If Jesse Sharkey, the vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, has one regret, it is this: “I wish we had stopped Arne Duncan before he took his show on the road.”

Sharkey sees the seeds of the nationwide “education reform” push in Duncan’s tenure from 2001 to 2008 as the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools. Duncan joined President Barack Obama’s cabinet as education secretary in 2009, a position he held until 2015.

“The strategy of test-based competition and market competition for schools is something which was developed and perfected in Chicago under Duncan,” Sharkey said. “These are the same strategies being used around the country. Duncan claimed the mantle of education reformer, and that enabled him to go national.”

Today, public schools in Chicago are in crisis and a possible teachers’ strike looms, the result of Duncan-era education policies and fiscal mismanagement.

Since July 2015, Chicago teachers have worked without a contract. The city, which funds teacher pensions, has skipped payments for 10 years. Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner, a Republican long hostile to unions, threatened a state takeover of the Chicago Public Schools earlier this year, citing the failure of Mayor Rahm Emanuel to fix the district’s finances.

A push to privatize

Under Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff, 50 public schools have been shuttered and 31 new charters have opened (there are now 130 charter schools operating in the city), and janitorial and other services have been privatized. Both city and state funding has been redirected toward charter schools.

The number of students in Chicago Public Schools has been falling, from more than 426,000 in 1999, to just over 300,000 by 2014. In the same period, charter school enrollment rose from 5,535 to 60,982.

A strike by Chicago teachers in 2012 put the city on notice that the union was ready to fight back. Emanuel laid off 850 school staffers — including 550 teachers — in 2013 to further cut costs, but the school system’s financial crisis only worsened.

At the heart of the problem is the state’s school funding formula. In Illinois, local school districts are funded by local taxes. The state has done little to address the resulting inequities.

According to the Education Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, Illinois is one of 14 states in which school districts with high concentrations of low-income students receive less funding. Chicago borrowed heavily at high interest rates over the years to keep its schools running.

Now Chicago schools are carrying the burden of a $1.1 billion budget shortfall — in addition to a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the pension fund. Gov. Rauner responded by proposing a budget that would have cut teacher pay by 7 percent.

“People are hurting across Illinois while this so-called governor plays chicken with the state budget,” said Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis in an address to the City Club of Chicago in April. Lewis has pushed the city to adopt a plan to raise $502 million in new revenue by increasing taxes.

Demeaning working conditions

Chicago teachers say they are working under conditions that demean students and staff.

It took nine weeks to fix a leaking pipe in Lauren Barry’s classroom in her aging high school building. “The heat turns on when it’s 70 degrees out,” Barry said. “I had an electrical explosion in my classroom. It smelled a bit, but I just kept on going.”

Kristina Ballard teaches high school English and history in a neighborhood that has been struggling with poverty and gang-related violence. The public radio program “This American Life” chronicled the violence surrounding the school in 2013, when 21 students were wounded and eight died from gunfire.

The school of 300 students once had 20 security guards. “We now have six,” said Ballard. The school used to have three social workers; now it has only one who comes in two days a week. Class size can go as high as 38 students, Ballard said. It’s a volatile mix.

“We have a lot of fights, and the neighborhood violence is worse than ever,” Ballard said. She sees the shift to charters and magnet schools as a snub to her and her students. “They don’t respect me because they don’t respect my kids,” she said.

Philip Cantor teaches biology and Advanced Placement psychology at a high school in the Humboldt Park area, where he estimates 96 percent of students come from low-income families. The school, desperately in need of an updated computer system, has had to test students in shifts for those exams requiring computers. His science department also has had to go without new textbooks and lab equipment.

“The overall financial situation in the schools for the past six years has been demoralizing,” he said. “Teachers are being blamed for the financial difficulties of the district.”

Sharkey said there is only one solution to the current impasse: “Be organized and prepared to fight. That’s what the long-term health of the union movement will depend on.”