppose dominant spatial orders but engage in a process of world-making that transforms space itself. As Kipfer (2012) emphasizes, urban transformation is a central terrain of this counter-hegemonic struggle. Claims to urban space and urban life are not secondary effects but fundamental components of these projects. Counter-hegemony, in this sense, involves the production of new spatial imaginaries and the contestation of inherited spatial divides.
Extending Gramsci's concept of counter-hegemony and building on its spatial reinterpretation in recent scholarship, I argue that CTU's 2019 strike should be understood not only as a fight over teacher working conditions and education policy, but as a spatially grounded counter-hegemonic project. Rather than serving as a backdrop to union strategy, spatial imaginaries, practices, and tactics were central to how CTU contested the dominant geographies of education under neoliberalism. In Chicago, this has meant confronting spatial regimes that frame public schools as instruments of austerity, accumulation, and real estate development, while also asserting an alternative vision of schools as infrastructures of care and social reproduction embedded in broader projects of urban justice. By infrastructures of care and social reproduction, I refer to the uneven everyday and institutional systems that sustain life and organize care (Binet et al., 2023; Dowling, 2021; Hall, 2020; McFadden, 2025; Power and Mee, 2019), which neoliberal education reforms have systematically disavowed (Lawson, 2007; Power and Bergan, 2019; Tronto, 2013). Grounding counter-hegemony in the spatial strategies of teacher organizing offers a new perspective on how organized educators can contest neoliberal education reforms, while also reconfiguring the spatial relationship between education, urban governance, and the production of public space.
Theorizing CTU's organizing through the lens of spatial counter-hegemony reveals how teacher unionism extends beyond the defense of public education to become part of a broader struggle to reassert and reimagine education's role in urban life. This perspective foregrounds how spatial politics and spatial imaginaries shape education's position within broader processes of urban governance and development. This framework contributes to existing scholarship on counter-hegemony by grounding spatial theory in the concrete practices of organizing, showing how labor unions like CTU contest dominant geographies both discursively and materially through protest routes that traverse segregated neighborhoods, cross-scalar demands that target municipal and state institutions, place-based coalition-building, and the occupation and reinterpretation of public space. CTU's 2019 strike reveals how counter-hegemonic projects operate not only through ideology, but through the remaking of infrastructure, spatial governance, and the everyday geographies of collective life and belonging in Chicago.
This theoretical lens is strengthened by work on urban social movements (Ballesteros-Quilez et al., 2022; Cordeiro de Campos, 2022; Deaton, 2015; Toukan, 2020), which highlights several key ways counter-hegemonic movements engage space. First, such struggles often entail occupying urban space and creating counter-spaces that reshape who belongs, what activities are legitimate, and how place becomes meaningful (Ballesteros-Quilez et al., 2022; Deaton, 2015; Yoltay, 2021). Second, counter-hegemony is enacted through everyday, performative practices such as art, protest aesthetics, and pedagogical relationships that generate new commonsense understandings of the city and its institutions (García López, Velicu and D’Alisa, 2017; Karriem, 2009; Toukan, 2020). Third, these projects operate across scale, from the individual to the neighborhood to the city and beyond. Here, scalar attention is vital for understanding how conjunctural crises are reproduced in ways that create openings for counter-hegemonic interventions (Davies, 2023; Jessop, 2005; Woolston and Mitchell, 2024). Finally, scholars emphasize the role of coalitional work in sustaining long-term visions for transformation (Carroll and Ratner, 2010; Dunford, 2020). Yet, as Rzedzian (2023) notes, counter-hegemonic struggles are rarely unified; they often involve multiple, sometimes conflicting spatial imaginaries and political commitments, a dynamic that is salient in teacher organizing. Taken together, this scholarship helps us understand counter-hegemony as a spatial project that must account for how space is reconfigured, performed, and contested across scales, and how oppositional movements build solidarity amid internal heterogeneity and political friction.
Complementing insights from urban social movement studies, labor geography offers additional tools for understanding how organized workers, especially public sector unions like CTU, engage spatial politics. Scholars in this tradition emphasize that workers and unions do not merely respond to spatial conditions but actively produce space through struggle, contesting and reshaping uneven geographies of capital and labor (Herod, 2001; Jordhus-Lier, 2012). Labor geography also highlights how unions resist the spatial fragmentation and scalar disarticulation produced by neoliberal governance, insights that resonate with CTU's efforts to organize across scales and intervene in Chicago's racialized education geography. While labor geography frames unions as spatial actors, a Gramscian lens reveals how this spatial agency contributes to broader efforts to contest dominant spatial logics, reshape political common sense, and build counter-hegemonic alternatives. Taken together with Gramsci's concept of war of position, these literatures clarify how spatial practice becomes central to constructing durable counter-power.
In the following section, I turn to CTU's internal transformation through the rise of CORE. Drawing on scholarship on educator-driven social justice unionism and bargaining for the common good, I outline what the framework of spatial counter-hegemony adds to existing debates on educator organizing while providing necessary context for understanding CTU's strategic trajectory and its evolving political vision.
