About This MemoirIn 2017, while still president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis began work on I Didn’t Come Here to Lie, writing drafts of her life story. The process changed, though, after she had a stroke that October. Coauthor Elizabeth Todd-Breland and editor Jill Petty sat with Lewis for more than a dozen recorded conversations — at her office, at her Bronzeville home, at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab as she recovered from her stroke. And when the brain cancer Lewis had been diagnosed with in 2014 returned in 2018, they met at Whitehall, a skilled nursing facility in Deerfield where she stayed following surgery. After Lewis died in 2021, at the age of 67, Todd-Breland made use of personal accounts in Lewis’s speeches and writings to complete the memoir.

In 2008, I got a call telling me that Jesse Sharkey was involved in starting a progressive caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union. I had met Jesse when I was on the advisory board for past CTU President Debbie Lynch. We both worked at North Side high schools — Jesse was a social studies teacher at Senn, I taught chemistry at Lane Tech. What I liked about Jesse was that he was smart but not arrogant. I appreciated his ability to put a sharp point on an argument and to press an issue to a logical conclusion. He knew a lot about stuff I didn’t know anything about. People always called me a socialist, and I would ask Jesse, “Am I a socialist?” And Jesse would say, “You might be like the European socialists, like a democratic socialist.” I learned a lot from Jesse. 

Jesse had put up a massive resistance to the takeover of Senn by the military in 2004. The Chicago Board of Education wanted to put in a naval academy there as a pipeline for students to the navy. With the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a strong antiwar movement by teachers, parents, and community members, who fought back against the plan. Jesse was a leader in that. Ultimately, the board of education put the program in, but Jesse’s willingness and ability to fight made me want to do better work in organizing my building. 

So when Debby Pope, a mutual friend, told me Jesse was involved in a new caucus, I was intrigued. Debby asked whether I would come to a meeting. I agreed, and one muggy day that April, my husband, John, and I walked up three flights of creaky stairs to Casa Aztlan — an important center for Mexican arts, culture, and community in Pilsen. It wasn’t a big group there, but there were some familiar faces: the more radical members of the PACT (Pro-Active Chicago Teachers) caucus, which had been in power until losing a reelection bid in 2004, and a coterie of young, earnest-looking folks. With their new caucus, they wanted to center the needs of students, parents, and community organizations that worked with young people.

By the end of the meeting, we had homework assignments. That really caught me. It was a book club too, and I’m such a nerd. We read Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which is about how capitalism exploits catastrophes of nature and war to push privatization and profit, to the detriment of those most impacted by the disasters. It changed my life. During my preparation to teach, I had read Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Between that and Shock Doctrine, I was able to connect the dots between the so-called school reformers of the day and the Wall Street fat cats ushering in a new golden age of robber barons that was devastating our schools and communities. We read articles by Pauline Lipman, a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago who studied the effects of these reforms. She denounced the much-touted Renaissance 2010 plan — announced by Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago Public Schools in 2004 — as nothing more than a real estate plan concocted by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an elite group of corporate executives with an outsize influence on public policy. 

Renaissance 2010 outlined the opening of 100 schools, mostly charter and contract schools, and the closure or “turnaround” of existing schools deemed to be failing. When a school was in turnaround, all staff members, not just the principal, would be fired and have to reapply for their jobs. The charter and privately managed schools were being opened in mainly Black communities that were already experiencing declining enrollment at neighborhood schools. This created competition for a shrinking number of students. The plan also included imposing new models on existing schools, like the military academy at Senn. It was a vast expansion of privatization, “school choice,” and market-based school reform in CPS. 

The ideas behind Renaissance 2010 grew out of approaches already implemented under Paul Vallas, the first CPS CEO whom Daley appointed when he took control of the schools in 1995. Vallas had increased the district’s reliance on standardized testing, used students’ scores to put schools on probation, stifled teachers’ creativity, stripped them of the benefits of their professional expertise by requiring back-to-basics scripted lesson plans, and implemented “reconstitution,” which became “turnaround” under Renaissance 2010. Vallas also ushered in the privatization of public education through the use of private consultants and private management firms and the opening of the first privately managed charter schools in the city. After Vallas left in 2001, Arne Duncan was named CEO. He carried the same neoliberal agenda forward in his oversight of Renaissance 2010 until Barack Obama tapped him to serve as secretary of education in 2008.

