This week, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), representing more than 25,000 teachers and the roughly 400,000 students and families they serve, announced their intent to strike and set a deadline of October 17 to reach a deal with the city. In doing so, they build on their 2012 strike that inspired educators across the country — from West Virginia to Oklahoma to Los Angeles — to fight for better wages and health care, professional respect and reasonable class sizes, and desperately needed frontline staff like school nurses, social workers, and librarians.

CTU teachers are also striking for the survival of public-sector institutions and against a bipartisan austerity agenda that, ironically, was incubated in Chicago decades ago. After all, it was “the father of school choice,” Milton Friedman, who founded the Chicago school of economics that spawned generations of neoliberal acolytes like Gary Becker, who infamously reduced schoolchildren and learning to “human capital.”

Over the last thirty years, Chicago-school free-market economics and the ideology of “school choice” has informed the education agendas of both major political parties. During the Bush era, No Child Left Behind used “school choice” and high-stakes standardized testing to justify attacks on public education and scapegoat teachers and their unions. Around the same time, Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore promised to triple the number of charter schools in the country under the rubric of “universal school choice.”