CTU's transformation
Over the past decade, a wave of teacher strikes and renewed labor militancy have sparked scholarly interest in what is often called “social movement unionism” and “social justice unionism” within education (Dyke and Muckian Bates, 2023; Konkol and Ramirez-Alonzo, 2021; Maton, 2016; Novelli, 2004; Peterson, 2015; Rottman, 2008; Stark, 2019; Weiner, 2012, 2013). Scholars have examined how social justice caucuses like CORE in Chicago have transformed their unions by linking workplace demands to “common good” demands such as fully funded schools, affordable housing, sanctuary city protections, climate justice, and democratic governance (Alter, 2013; Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Blanc, 2022; Bradbury et al., 2014; Brogan, 2014; Maton, 2022b; McAlevey, 2016; Uetricht, 2014). Work focused on Chicago has illuminated key strategic and organizational shifts within CTU, including internal union democracy, deepened community alliances, and the development of the bargaining for the common good framework. Building on these insights, this article foregrounds how such organizing also operates as a spatial project, reconfiguring urban space and contesting the spatial foundations of neoliberal governance. Framing CORE's transformation of CTU as the groundwork for a counter-hegemonic project highlights how union strategy moved beyond responding to neoliberal reform to build a new political common sense rooted in spatial critique and urban transformation.
CTU's transformation under CORE has become a defining case in the scholarship on social justice unionism. CORE was formed in 2008 as a social justice caucus within CTU by a multiracial, multigenerational group of educators who came together to resist school closures and the expanding reach of neoliberal education reform. Many founding members, including Black educators, leftist teachers, and longtime school staff, drew on their experiences in classrooms and neighborhoods to reshape the union from within while building alliances with community organizations like the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, Pilsen Alliance, and Blocks Together that had long organized against education privatization, gentrification, and neoliberal housing policies in the city (Alter, 2013; Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Brogan, 2014; Uetricht, 2014; Stark, 2019). From the outset, CORE emphasized internal democracy, rank-and-file engagement, political education, and coalition-building as key strategies for rebuilding CTU into a more militant and community-embedded union.
CORE's organizing led to a successful challenge to CTU's incumbent leadership in 2010, ushering in a new political orientation for the union. Early efforts to redefine the union's mission sparked internal tensions about the proper scope of teacher unionism, questions that would resurface in later contract cycles. Nonetheless, in 2012, CTU went on strike for the first time in 25 years, marking the first large-scale effort to enact CORE's vision. While the union's formal demands focused on pay, class size, school closures, and testing, the strike was also a political intervention: a reassertion of public education as a collective good and a challenge to dominant narratives of austerity and privatization (Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Alter, 2013). The strike signaled a broader counter-hegemonic project in which the union sought not only to win material gains, but to reshape the spatial and political logics of public education in Chicago.
This shift reflected both CORE's political commitments and the strategic assessment that community-labor alliances would be essential to resisting neoliberal restructuring. In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis and amid intensifying austerity across public institutions, CTU organizers increasingly viewed the union contract as a vehicle for contesting broader structures of dispossession (Bradbury et al., 2014; Gutstein and Lipman, 2013). Rather than focus solely on teacher working conditions, CTU began to frame school bargaining as a form of redistributive urban politics, linking school conditions to housing justice, public health, and tax equity (Hilgendorf, 2013).
This orientation helped lay the groundwork for what would eventually become known as “bargaining for the common good,” a strategy through which unions use the bargaining process not only to improve wages and working conditions, but to advance structural demands and build sustained coalitions for justice (Bargaining for the Common Good, 2023; Konkol and Ramirez-Alonzo, 2021; McCartin, 2016; McCartin, Sneiderman and BP-Weeks, 2020). While most of CTU's 2012 common good demands were not realized, leading critics to note its limited material gains (Kaplan, 2013; Shuffleton, 2014), the strike marked a durable shift in how the union organized and how it positioned education within broader struggles for racial and economic justice. Since then, CTU has helped define and popularize bargaining for the common good 2 in the education sector (Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Uetricht, 2014). Although often framed as a novel model, bargaining for the common good draws on long-standing traditions within labor and civil rights organizing (Konkol and Ramirez-Alonzo, 2021; Hale, 2019; McAlevey, 2016). In this article, I analyze common good bargaining less as a standalone strategy and more as a central element of CTU's spatial counter-hegemonic project that seeks to transform both the political meaning of education and the spatial structures that sustain urban inequality.
While CTU's transformations over the past two decades have been well-documented, different strands of the literature have addressed the spatial dimensions of its strategy and practice in distinct ways. Some work has addressed these dynamics directly: Brogan (2014) emphasizes neighborhood-based attachments, Gutstein and Lipman (2013) examine the relationship between education and urban development, and both Bocking (2020) andMcCartin et al. (2020) highlight scalar labor strategies. Gramscian frameworks of counter-hegemony have also been used to analyze social justice teacher unionism (Bocking, 2020; Gutstein and Lipman, 2013; Maton, 2022a; Novelli, 2004; Stark, 2019; Tarlau, Campos and Visagie, 2025), though spatial elements are not always treated as a central analytic lens. Building on these contributions, I foreground the spatial politics of CTU's organizing, showing how spatial critique—how schools are positioned, where protest happens, how demands are territorialized—has been essential to its counter-hegemonic project. This framing reveals how CTU has worked to reposition schools within the urban fabric, contest the education-development nexus, and advance alternative spatial imaginaries of what and whom the city is for.
Contesting the spatial order of neoliberal education
Before analyzing the 2019 strike, I define the dominant spatial order that CTU has sought to contest. In Chicago, education policy has been a key instrument of neoliberal urban development, reproducing racialized geographies of dispossession and containment.
Since the 1990s, schools have been increasingly tied to housing and development strategies aimed at gentrification and real estate speculation (Lipman, 2004,2011). A centerpiece of this effort was Renaissance 2010, a policy initiative that called for closing 60 district schools and opening 100 new, mostly choice-oriented schools such as charter and contract schools (Lipman, 2011). Framed as a way to improve student achievement and efficiency, Renaissance 2010 accelerated the expansion of selective, privatized, and often non-union schools, while dismantling neighborhood-based district schools. These closures disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx schools, compounding existing patterns of disinvestment. In downtown areas and neighborhoods targeted for redevelopment, the policy intensified displacement by accelerating investment geared toward higher-income residents (Lipman, 2011). Meanwhile, in predominantly Black and Latinx communities on the south and west sides, these same policies undermined the spatial and social anchoring function of neighborhood schools, often paving the way for further privatization and destabilization (Bocking, 2020; Ewing, 2018; Lipman, 2011; Todd-Breland, 2018).
Alongside spatial restructuring through school closures and school choice expansion, Chicago's education governance was simultaneously rescaled to transfer power away from local communities and towards the mayor's office, state-level authorities, and federal policy frameworks. The 1995 Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act cemented a mayor-appointed school board, replaced the CPS superintendent with a CEO, and restricted the CTU's bargaining rights to wages and benefits (Lipman, 2004). These changes took decision-making power away from schools, Local School Councils, and even the district itself, disempowering local school communities while enabling direct corporate involvement in education policy through privatization, performance metrics, and accountability regimes, ultimately reducing transparency and limiting democratic oversight. These policies would later be codified in national policies such as No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, further rescaling education governance toward the national register (Bocking, 2020; McAlevey, 2016). Together, the twinned policies of school choice expansion and high-stakes accountability enacted a double movement: centralizing control while pushing responsibility and blame onto individual families and schools.
These shifts in education governance were embedded within broader urban restructuring that transformed housing, infrastructure, and public space in similarly exclusionary ways. For example, neoliberal housing policy further reinforced this spatial reordering. The Plan for Transformation, Chicago's version of the federal HOPE VI program, demolished large-scale public housing, promising to replace it with mixed-income housing and private-market vouchers (Lipman, 2008). The demolitions displaced over 26,000 households, most of whom were pushed out of the public housing system rather than rehoused in new developments (Ewing, 2018). These demolitions were closely linked to education policy, as school investment and closure patterns tracked and reinforced housing-led redevelopment: new schools were often built in gentrifying areas while long-standing neighborhood schools were closed or destabilized. As Lipman (2011) argues, both housing and school reform advanced the city's efforts to attract investment and high-wage workers, transforming schools into tools of “revitalization” and capital accumulation. Across these policies, racialized discourses of pathologized Blackness and dependency were mobilized to justify disinvestment, the dismantling of public institutions, and gentrification (Lipman, 2008,2011). These narratives naturalized exclusion while blaming low-income communities of color for their own displacement, legitimating the broader restructuring of urban space.
Chicago's entrepreneurial fiscal strategies have further entrenched this spatial order (Farmer and Weber, 2022; Lipman, 2011; Weber, 2003). Tools such as tax-increment financing (TIF) have been used to divert property tax increases away from public infrastructure like schools into special funds for private development. While TIF has funded a variety of development projects, in the education landscape the mechanism has disproportionately subsidized new construction of privatized, selective enrollment schools. In addition, studies show that affluent, gentrifying, and majority-white communities have received a disproportionate share of TIF-funded school investment, while working-class Black and Latinx neighborhoods have received far less, often limited to charter or contract schools with restrictive enrollment policies that constrain access for neighborhood students (Brogan, 2013; Farmer and Poulos, 2015).
These funding mechanisms have deepened CPS's reliance on debt (Farmer and Weber, 2022), with increasingly risky and more complex financial instruments being used to fund both school operations and infrastructure (Kass, Luby, and Weber, 2019). As a result, CPS has responded to these self-reinforcing fiscal crises with austerity measures such as pension holidays, staff cuts, and school closures (Farmer and Weber, 2022). This cycle of austerity and accumulation, what Farmer and Weber call “recursive austerity,” not only erodes school resources but also reproduces the spatial hierarchies that structure who the city is for and under what terms public infrastructure is maintained or abandoned. This is the spatialized hegemony that CTU seeks to confront: one in which education serves as a tool of racialized accumulation, dispossession, and spatial exclusion rather than a site of collective care or democratic possibility. This context shapes the possibilities and stakes of resistance and makes CTU's 2019 strike strategy particularly legible as a spatial intervention.
