Truth-Telling: On Karen Lewis’s “I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education”
Karen Lewis | I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education | Haymarket Books | February 4, 2025
Public education, like all of our public institutions in 2025, is in historic crisis. Donald Trump promised to abolish the Department of Education on the campaign trail, and Elon Musk’s unauthorized and totally unaccountable outfit DOGE is on the precipice of making it happen. This state of affairs didn’t come out of nowhere; decades of right-wing activism from the proliferation of charter schools in disproportionately underserved areas to years of anti-DEI rhetoric putting a target on the backs of teachers and administrators, led to this moment. The 2024 election gave the right a mandate with little in the way of checks and balances, and now they want to make good on their promise of ending public education as we know it.
Over the past several weeks, Chicago has become a locus of this terrifying new normal. Just days after the inauguration, alleged reports of ICE agents trying to enter an elementary school in Chicago went viral. (Those allegations turned out to be false, but ICE has every intention of conducting immigration raids in schools, as Trump border czar Tom Homan insisted on television.) The Trump administration is suing Chicago, alleging that sanctuary laws on the books in the city and the state “obstruct” the enforcement of federal immigration law. It’s easy to understand why Chicago has come under particular fire from the Trump administration: it’s a multiracial city with a large Black population and a history of radical left-wing movements, and the mayor is a prominent progressive who came out of the Chicago Teachers Union. Right-wing and corporate media outlets stoking racist crime panic have painted Chicago as a lawless city full of crime for decades now, shaping the public’s perception of the city. In Chicago, these two great right-wing boogeymen, multiracial cities and public education, converge.
In her memoir, I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education, the late Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis writes about what led her to pursue a life of service in the labor movement and how, under her leadership, the Chicago Teachers Union launched a historic strike in 2012 that changed the trajectory of the American labor movement. In the early 2010s, Democrats faced a choice between two radically different visions for public education: should they try to compete with the likes of Scott Walker and throw their weight behind school choice to sell public schools to the highest bidder, or stand with educators to fight for a robust public education system that invests in children and families?
It’s easy to forget now, but Rahm Emanuel was once a rising star in the Democratic Party. When he was elected in 2011 to his first term as Mayor of Chicago after serving as President Obama’s first Chief of Staff, he was primarily interested in carrying on the privatization agenda of his predecessor, Mayor Richard M. Daley. FOIA records show that, during his first year in office, Emanuel spent virtually all his time with wealthy financiers and out-of-state donors like Bruce Rauner, the private equity billionaire and charter school advocate who was Governor of Illinois from 2014 to 2019, and Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock.
Emanuel was known for his disrespectful and controlling attitude and incessant profanity; he was described in the New Yorker as “feudal.” But he was overconfident in his ability to steamroll his adversaries, and it made him deeply unpopular among his constituents. One of his first major decisions in office was to order the Chicago Public Schools board to cancel a scheduled 4 percent cost-of-living raise for school employees while giving Chicago Public Schools executives raises. This alienated the CTU and immediately put them on the defensive, a bad sign for a new mayor looking to avoid a strike. Lewis writes about meeting with him early on in his term, hoping to build a relationship. It was in this meeting that he told her that “25 percent of kids in our schools were never going to amount to anything and so he wasn’t going to throw resources at them”, a statement Emmanuel later tried denying to the press. Contrast that with Lewis, whose affect, in her memoir, is warm and friendly, and writes like she is sitting right across from you. In her classroom, she would tell her students, “I’m not just going to teach you chemistry. I’m going to teach you life. Because you’re going to need that.” She brings the same ethos to her memoir, and does not hold back from telling you what she really believes. You can tell her students must have loved her, and it is reciprocal.
In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire writes that educators cannot effectively teach without acknowledging the world their students move through: “One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” This ethos reflects Lewis’s approach to her years in CTU leadership. “The fat cats don’t understand what it means to go to school hungry or walk through neighborhoods riddled with violence,” she writes, “Corporate school reformers focus a lot on accountability for teachers and principals. But where is the accountability upwards for the hot mess they create for the rest of us? Who is held accountable for exploiting and destroying neighborhoods?”
CORE, or the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, was founded in 2008 by Lewis and a group of CTU members who wanted to push the union in a direction that would center the needs of students, families and community members over collaboration with Chicago Public Schools administrators. At the time, CPS administrators and Mayor Daley’s administration were invested in Renaissance 2010, a plan to close “underperforming” public schools and replace them with charter and private schools, disproportionately affecting many of the poorest students in the system. The neoliberal education agenda piloted in Chicago was being pushed nationwide, as former Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan had recently been appointed Secretary of Education by President Obama.
CORE members did not originally intend to take over CTU leadership, only to mount a sufficient response to Renaissance 2010. But in 2010 when the then president stepped down, Lewis and CORE had the most coherent message of academic freedom and community building on offer. “Who ever heard of a caucus that wanted to include the needs of students, parents, and community organizations that worked with young people?” Lewis writes. CORE’s appeal was that they were willing to tell the truth about the current political moment. CTU members responded accordingly, and elected Lewis to be their next president.
Lewis, who saw her union organizing through the lens of her commitment to the Black struggle, expounds on her philosophy on what she as an educator and a union leader owes to Chicago students, frequently referring to them as “her” kids. White students make up less than ten percent of Chicago Public Schools students—a little less than half of students are Black, and around the same percentage identify as Hispanic. The school choice agenda of Rahm Emanuel and the right-wing alliance of centrist Democrats and conservative activists would prevent those students from receiving the quality public education they deserve, the same as their white suburban counterparts. Labor agitation and social justice, in this context, are one and the same, and the interests of Chicago teachers were tied up with that of the broader community in which they lived and taught.
