This October, after twenty-two months of strained negotiations with Chicago Public Schools, the Chicago Teachers Union made a last-minute deal to settle their contract and avert a strike. While stalled contract talks were the immediate cause of the threatened work stoppage, there is a larger reason educators in the country’s third-largest school district once again authorized a strike: austerity.

Already reeling from school closures, mass layoffs, and the elimination of school services and programs, the CTU once again drew a line in the sand this year against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s cohort of neoliberal privatizers.

While the CTU’s fight against austerity in K-12 schools has rightly generated national attention, public education at all levels is now a key battleground. Of the 59 percent of CPS graduates who go on to a four-year college, almost three-quarters wind up at an Illinois public university. There, they confront the same pattern of budget cuts that they endured from kindergarten through twelfth grade. But they’re beginning to see the same spirit in their college instructors that they saw in their CPS teachers.