As scholars have mapped these transformations, Chicago has often been upheld as a paradigmatic example of neoliberal urban restructuring in education and beyond. While the city has become an important reference point for both reform and resistance, this paper resists viewing CTU's trajectory as exceptional or singular. Neoliberal education reform is a global project, with early iterations shaped by structural adjustment policies and World Bank directives that began in Chile before unfolding across Latin America, Asia, and Africa (Bhattacharya et al., 2018; Weiner, 2012). In response, educators and public sector workers in Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere have long organized counter-hegemonic movements that offer alternative visions of education and urban life (Novelli, 2004; Rincón-Gallardo, 2020; Tarlau, Campos, and Visagie, 2025). These global struggles and solidarities inform Chicago's story. One founding CORE member credits the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education, a network connecting education activists across North America, as a key influence after attending its conference in Oaxaca, and an early CORE event also included a workshop drawing on the experiences of a Canadian teachers union (Ashby and Bruno, 2016; Bocking, 2020; Uetricht, 2014). Recognizing these connections allows us to learn from CTU as one articulation of a broader transnational struggle without reproducing a mythologized narrative of Chicago's exceptionalism. With this conceptual and historical grounding in place, I now turn to the 2019 strike as a situated intervention into the spatial politics of education and urban governance.
2019: striking for the city
Building on a decade of union transformation and citywide coalition-building, the 2019 strike marked a pivotal moment in CTU's ongoing counter-hegemonic effort to reshape the spatial logics of education and urban development in Chicago. The strike brought together more than 30,000 education workers across CPS, including CTU members such as teachers, nurses, counselors, librarians, and paraprofessionals (PSRPs), as well as SEIU 73 members such as classroom assistants, bus aides, and custodial staff. Though the two unions bargained separately, they coordinated actions, messaging, and picket lines. More than a dispute over wages or working conditions, the strike challenged dominant spatial and fiscal priorities in the city, disrupting taken-for-granted assumptions about who the city is for, what education is for, and how public infrastructure should be valued and distributed. In doing so, it became part of a broader counter-hegemonic struggle that remapped the city, contested the education-development nexus, and elevated schools as infrastructures of care and collective life. As I will show, this involved interventions into both the material and symbolic geographies of the city, repositioning schools as central sites of urban governance and city politics rather than peripheral public services.
Spatial tactics and multiscalar struggle
Throughout the eleven-day strike, CTU and SEIU 73 deployed spatial tactics that turned space itself into a site of counter-hegemonic intervention, transforming familiar parts of the city into spaces of collective reimagination. A typical strike day began with local pickets at neighborhood schools, followed by mass actions in the afternoon. While some citywide actions were held downtown, many were staged across the south, west, and southwest sides, grounding the strike in Black and Latinx communities and linking it to longer-standing fights for racial and educational justice (Todd-Breland, 2018). These routines affirmed schools as place-based community anchors while challenging Chicago's dominant geography of education, where political and economic power is concentrated downtown and communities of color are systematically marginalized. By rerouting protests through neighborhoods most impacted by disinvestment and harmful state interventions, CTU's actions re-inscribed these areas into the city's spatial narrative, disrupting inherited spatial hierarchies and the logic that renders some places disposable and others as zones of accumulation. In doing so, they contested dominant assumptions about where power and visibility reside and enacted an alternative map of urban political life anchored in schools and community spaces, making visible how education, race, and urban investment are organized through space and how they might be reorganized otherwise.
The strike also featured actions that deliberately connected parts of the city typically kept apart by segregation and disinvestment. On the day of then-Mayor Lightfoot's budget address, regional marches began at four schools and converged on City Hall. In another example, morning pickets from 22 schools merged to form a mega picket line along Ashland Avenue, stretching nearly nine miles through the city's north-south corridor. This action disrupted dominant spatial patterns by encouraging movement between historically segregated neighborhoods. Supporters biked the length of the picket with signs strapped to their backs, cheering at schools along the way, while trucks with loudspeakers turned the street into a roving dance party. The mood was celebratory and joyous, and people shared coffee, donuts, and tamales between chants and conversations. These mobile tactics made political use of movement and visibility, enacting a connective form of spatial disruption in a city built around exclusion.
By marching educators from City Hall, past the Board of Education, through TIF-funded developments, and into neighborhoods like Bronzeville on the south side, the strike produced an embodied spatial understanding of how education policy, municipal finance, and racialized urban planning converge in the city. These daily protest routes compelled participants to move through and reckon with a contested urban fabric, foregrounding histories and connections often obscured by dominant narratives. In doing so, they redirected spatial attention away from elite centers of decision-making and instead mapped an alternative geography of the city where neighborhood schools became political anchors of collective life. The march routes, protest sites, and picket structures were therefore not simply logistically useful but symbolically and materially disruptive to the city's political geography.
