While Chicago communities try to figure out what it will mean if their schools are closed, a different debate is brewing in Mexico. Last week, the leader of Mexico’s teachers’ union—one of the most powerful in all of Latin America—was arrested on charges of embezzling millions of dollars in union funds. Her arrest came just after a set of sweeping education reforms aimed at breaking the union’s powerful hold on public education in Mexico. John Ackerman, a law professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and columnist at La Jornada newspaper and Proceso magazine as well as a frequent contributor to US media, explains what this means for the future of the union and Mexico’s education system in general.