Chicago Bled Dry by Striking Teachers’ Unions

[Deberg_1990]

heh



http://www.nationalreview.com/corner...ions-john-fund



The smartest parents in Chicago right now are those whose kids attend charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools. Those institutions don’t employ Chicago’s unionized public-school teachers, who went out on strike this morning for the first time in 25 years.

The coverage of the strike has obscured some basic facts. The money has continued to pour into Chicago’s failing public schools in recent years. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.

The city is being bled dry by the exorbitant benefits packages negotiated by previous elected officials. Teachers pay only 3 percent of their health-care costs and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois in the last five years, a full 71 cents has gone to teacher retirement costs.

But beyond the dollars, the fact is that Chicago schools need a fundamental shakeup — which of course the union is resisting. It is calling for changes in the teacher-evaluation system it just negotiated by making student performance less important.

Small wonder. Just 15 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading and only 56 percent of students who enter their freshman year of high school wind up graduating.

The showdown in Chicago will be a test of just how much clout the public-employee unions wield at a time when the budget pressures they’ve created threaten to break the budgets of America’s major cities.

[patteeu]

Originally Posted by frazod

That's great, except I think the skin color is a bit off.

If frazod sees this, he's going to infract it as racist.

[frazod]

Originally Posted by patteeu

If frazod sees this, he's going to infract it as racist.

Sorry to offend your liberal sensitivities.

[La literatura]

Can we all agree that the salary is not what the teachers are striking for?

[AndChiefs]

Originally Posted by Literature

Can we all agree that the salary is not what the teachers are striking for?

Yep, they're striking to make sure they can't lose their salary. (The 16% raise is just a bonus)

[La literatura]

Originally Posted by AndChiefs

Yep, they're striking to make sure they can't lose their salary. (The 16% raise is just a bonus)

I think many of the teachers found the salary offer quite generous, but would not bend on the standardized test evaluation.

[alnorth]

Originally Posted by AustinChief

BTW.. I am fine with getting rid of testing as an evaluator if you allow teachers to be fired AT WILL. There are plenty of schools in VERY BAD areas that have found their own solutions and one thing that seems to be a common factor is that they hold teachers to high standards and fire them the minute they aren't living up to those standards.

Sounds good to me. Its clear that this strike isn't about pay, its about the teachers not wanting to be held accountable, and in Chicago there are probably more than a few teachers who should be flipping burgers.

If they don't want to be judged objectively by value-added improvement in standardized tests, then the leaders of the school should be able to fire them at will. Think you were fired unfairly because the boss didn't like you? Too bad, get in line with the rest of working america.

[SNR]

Originally Posted by Literature

So we have 20 students take this test. 16 of them don't care. We offer them an incentive to care. We tell the students, "Pick out any Apple product you want under $200. If you improve your test score by X percent, you will get that thing."

And then we tell teacher, "Go about your classes, but your end result is that you will get judged significantly by your students' improvement on the tests. We will examine their improvement in test results, and you will be evaluated accordingly and based on state and national average improvements."

And then we sit back and watch this magic happen.

I'm not up to date on the news regarding this, but I'm pretty sure standardized testing, even through NCLB rules, was not the majority factor in determining if a teacher is good or not.

Standardized testing was used to judge SCHOOLS, which I'm not sure is any better. But either way, using standardized testing as ONE area of criteria to examine is not a big deal. Do you honestly think the local school board would take a teacher teaching in inner city Chicago, see poor standardized test scores, and say, "Well now, this one didn't work out, did he/she? Fire them. We need those scores brought up, damn it!"