These actions made explicit the spatialized nature of austerity and accumulation in Chicago, connecting school conditions to urban planning, real estate speculation, and fiscal governance. As outlined in the introduction, protests at sites like the TIF-funded Lincoln Yards development visibly rejected the city's investment priorities. But this spatial critique extended beyond protest tactics and into the terrain of bargaining itself, reshaping what counted as a legitimate object of labor struggle and education justice. Alongside issues such as pay, healthcare costs, class size, and prep time, the union advanced broader community-oriented demands. Most notably, in collaboration with the Lift the Ban Coalition, CTU called for rent control in neighborhoods facing gentrification, a striking move given that rent control is illegal in Illinois and would require new legislation. In a press release explaining the inclusion of affordable housing concerns in the contract fight, CTU made its critique explicit: “You see new luxury developments in any direction you look … You see a different reality in our schools and neighborhoods—one of chronic disinvestment and lack of basic services … Any teacher could make a laundry list of needs for their schools and communities, but if families do not have a place to live, it is very difficult for them to stay in our neighborhoods. Without students, we cannot have schools. So, to fully support our public schools, we must address the lack of sustainable, affordable housing in our city” (Chicago Teachers Union, 2019).
The emphasis on rent control and affordable housing illustrates how CTU used bargaining for the common good as a method of counter-hegemonic struggle. Addressing housing affordability through a teachers’ contract reflected an alternative understanding of education's relationship to the urban fabric, foregrounding both CTU members' compulsory Chicago residency requirement and the material conditions of entire school communities. Rising rents erode real income and contribute to the displacement of students, families, and school staff, making housing insecurity central to the conditions of teaching and learning. In speeches and public messaging, the union consistently linked this insecurity to school disinvestment and the city's subsidization of luxury real estate, arguing that fiscal policy actively reproduced inequality. Protest signs asking, “Why are we broke on purpose?” and declaring, “Chicago is not broke, the city's priorities are” distilled the union's core critique: that austerity was a political choice, not a financial necessity. As Lipman (2011) has shown, Chicago's education landscape has long been manipulated to facilitate gentrification and neighborhood transformation. In this context, CTU's demands for rent control and TIF reform went beyond material redistribution to contest the fiscal and spatial architecture of dispossession. The strike, in turn, repositioned education as a central terrain of urban struggle with far-reaching implications for housing, development, and community survival.
The strike also adopted multiscalar strategies, operating across the level of individual workers, school sites, municipal governance, state policy, and translocal networks. At the level of individual workers, the unions advanced demands related to pay, benefits, and healthcare. Yet even these workplace issues were framed within broader systemic critiques. For example, SEIU 73's wage demands, grounded in the reality that many members earned poverty-level incomes, were positioned as essential for sustaining school communities. Low wages, organizers emphasized, strained not only workers, but also students, families, and the overall education environment. By organizing across roles—from bus aides and hearing screeners, to teachers, counselors, and parents—CTU and SEIU 73 challenged neoliberal logics that cast schools as interchangeable, atomized units. Instead, the strike affirmed schools as deeply embedded in neighborhood life. School-level demands such as smaller class sizes, a nurse and counselor in every building, and restorative justice programs further reflected this vision of public schools as wider ecologies of care. By organizing mostly certified CTU workers alongside non-certified SEIU 73 workers, the strike also sought to revalue the diverse forms of labor that sustain school communities. 3 A favorite refrain during marches was the chant, “We are family, CTU and 73,” sung to the tune of Sister Sledge's hit, offering a playful but powerful expression of solidarity across roles, unions, and legal contracts.
At the city level, CTU's demands around TIF redistribution, municipal budget reform, and school funding equity challenged the fiscal foundations of neoliberal governance. The union also engaged state politics through avenues such as the rent control proposal and efforts to reshape school funding debates, often pushing beyond the boundaries of public sector bargaining. CTUs’ reach also extended beyond Chicago through translocal networks. After the 2012 CTU strike, CORE helped establish the United Caucuses of Rank-and-File Educators (UCORE), a national network that fosters social justice teacher unionism by connecting social justice caucuses, building solidarity across place, and sharing strategies (Stark, 2019). The CTU-SEIU 73 alliance became a model for future education labor actions, particularly in its commitment to organizing certified and non-certified educators together. In these ways, CTU's organizing both drew from and contributed to a growing repertoire of multiscalar strategies and solidarities that operated in counter-hegemonic ways. Read spatially, these multiscalar strategies positioned education as a hinge between neighborhood life, municipal governance, and translocal organizing, expanding the spatial horizon of what a teachers’ strike could do while cultivating a political imaginary in which public education serves as a foundation for more just urban futures.
