What the world is witnessing in Chicago as thousands of teachers, staff and support personnel strike is the emergence of... an ideal rooted in the promise of democracy - one that challenges corrupt neo-liberal practices, such as giving corporations and markets the right to define the purpose and meaning of public education; opposes policies that systemically defund public education by shifting the burden of low tax rates for the rich, and the cost of bloated military expenditures, to teachers and other public servants; and refuses to support educational reforms that debase educational leadership and teaching in order to undermine public education as a bulwark of democracy....

What teachers in Chicago are attempting to tell the American public is that public schools are under attack not because they are failing, but because they are public spheres that keep alive the relationship between learning and the hope of a more equitable, free and just society. Public schools are the DNA of democracy and they are under attack by a political virus that reduces teachers to technicians (or worse) and schools to investment opportunities for the rich, on the one hand, and militarized training centers for low income and poor minority students on the other. The Chicago teachers have taken upon themselves what many other academics in both public and higher education have failed to do. They have been advocating "for education as a public good and critical thinking as perhaps the most important capacity of responsible citizens under a republican form of government"...

Increasingly, what Diane Ravitch calls the "billionaires club" is fostering on the American public a view of education tied to profit margins and the savage Darwinian shark tank logic of the marketplace. As Martha Nussbaum points out, the consequences are costly in ethical and political terms. She writes: "Education based mainly on profitability in the global market [produces] a greedy obtuseness and a technically-trained docility that threaten the very life of democracy itself"....

This fight is not simply about the right of public school teachers to have some control over their working conditions and the quality education they labor to provide daily to their students; it is about the struggle over public education as a public sphere that is fundamental to the survival of democracy. A healthy democratic society, by all vital social and economic measures, is also an educated society and that truism must be understood and embraced as a defense of education as a public good rather than a corporate, privatized and commodified right. This is precisely the message that has emerged from the Chicago teachers strike, one that can serve as a lesson to other educators and citizens who have a vested interest in education as essential to the survival of a democratic society.