Initially I thought Renaissance 2010 was a terrible joke; I didn’t believe it would really happen until I started to see it in action. I wasn’t worried for myself, because I taught at a selective enrollment school that would never close. Yet I knew my sisters and brothers throughout the city were being devastated. Renaissance 2010 led to the closure of more than 100 public schools; it maligned veteran Black teachers, paraprofessionals, and administrators; and it launched many charter, contract, and alternative schools without unionized workforces. 

This destruction needed to be addressed head-on. We wanted our union to testify at board of education meetings and the public hearings. We wanted our union to organize massive protests against these policies. But our appeals were ignored. These deliberate attacks on Black teachers, students, and schools moved along without a coherent response from those in the best position to understand and address the problems. When I started teaching, almost half of CPS teachers were Black. By the time I’d leave the classroom in 2010, less than 30 percent were. 

What all of this meant for those of us who cared about publicly funded, publicly managed education was that we had to move our union in a different direction. When we started meeting as a group in 2008, we weren’t interested in running the CTU. We just wanted a more vigorous response to Renaissance 2010. The stuff we were talking about doing at that meeting in Pilsen reminded me of my student activism days in the 1960s. I felt like I was right back where I started. And then we began doing stuff. Jesse Sharkey, Jackson Potter, Al Ramirez, Kenzo Shibata, Debby Pope, Carol Caref, Stacy Davis Gates, Norine Gutekanst, Jay Rehak, George Schmidt, and other refugees from PACT started showing up at public hearings, announcing ourselves as members of CORE (Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators) while denouncing school closings and charter openings. It was exciting. 

We went to every single charter school opening hearing and every single board of education meeting. According to the board rules, you could only speak in the public portion of the meeting every other month, so we carefully coordinated our speaking with our personal days. Then we started going from school to school to try to get more people involved. I think what resonated most was that we believed in academic freedom and integrity. Teachers felt overwhelmed by unnecessary paperwork and unhelpful directives about what they had to teach and how they had to teach.

It was a hard time for public education. There was this ugly, nasty, just totally foul conversation going on around schools and teachers and our communities. Teachers were fed up, and so were paraprofessionals and clinicians. Something needed to change.

When CORE started, I had no plans to lead, but I was encouraged to run for CTU president. I think people saw that I was smart and had a presence and self-confidence. What I did as a teacher and union leader also required the ability to entertain and engage. I’ve been entertaining myself since I was a little kid. When you’re an only child, which I was until my sister was born, you don’t have a choice. I liked it so much, I was sure I’d be an actress. 

At first, the American Federation of Teachers was very wary of CORE. When we won the 2010 CTU election, AFT President Randi Weingarten and Mark Richard, her right-hand man and counsel, immediately came to Chicago to see who we were. I called Mark “Mr. Wolf” because he reminded me of the Harvey Keitel character in Pulp Fiction. We had a Thai dinner around my dining room table. Mr. Wolf was sizing us up, trying to convince us of his own movement bona fides (“I worked with César Chávez,” etc.), and at the same time trying to figure out if we were going to go on the attack against Randi and the rest of the AFT establishment — if we just wanted to burn the whole place down. But once they realized we weren’t ridiculous, they wanted to work with us. They saw we had a winning strategy and that the other locals could learn something from us. 

My first day of work as CTU president was July 1. The whole month of June had been very difficult for me. I struggled to adjust to the fact that I was leaving behind one of the best jobs I’d ever had, as a high school teacher making a difference in teenagers’ lives. As my husband pulled the car off of Lake Shore Drive at Wacker to take me to the CTU offices in the Merchandise Mart, I started crying and said, “Turn the car around. This is a mistake. I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.” I always felt like I was the least responsible person out of everyone I knew. My husband wouldn’t even let me have a dog because he said I wasn’t not responsible enough. And now I was thrust into this position. John consoled me, saying, “You’ll be fine, baby. Don’t worry.”

I walked into the office of the president, where the most amazing woman sat at a curved peninsula. Audrey May was the executive assistant to all CTU presidents from Jackie Vaughn in 1984 to me (with the exception of Debbie Lynch). She had a lot of institutional knowledge. It was Audrey’s job to protect the president. On my first day, she could see I was flustered and frightened. Audrey was the picture of a professional and poised Black woman. She had been a model in her younger days. She was extremely stylish, very smart, and could be intimidating when she wanted to be. She gave me two folders. “This is your mail, and these are your appointments.” She smiled at me and looked concerned because I’m terrible at hiding my emotions. 

I sat down at my desk, a huge monstrosity that overwhelmed me. Audrey came into my office and handed me a binder that had a very detailed plan to include clergy as community partners. The proposal was for a program called PEACE (Parents, Educators, and Clergy for Education). It was clear she was aware of the work the CORE caucus had done to include parents and community in our advocacy. I flipped through the pages and was thrilled to see the well-thought-out plan. I asked her, “Whose idea is this?” She made a little gasp and timidly said, “Mine.” I looked at her intently and said, “Then you’re in charge!” I thought Audrey was going to start sobbing. 

Audrey May was the guardian at the gate, and she became a dear friend. She was the Keeper of the Schedule, and she never allowed people to abuse my time. She would interrupt a meeting and start tapping her watch — a clear signal that it was time for everyone to go. Later, when I got sick, it was Audrey who checked me into the hospital under a fictitious name.

The racial politics within the union were always extremely present and pressing. When I ran against Marilyn Stewart and the United Progressive Caucus, the group in power at the time, there was this strong notion that a Black woman needed to be CTU president. That was what people were counting on now. But in order for white people to accept me — white teachers and white parents — I had to be smart, I had to be articulate, I had to use the Queen’s English correctly. 

I had always been very adamant about teaching my students not just chemistry but also standard English, because I knew that they would be judged by how they spoke. My students would sometimes tell me, “Hey, Miss Jennings” — or, later, “Mrs. Lewis” — “this ain’t no English class.” I said, “Your whole life is an English class, so you have to be prepared.” I would not let grammar get in their way. Growing up in Hyde Park taught me that. My parents were strict grammarians. They would get on me for saying “ain’t,” which was a word I loved to say.

As CTU president, I also had to be intentional about my appearance in ways I had never had to before. I couldn’t just be out there in public with a fresh-washed face. It just doesn’t work like that for Black women. I’m the laziest dame on the planet — I am so trifling. I just don’t pull things together well. Whenever I’d put makeup on, it was either too much or not enough. I found a woman to do my makeup for my first professional photography piece as CTU president. And I was like, “Damn. I look good.” Eventually, I hired someone to do my makeup on a regular basis. 

There had not been a teachers’ strike since the 19-day-long one Jackie Vaughn led in 1987. During Daley’s tenure, he always found funding to raise teacher salaries. When a new contract would come out, most people wouldn’t read it — they’d go to the back pages to see how much money they were making that year. Since we were getting very good raises, nobody complained. 

As soon as we walked in the door as the new CTU leadership, we received a notice from CPS’s outside counsel that they had a laundry list of givebacks they were demanding. They wanted us to give up our contractually agreed-upon raises or they would lay off 2,000 school workers. They had a whole chart with different ways to make cuts. We reached out to rank-and-file members of the other four CTU caucuses who had run in 2010 to ask them to join us in negotiating a reasonable agreement. Coming off the election, the CTU was still very divided. My goal was to unify factions. 

We also created an organizing department. We did not understand how a labor union could exist without organizers. We were moving the union from a service model to an organizing model to empower rank-and-file teachers to do what was best for kids. As educators, we did not understand how our union could make its arguments without research, so we added a team of researchers. That way, when the district or the mayor made a claim about the budget or some arbitrary policy, we were able to dispute it. Now we would be the ones issuing reports that the board reacted to — not the other way around. 

In the summer of 2010, we walked together 40 strong as a bargaining team to the Holiday Inn across the street from the Merchandise Mart for a meeting with James Franczek, CPS’s outside counsel. It was the first time he had to negotiate with rank-and-file members of our union. The CTU constitution required that, at a minimum, two officers negotiate on behalf of members, but we wanted to demonstrate a different type of elected leadership. So I put as many people as I could on the bargaining team, across caucuses and across bargaining units. I wanted to make sure there were counselors, nurses, substitutes, too. We needed as many of our members as possible to understand that it felt like the board was trying to blackmail us: If we didn’t give back the raises, we knew they were then going to try to blame the layoffs on us. 

We held training for this new bargaining team. We explained how bargaining worked and analyzed the board of education’s demands. We even brought someone in to pretend to be a board lawyer to get members used to how things would go in negotiations. I also trained our team on how to enter and exit the room. I had a signal for when it was time to end the meeting. When I slid my chair back, everyone knew to count to three in their heads, and then we’d all walk out in unison. It was important that we demonstrated a united front because there were attacks coming at us from multiple fronts. 

Soon a new force emerged against us: Rahm Emanuel, who was elected mayor in 2011. He antagonized us from the jump. His entire campaign felt like bashing CPS teachers. It was the same kind of stuff that Bruce Rauner, the Republican multimillionaire private equity manager who later became Illinois governor, would say: that teachers were “virtually illiterate.” It seemed like Rahm wanted to just ham-fist everything. He wanted a longer school day, and he campaigned on it. He also named Juan Rangel as cochair of his campaign. Rangel was CEO of the United Neighborhood Organization charter school network, and we were fighting privatization. So Rahm making Rangel a key adviser was another signal that an all-out attack on the CTU was about to be launched. 

Senate Bill 7 was already in motion even before Rahm took office, but once sworn in, he was able to shove it down our throats. SB7 steamrolled through the Democratic state leadership in Springfield, pushed by powerful lobbyists from Stand for Children and Advance Illinois. It curtailed the union’s ability to protect our members and allowed for evaluation and merit pay of teachers to be based on their students’ test scores, an inherently misguided idea. SB7 made the length of the school day and school year permissive subjects of bargaining, meaning the mayor had the power to change them. And SB7 raised the threshold for teachers to strike — but only for Chicago! — by requiring that the CTU get 75 percent of members to vote for such an action.

There was a clause in the contract negotiated by the previous union administration that gave the board the option to forgo paying raises if CPS didn’t have enough money. And in June 2011, Rahm used that to direct the board — unelected and appointed by the mayor — to rescind the previous 4 percent raise. It was a gambit to make our new so-called radical union administration look incompetent. It had the opposite effect; it really pushed people over the edge. It made our members suspicious of anything the board wanted. There was constant talk of “weasel wording.” 

When Rahm cussed me out in his office in the summer of 2011, I was prepared with what I was going to say and how I was going to be publicly outraged after the fact, because I knew he was going to come at me like that at some point. We were meeting about his plan for a longer school day, which I disagreed with because it was really more of a babysitting plan to warehouse kids. He got upset, pointed his finger at me, and said fuck you to me. I cussed him out right back. I wasn’t going to have us getting off on a foot where he thought he could just say anything he wanted to me. He’d made a huge tactical error because he thought I would keep quiet about his disrespect. Instead, I went right to the press and told them what he had done. He thought I wouldn’t tell anyone because people in power are used to doing stuff in backrooms. I don’t work like that. I said, “Listen, I’ll take my earrings out and put the Vaseline on, and we can go to blows!” And I think that shocked him. With guys like that, with bullies, you always have to put them on blast. If you don’t, they will get away with murder. And they will continue to get away with murder. 

Rahm didn’t want negative attention. What you have to remember is that Rahm is not an ideologue, he’s transactional. If you remember that about him, then you can put all things in perspective. His brother Zeke’s book Brothers Emanuel is very insightful. And you better believe that I read that muthafucka with a fine-tooth comb. Because I was like, I need to better know who I’m up against. That was something my first husband had taught me, back when he encouraged me to read Ayn Rand: Know your enemies. 

Every time Rahm tried something crazy, I’d say, “I’m from Chicago. You’re from Wilmette, buddy. You grew up very differently from the way I grew up.” Someone could look at my résumé and see that I got the best of everything — training, education, exposure — and think I grew up cloistered. But I was grounded by the experience of being raised by Black parents. Black parents don’t take any shit off their kids. But Rahm had no clue. He was just looking at my résumé. 

The disrespect, constant condescending, dismissive tone — none of this helped Rahm at all. I had dinner with him early on, as he was transitioning into the mayor’s office. I was trying to get to know him and build a relationship. It was at dinner that he told me 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. That’s how he saw our kids! Of course, he denied he said any of this when asked by the media.