Reimagining the city through schools
Through their organizing, CTU has resisted neoliberal education reforms while also articulating an alternative spatial imaginary that repositions schools as anchors of racial justice, housing justice, public health, and neighborhood solidarity. In this sense, the 2019 strike was not only oppositional but generative, asserting a different vision of urban life. In contrast to neoliberal models that treat schools as narrow sites of instruction and individual achievement, CTU envisioned them as institutions that sustain communities through everyday forms of labor, support, and connection. In this context, bargaining for the common good functioned as a spatial-political method for enacting a city where schools operate as infrastructures of care and social reproduction. This counter-hegemonic imaginary took shape through shifts in the terrain of struggle, the contestation of dominant narratives, the cultivation of shared analysis, and the creation of material and symbolic counter-spaces. Across these practices, solidarity within schools, between unions, and across communities emerged as a central force in imagining and enacting a different kind of city.
CTU's common good demands gave material form to this spatial-political vision. While the strike called for improved pay and benefits, it also emphasized community-wide school quality, racial justice, and sanctuary protections. By linking workplace demands to neighborhood conditions and citywide struggles over housing, immigration enforcement, and public investment, the strike repositioned schools as territorially embedded infrastructures central to urban life. As CTU then–vice president Stacy Davis Gates put it, “the benefits we are demanding will not follow teachers home, but rather stay in the school community.” In this way, the union articulated a spatial imaginary in which the well-being of educators, students, and neighborhoods was mutually constitutive, and where labor bargaining became a vehicle for intervening in the governance and spatial organization of the city. This framing reimagined the education-development nexus from a pipeline for accumulation and exclusion to a terrain for solidarity and collective care. In doing so, CTU's demands challenged dominant definitions of what counts as bargainable, positioning education as a foundation for democratic life.
This alternative vision was sustained through coalition. CTU's alliances with organizations like the Grassroots Collaborative, Reimagine Chicago, and Raise Chicago extended the strike's reach into fights for housing, healthcare, racial justice, and budget equity. These partnerships expanded the strike's terrain beyond schools, embedding it in broader critiques of austerity and policing. The strike also built on cross-union solidarity with SEIU 73, demonstrating that school-based labor organizing can challenge role-based hierarchies and build power across positional difference. Solidarity marches and weekend events brought together educators, nurses, fast-food workers, and parents, forging alliances between struggles often treated as distinct. On a drizzly Saturday morning, a packed bus heading to Union Park overflowed with people dressed in the red of CTU and the purple of SEIU 73. Strike supports held signs and children in laps as ‘Solidarity Forever’ echoed through the bus and strangers swapped stories and shared ponchos in preparation for the coming rain. The strike spilled out into the city, making even bus rides and transit routes spaces of strike participation.
The wide breadth of participants beyond CTU and SEIU 73 generated expansive political spaces within the city, disrupting the everyday rhythms of urban life. The work of the strike overflowed into unexpected places as organizers juggled logistics and support on sidewalks and in corporate cafés. At one downtown Starbucks, red and purple shirts crowded tables, holding teach-in prep sessions, watching toddlers, and organizing next-day pickets between sips of coffee. The strike became a vehicle not only for expressing demands, but for experimenting with alternative modes of political participation, community building, and urban governance. These public actions temporarily reconfigured the city, opening space to imagine how labor, care, and democracy might otherwise be organized, and to do so through the lens of education. The counter-hegemonic political space of the strike, and the solidarities that sustained it, offered a rare opportunity to inhabit, however briefly, a different kind of city.
CTU's expansive vision was not universally embraced. As highlighted in the introduction, CTU faced significant opposition from traditional media outlets that drew on familiar cultural scripts to portray striking teachers as lazy, selfish, and harmful to students. These narratives worked to reassert a dominant common sense about education, labor, and urban value in ways that naturalized austerity and individualism. In response, CTU and its allies turned to popular education as tools of counter-hegemonic struggle. Teach-ins, strike schools, and community seminars offered alternative narratives that positioned teachers as political actors and schools as vital to collective well-being. For example, the Resist, Reimagine, and Rebuild Coalition ran programs linking contract demands to community-based struggles, while the CTU Latinx Caucus collaborated with Mijente to host La Escuelita, a Spanish-language strike school that engaged Latinx families and disrupted dominant media framings. These events created counter-spaces where participants could reimagine the city, see themselves as political actors, and connect local conditions to citywide demands. The strike therefore became a terrain of economic, ideological, and spatial struggle, challenging dominant narratives of austerity, meritocracy, and individualism while making alternative visions of education, care, and urban life materially and imaginatively present.
Leading up to the strike, creative practices became central to the organizing process. CTU hosted a multi-day Art Build that brought together educators, students, parents, and community members to produce protest materials: screen-printed signs, hand-painted banners, and patches and pins. The event also fostered translocal solidarity and shared visual styles and messaging through collaboration with traveling artists who had supported educator strikes in LA and West Virginia. The event transformed every corner of the main floor of CTU's headquarters into a makeshift art studio: in the center of the member hall, a huge circle of fabric covered the floor, almost 30 feet in diameter, in the process of becoming an oversized parachute banner visible from above. In the rooms facing Carroll Avenue, people wielded staple guns, constructing wood frames and stretching them with canvas prints. As they nailed and drilled, people swapped memories of the 2012 strike and imagined how this one might unfold. The space buzzed with artmaking, conversation, and scenes of everyday life, as toddlers napped in corners while older kids darted between tables and refilled their plates from the many trays of donated food. In this way, the Art Build supported strike messaging while giving material form to its counter-hegemonic vision, rehearsing in space and through practice the kind of collective city the strike sought to build.
