After 10 months of negotiations between the Chicago Teachers Union and city officials failed to yield a new contract, teachers took to the streets. More than 29,000 teachers and support staff walked out of classrooms in the nation’s third largest school district on Sept. 10, leaving some 350,000 students idle. “After 15 years of a fixation on testing, closing schools and being poked in the eye by the mayor, teachers finally said, ‘enough was enough,'” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which is the parent organization of the Chicago Teachers Union, told TIME. The strike lasted seven days, and the deal that was struck behind closed doors was viewed largely as a win for the unions. But the fight over teachers’ contacts is anything but over as the same issues debated in Chicago—evaluations, merit pay, tenure and length of the school day—are being hammered out nationwide. “What I think it’s done, more than anything, is change the conversation,” Weingarten said of the showdown in Chicago. “There had been this unholy alliance between some mayors, governors who are dealing with budget cut after budget cut and as a result not wanting to make public education a priority, combined with lots of these so-called reformers who simply want to tell teachers to do more with less, ignore their voice and then blame them when things don’t go how they think they should go.”