For decades, the mere memory of past strikes was enough to make the board bargain seriously at the table. By the end of the 2011–12 school year, the state of negotiations — as well as the daily disrespect the board showed educators — demonstrated that these faded memories would no longer suffice. Educators were tired of feeling blamed, bullied, and belittled by the very district that should have been supporting them. It was like we weren’t being heard. And the only way anyone in power talked about improving conditions in schools was to create more charter schools. 

The CTU had issued a report that February: The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve. The report offered 10 recommendations for strengthening neighborhood schools and addressing inequities in the school system. It recommended reducing class size, providing wraparound services for students, and giving greater access to pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten to make sure students got off to a good start. These were educator-backed and proven reforms. 

A lot of people doubted that students and their parents would support us if we decided to strike. I even remember one of our people being upset that data showed the average teacher in CPS made $75,000. She said that our students’ parents don’t make that kind of money, so why would they be sympathetic to us? I countered that we were asking for changes in working conditions that would benefit our students — their children. We weren’t just looking at bread-and-butter issues, we were talking about root causes, and that was different for a union. We invited parents to be a part of our process and give us ideas about what we should bargain for.

In June 2012, we took a historic vote — one many thought we’d never be able to win. More than 90 percent of our members voted, and of those who did, 98 percent voted to strike. Our solidarity made a mockery out of the union-busting SB7 and its 75 percent threshold. The rest of our summer was spent preparing our members for the inevitable: On September 10, Chicago experienced its first teachers’ strike in 25 years. 

One of my proudest moments came during those strike negotiations. Rahm was trying to rush us into settling the contract, but the CTU delegates voted to extend the strike to allow members time to read it. We decided to push it two days because only one would have made the vote fall on Rosh Hashanah. I remember Rahm telling me he could get fifty fucking rabbis to come in and tell us why we should just go do this. I told him it was awful of him to say that. “I’m going to shul, thank you very much,” I said to him. “Now you can take your soul and do whatever you think you need to do with it.” He was furious. 

No contract will be 100 percent perfect, and we had to make some compromises, but our campaign was successful. We maintained our salary schedule, stopped merit pay, and got protections against dramatic health cost increases. We also won gains for students: guarantees that they would have access to textbooks on day one; that CPS would add 600 art, music, and world language positions to provide a well-rounded, enriching education; and that social workers and counselors would have access to private spaces to serve students. In the face of coordinated pushes for privatization, the strike also changed the conversation in Chicago and nationally about public education by advancing issues like class size, funding, facility needs, and working and learning conditions to the forefront. 

When I was a little girl, I used to enjoy the days when I could catch a baseball game with my father. Whenever a player would knock the ball into center field or hit a home run, Dad would often lean over and say, “Wow! He just made a believer out of them!” And that’s what happened when we went on strike for seven days in the fall of 2012. The board did not believe that our members would stand up for what was best for our children. The board did not believe that parents and community members would support us. We made believers out of them. 

Even Jean-Claude Brizard, Rahm’s handpicked CPS CEO, had to acknowledge this. Reflecting on the strike in an interview with the Fordham Institute, he said: “We severely underestimated the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to lead a massive grassroots campaign against our administration. It’s a lesson for all of us in the reform community.” 

Reporters converged on Chicago to share our story. Thousands of dollars poured into our solidarity fund from around the country. People from as far away as Denmark, France, London, and South Africa were asking us how we accomplished so much when we were considered underdogs. Rank-and-file members became the new heroes of the labor movement.  

Adapted with permission from I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education by Karen Lewis and Elizabeth Todd-Breland, published in March 2025 by Haymarket Books.

About This MemoirIn 2017, while still president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis began work on I Didn’t Come Here to Lie, writing drafts of her life story. The process changed, though, after she had a stroke that October. Coauthor Elizabeth Todd-Breland and editor Jill Petty sat with Lewis for more than a dozen recorded conversations — at her office, at her Bronzeville home, at the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab as she recovered from her stroke. And when the brain cancer Lewis had been diagnosed with in 2014 returned in 2018, they met at Whitehall, a skilled nursing facility in Deerfield where she stayed following surgery. After Lewis died in 2021, at the age of 67, Todd-Breland made use of personal accounts in Lewis’s speeches and writings to complete the memoir.