Creative practices were powerful and ever-present elements of the strike. Taking place around Halloween, the strike used the holiday as added motivation to adopt creative protest aesthetics and satirical visual critique. One sign depicted a vampire-like figure removing a mask of former Mayor Rahm Emanuel who is revealed to be then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The mayoral figure was depicted holding a bucket full of TIF dollars and standing in front of Lincoln Yards. In another instance, two CTU members wore Tyrannosaurus Rex costumes while carrying signs that referenced their costumes: “Gee whiz, CPS, I thought we were shorthanded,” and “Jurassic times call for Jurassic measures.” Artmaking, costumes, and playful political theater became forms of spatial storytelling, giving aesthetic expression to the strike's counter-hegemonic vision. These creative interventions helped spatialize critique, transforming the visual and performative landscape of protest into a pedagogical and political force.
As Gramsci reminds us, counter-hegemonic struggle involves not only resistance to dominant structures, but the articulation of alternative visions for organizing life, labor, and, crucially, space. Through spatial and multiscalar tactics, coalitional solidarity, popular education, and creative protest, CTU enacted a distinct spatial logic that asserted a different understanding of what schools are and what cities can be. The 2019 strike demonstrates that teachers are more than public employees, they are political actors embedded in the social and spatial fabric of urban life. Their organizing reveals how education can function as an infrastructure of care and as a platform for broader struggles over housing, health, and justice. In doing so, CTU advanced a spatial counter-hegemonic project that invited Chicagoans, and observers beyond the city, to imagine and inhabit new urban futures rooted in the everyday solidarities forged in and around public schools.
Limits, tensions, and contradictions
The CTU/SEIU 73 strike lasted 11 days, making it the longest teachers’ strike in Chicago in three decades. CTU secured a range of contract wins including raises, lower mental health co-pays, and new advancement opportunities for PSRPs. The contract also included resources for housing insecure students, hard caps on class size for the first time, and $35 million to address overcrowded classrooms and understaffed schools, alongside new equity mechanisms to ensure funds reached the schools that needed them most.
Yet, despite these gains and strong public support, the 2019 strike did not secure contract provisions related to its most ambitious demands, echoing the 2012 strike's limited material gains despite its broader political vision (Kaplan, 2013). This tension between vision and winnability reflects the structural constraints of municipal labor organizing. Even as bargaining for the common good challenges dominant logics, the bargaining process, and the education landscape itself, remain shaped by austerity, legal limitations, and decades of neoliberal reform. Bargaining for the common good is a strategy, not a panacea; a spatial-political method rather than a guaranteed outcome. Grappling with these limits is not a deviation from counter-hegemonic struggle but a condition of its ongoing practice.
The limitations of the 2019 contract also bred internal discontent within CTU. Some members expressed frustration that the union compromised on its common good demands, while a more vocal faction called ‘Members First’ argued that CTU's focus on social justice was undermining the union's core responsibility to advocate for its members. These divisions culminated in a contested union leadership race in 2022, which CORE narrowly won. As Bascia and Maharaj (2022) note, such tensions are not unique to CTU as unions often struggle to balance internal membership dynamics with broader political strategies. Stark (2019) further emphasizes that social justice caucuses are often forced to navigate the contradictions between rank-and-file democracy and social justice aims, particularly around racial justice.
CTU leadership has attempted to manage these tensions through political education and internal organizing aimed at building shared analysis among members (Stark, 2019: 139). These contradictions, and the unevenness of member buy-in, do not weaken the counter-hegemonic project but rather define it. Counter-hegemonic work is necessarily partial, contested, and embedded in power. The systems CTU seeks to confront—white supremacy, anti-Blackness, capitalism, colonialism, heteropatriarchy—are also present within the union itself, necessitating continuous reflexivity, accountability, and internal transformation. In this context, political education, coalition work, and the fragile process of building internal alignment are essential components of the organizing process. The task is not to resolve contradictions, but to deepen the counter-hegemonic struggle by engaging them directly as the terrain through which transformative politics must be built. How these tensions are navigated across ideologies, communities, and geographies will shape not only the strategic direction of CTU but the broader spatial terrain of labor-based counter-hegemonic politics in Chicago and beyond.
Beyond internal tensions, CTU's post-strike strategy reflected a growing recognition that without access to institutional power, even the best-organized movements could be blocked from securing lasting change. This realization set the stage for a strategic pivot towards electoral politics, culminating in the successful 2023 mayoral campaign of Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher, CTU organizer, and county commissioner. The transition from movement to governance has been fraught, marked by fiscal constraint, media hostility, and growing public disillusionment, including among the Black, Latinx, and working-class communities most central to Johnson's campaign. These tensions underscore the frictions between movement vision and administrative compromise.
