Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups' 404
theodp writes "The striking Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is holding a massive 'Wisconsin-style rally' Saturday as ongoing negotiations try to bring an end to the strike that has put education on hold for 350,000 of the city's schoolchildren. 'The 30,000 teachers, school social workers, clerks, vision and hearing testers, school nurses, teaching assistants, counselors, and other school professionals of the Chicago Teachers Union are standing strong to defend public education from test pushers, privatizers, and a national onslaught of big money interest groups trying to push education back to the days before teachers had unions,' explains the CTU web site. 'Around the country and even the world, our fight is recognized as the front line of resistance to the corporate education agenda.' Some are calling the strike — which has by most accounts centered on salary schedules (CPS salary dataset), teacher performance evaluations, grievance procedures, and which teachers get dibs on new jobs — a push-back to education reform that has possible Presidential election implications. The big winners in the school strike, Bloomberg reports, are the city's largely non-union 100+ charter schools, which remained open throughout the strike. Charter school enrollment swelled to 52,000 students this fall as parents worried by strike rumors sought refuge in schools like those run by the Noble Charter Network, which enjoys the deep-pocket support of many wealthy 'investors.'"
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:2, Interesting)
Nationally, teacher salaries and benefits cost over $500 billion annually. Imagine reducing teacher staffing by 10%, or teacher compensation by 10%, or an equivalent combination. That would free up $50 billion annually for Gates, Broad, Walton, Pearson, etc. Education reform is all about getting this money, period. McSchools are on the way and they will be standardized, popular, and highly profitable - just like the restaurants. Enjoy your future McLearnin', Americans!
I'm not a teacher, I have kids in public schools and I think they suck (the schools), and I think ed reformers are a combination of deluded and evil and making the situation worse year after year after year after year...
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:2, Interesting)
How much is "well?" This argument seems to work no matter how much teachers are paid. My guess is that if teachers were paid a million dollars a year, and were asking for an increase, anyone opposed would be accused of being against good pay for teachers. As the GP said, Chicago teachers are already some of the best paid in the country. 30% is huge. Student outcomes have not increased by 30% over the past two years, so why should teacher pay be increased by that much over the next 2?
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in Canada they'r one of the biggest. The part about this that really irritates me is that they've been getting annual raises about four times the rate of inflation and threatened to strike during a huge budget shortfall at the first mention of pay freezes. A completely classless move. There are very large numbers of people waiting to get into teaching, yet the pay keeps going up. What ever happened to supply and demand? If there's that big a supply, the rate of pay increase (if any) should be at or below the rate of inflation, I think, especially for a public sector position like teaching.
Re:Chicago Teachers Rip 'Big Money Interest Groups (Score:5, Interesting)
I am an employee of the federal government. Not only do I think I shouldn't be able to be in a union I'm not sure if I should be allowed to vote. I realize my salary come from taxing productive members of society. I do believe that my job is constitutional. But if those people that pay my salary decide they no longer want to fund the agency I work for I shouldn't have a vote in the matter.
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know how the Chicago district proposes to measure "teacher performance" but it is possible to measure actual teacher performance. Chicago is a big system over which most teachers' actual performance can be measured:
Compare last year's test scores of the kids who are in each teacher's class with the end-of-term test scores of those same kids to measure their progress. Now compare the progress scores of that class of kids to the average progress of other kids in the district who had similar scores at the end of the previous term. In this way, you remove (to first order) the differences between particular groups of kids. What's left is attributable to other factors, such as performance of the teacher, the classroom, administration, time of day at which the class is taught (yes, I think this makes a difference), etc.
Each teacher teaches several groups of students. A system like this can do a lot of good. They get real, meaningful feedback, probably for the first time ever. It's likely that some teachers will get a great progress score on one class and a bad score on another class. And they may sometimes be very much surprised by the rating. Because they only see how hard or easy it is to teach a class of this kind or that kind of students, not whether it can be done better.
Such a system also should identify top performers by category. Mr. X does a fantastic job with top performers but totally fails teaching slow kids. Mrs. Y does a poor job challenging the really bright kids but is good at helping slow kids catch up. They're both stand-out teachers in particular areas. So have Mr. X help teach other teachers how to work with top performing students and have Mrs. Y teach other teachers how to help the slowest students, deal with troublemakers and motivate slackers. Assign the students that are hard to teach to a group of teachers headed by Mrs. Y. Move the faster students to another group headed by Mr. X.
That at least can work in core subjects like math, science, reading and history, and any subjects where what is being taught is specific facts or skills. But some subjects are hard to evaluate in an objective way. How do you judge the merit the art that students produce? The quality of their music? The validity of their debating points? There's still a lot we don't know how to and maybe can't ever be really measured in education.
Sad (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:They rejected 16% salary increase over 4 years (Score:4, Interesting)
A 16% increase over 4 years works out to be 4% a year, which just happens to be a little lower than the average inflation rate over the last 4 years (yes, it's lower than that at the moment). Which means, in terms of spending power, its just maintaining the status quo.
Meanwhile, for the people actually paying for the teachers, median household income is down 7% in the last 10 years. [usatoday.com]
As for "merit-based" performance metrics, they don't measure the teacher's performance; they measure the students.
"I'm a good teacher, but my work doesn't really do the students any good. Give me a huge raise."
So the students who get the worst teachers, will be:
* Poor students, who don't have access to tutors or other extra curricular methods of learning
The students get such a great education from their government teachers, they need to hire tutors.
* Students with disinterested parents (parental involvements is one the major predictors for academic achievement)
* Students in classes of disruptive people
Obviously, you acknowledge these things are a problem. But rather than solve the problem, you want to make sure it doesn't affect teacher paychecks.
Nevermind the students. The purpose of a government school is to maximize payroll.
Because they are fundamentally wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I think FDR said it best:
"[A] strike of public employees manifests nothing less than an intent on their part to obstruct the operations of government until their demands are satisfied. Such action looking toward the paralysis of government by those who have sworn to support it is unthinkable and intolerable."