The CTU’s historic strike in 2012 inspired Bargaining for the Common Good, an approach to collective bargaining where workers demand reforms at the bargaining table that benefit the community beyond the immediate needs of union members. The lead-up to the strike was the first time in CTU history that rank-and-file union members were present at the bargaining table, and their perspectives, Lewis explains, were rooted in their experiences on the ground as educators and as community members living and working in the same neighborhoods as their students. “The social workers shared how their working conditions did not allow for the privacy to appropriately help their students,” she writes. “Librarians and arts teachers talked about being taken out of their programs to cover classrooms for absent teachers because the board didn’t provide enough substitute teachers. The lawyers looked as if they couldn’t believe a word we were saying.”
Bargaining for the Common Good, in which the interests of workers and of the community are one and the same, requires broad buy-in, and that means deep organizing well beyond the bargaining unit. This also requires trust in community members to understand what you’re fighting for and how your interests overlap. “There’s not a single parent in the city who doesn’t believe that their children should have a smaller class size,” Lewis explains. The CTU prioritized talking to parents about the reforms that would benefit their children, inviting them to contribute their ideas to what should be bargained for in the CTU’s next contract. It paid off; when the union went on strike, they had the support of the community. This would not have been possible without the internal organizing of CORE, which had long-standing relationships with community organizations well before 2012’s contract negotiations began.
Even as the CTU was building strong relationships in the community and creating a base to fight the neoliberal status quo, Emanuel and the CPS board did not expect that they would actually go on strike, believing that the 75 percent threshold to authorize a strike was too high. “There’s something to be said for underestimating your opponents,” Lewis writes. “Bullies take joy in knowing that their acts of cowardice are at the expense of people they see as weaker or inferior to them. Their faith in terror tactics is only shattered when the abused stand up and will take no more.” For seven days, the CTU showed the mayor, the school board, and the world that they were going to fight for their students. And the world was watching.
Over the next decade, a wave of teachers’ strikes erupted across the country, as educators in both red and blue states walked out on the job to protest for better working conditions for themselves and support for their students. These strikes, like that of the Chicago Teachers Union, were for more than the immediate needs of teachers. They struck for smaller class sizes, properly staffed schools, and the funding and resources that would set students up for success. Children, teachers across the country believed, should not be doomed to a failing education because of their socioeconomic circumstances, and poor children had just as much of a right to a quality public education as wealthy children.
Bargaining for the Common Good has ripple effects. Organizing around a vision of economic and social justice for all exposes the root causes of societal ills, and creates broad community buy-in that generates needed reforms. In her youth, Lewis had been skeptical of the burgeoning feminist movement of the 60s and 70s, believing it to be a “middle-class white women’s movement”. It was her time organizing as part of the CTU that she saw firsthand the links between gendered oppression and economic oppression. Less than a quarter of K-12 public school teachers nationwide are men, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. “As a feminized profession,” Lewis writes, “we were both demonized and paternalized by those in power.” The deprofessionalization of teaching pushed by the school choice right has gendered consequences, and the CTU’s historic strike made explicit the links between gender equity in the workplace and economic equity in the neighborhoods students and teachers lived in.
As unions are forced into permanent defense to fight this administration’s full-scale assault on workers’ rights, the Bargaining for the Common Good framework is more important than ever. In a segregated society, unions are some of the only spaces where workers of different races are in regular contact. CORE prioritizes the hiring and retention of Black and brown educators, who are best equipped to serve the diverse community of students and families that make up the Chicago Public Schools system. Ensuring students' proximity to that representation reinforces the belief that teachers and students are part of the same community, and that their interests are aligned with each other.
Lewis’s memoir is bookended by a foreword and afterword written by two Black movement leaders that played a pivotal role in her life: Angela Davis in the foreword, who Lewis had idolized in her youth, and Stacy Davis Gates, one of Lewis’s proteges and the current president of the Chicago Teachers Union. The order is intentional. Davis situates Lewis’s life and work in the Black liberation movement, and contextualizes her legacy in a long line of Black women activists for whom education was at the heart of the struggle. Lewis converted to Judaism in her 30s, and Davis writes about how Lewis’s activism was inspired by her theological commitments to inquiry and social justice. Gates explicates Lewis’s legacy and impact on the next generation of unionists who embrace rank-and-file organizing to win not only better contracts, but true economic justice, in and out of the classroom.
Lewis’s time as a leader in the CTU overlapped with some of the most exciting years for the American left in decades, amidst Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie 2016 campaign. While her campaign for mayor in 2014 was ultimately cut short due to her cancer diagnosis, in 2021, the movement she championed elected one of their own, former teacher and CTU organizer Brandon Johnson. This mayoral appointment came with the understanding that he would bring the movement into the halls of power and reorient the city towards a working-class politics.
Much has changed in the years since Lewis’s passing, and the culture has taken a more reactionary turn. With Donald Trump back in office, the world’s richest man dismantling the federal government, and an administration expressly designed to cater to the whims of billionaires at the expense of civil society, this is a bleak moment for labor. Right now as I write this, the Chicago Teachers Union is in the middle of contentious contract negotiations with the city. For the CTU to go on strike even as its supposed ally sits in the mayor’s office is a strong indication of the union’s power and commitment to Chicago schools, students, and families.