Yet despite these contradictions, CTU has continued to expand the common good project through its most recent contract campaign. CTU's 2025 contract, ratified in April and achieved without a strike, includes increased investment in community-driven school models like Sustainable Community Schools, a green schools initiative, and increased affordable housing support for CPS families. In the wake of the 2019 strike, CTU also played a key role in advancing legislation to transition Chicago to a fully elected school board. These moves mark a continued effort to extend the counter-hegemonic project beyond the realm of bargaining, even as the terrain of institutional politics remains deeply uneven. That this project endures is not evidence of its failure, but of its survival.
Like hegemonic ones, counter-hegemonic projects are partial, provisional, and made in and through contradiction. The work of building a spatial counter-hegemonic project in Chicago will continue to be a contested and ongoing political process. Reflecting on the uphill battle that CORE continues to face around their strategy and vision, both internally and externally, one organizer reflected, “Sometimes I think it is crazy that we even still exist, you know. In many ways it is unbelievable that the current leadership of CTU have held onto power for so long and that our program has spread so far and wide. That's very motivating for me, that perspective, and I have some hope about where things can continue to go … because kids still don't have the schools Chicago students deserve, the schools we've been fighting for. We are closer to that vision, but it's not there yet … so the struggle continues.”
Conclusion
Teacher organizing led by CTU constitutes an ongoing counter-hegemonic project that intervenes in the spatial politics of education and urban life in the city. The 2019 strike, when understood in the longer trajectory of CTU's organizing, offers a window into this spatial counter-hegemony. Through protest routes that linked disinvested neighborhoods to sites of elite decision-making, art practices that materialized a shared political vision, and popular education practices that challenged dominant narratives, CTU's organizing reconfigured public understandings of both education and the city. In this way, the strike involved not just a fight over working conditions or education policy, but a struggle over the material, symbolic, and imaginative geographies of the city. Building on Gramsci and recent spatial reinterpretations of counter-hegemony, I have argued that CTU's organizing aimed to reconfigure the relationship between education and urban development in Chicago. The union contested dominant narratives of schooling while also disrupting the spatial logics through which public education has been tethered to austerity, real estate development, and racialized disinvestment. Against these logics, CTU articulated a vision of schools as collective infrastructures of care and educators as key political actors in shaping urban futures. Even amid constraints, internal dissent, and unmet demands, the strike carved out a different urban imaginary grounded in care, redistribution, and collective life.
This article contributes to scholarship on teacher unionism, labor geography, and urban social movements by foregrounding the spatial dimensions of counter-hegemonic struggle. While educator-led social justice unionism and bargaining for the common good have been widely discussed, their spatial operations have received less explicit attention, particularly in terms of how organizing strategies function through space and how space itself becomes a terrain of both constraint and possibility. My analysis demonstrates that spatial practices and critique have been central to CTU's organizing, and that spatial strategy is critical if short-term protest is to contribute to longer-term counter-hegemonic transformation. The power of bargaining for the common good lies not only in expanded demands and solidarities, but in the articulation of a counter-spatial imaginary that links education to broader urban struggles. For scholars, organizers, and other education justice practitioners, attending more explicitly to the role of space in both strategy and analysis can help illuminate how protest routes, political education, coalitional organizing, and the reimagining of schools as infrastructures of collective care work to spatially reshape urban life. As struggles over public education and urban governance continue to intensify, the spatial dimensions of organizing will remain a critical terrain for analysis and action.
As CTU's experience demonstrates, counter-hegemony is not a singular victory, but a spatial-political practice made through protest, solidarity, pedagogy, and ongoing struggle. The 2019 strike should thus be read not as an isolated rupture, but as part of a longer conjunctural struggle to reconfigure the relationship between education, urban governance, and spatial justice in Chicago. While provisional and contested, CTU's project reveals what counter-hegemonic work entails: collective, situated, and sustained struggle to imagine and inhabit a different kind of city. It offers a case for how organized labor can challenge neoliberal reforms and austerity alongside the spatial regimes that sustain them. It shows how educators, as political actors, can help reimagine what cities are for—and who they can belong to.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Vinay Gidwani, Richa Nagar, Julie Santella, Kate Derickson, and Karen Ho for constructive comments on early articulations of this research. I’m also grateful to the Political Geography Specialty Group Early Career Workshop for providing a space to workshop the manuscript, and to Lindsay Naylor, Alex Liebman, and Yannis-Adam Allouache for their thoughtful dialogue and feedback. Thanks to Bri Markoff, Candace Moore, and Samuela Mouzaoir for their comments on the revised draft. Finally, I thank Charmaine Chua and the two anonymous reviewers for a truly generative review process.
Ethical considerations
The University of Minnesota's Institutional Review Board reviewed this research for ethical approval and assigned a determination of Not Human research (STUDY00006166).
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Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Data availability statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article.