The Chicago Teachers Union has become recognized as vibrant, democratic, and militant in a country where many unions are more likely to be engaged in the organizational equivalent of curling up into the fetal position. Unions have been battered by decades of attacks from big business and both political parties, yet they’ve been largely unwilling to remake themselves into key players in a broader social movement nor to educate and empower their membership.

But more attention has been paid to the union’s recent struggles than how the CTU became the kind of union that it is — one that could take on the right flank of the Democratic Party and free market reformers, go on strike when such a tactic was largely seen as alienating and counterproductive, and lead a movement for educational justice alongside parents and community members in a city long known as an incubator for neoliberal education reform. This transformation was accomplished through the rise of a radical rank-and-file caucus — the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE).