Late yesterday evening the delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union voted to accept the CPS’s contract offer that was on the table and the strike is over:
More than 350,000 Chicago public school students returned to class this morning after union officials overwhelmingly called off a seven-day teachers strike.
Sixteen-year-old Jayton Howard, on his way to Paul Robeson High School on the South Side, summed up his feelings in a word: “Great.â€
Parents were happy too. Some expressed hope that the new contract will benefit students in a district grappling with high dropout rates and poor performance.
“They’ll win from the strike,†said Leslie Sabbs-Kizer, whose children attend elementary school.
Delegates for the Chicago Teachers Union voted Tuesday to call off the strike, paving the way for CTU’s entire membership to approve a contract in the coming weeks that will secure them a double-digit salary increase over the next three years, including raises for cost of living while maintaining other increases for experience and advanced education.
Now comes the hard part: paying for what’s been agreed upon. The CPS is already broke. My intuition is that it will be much, much harder to give the teachers their average 17% raise than either they, the CPS, or Mayor Emanuel thinks.
What has been rejected from the new contract is most of the reform measures the CPS tried to put through have been rejected. They may have been misguided but where does that leave us? With a school system from which almost 50% of the students do not graduate on time and frequently come out having only notional reading and math skills. Only 8% of graduates from the Chicago Public Schools go on to a four year college degree. The CPS is quite obviously seriously in need of reform.
Analysts are quickly pointing to winners and losers. Here’s my pick for the biggest loser: Emanuel. He has not emerged from this whole brouhaha looking like a prudent steward of the city’s affairs. Another pick: the city’s taxpayers. It’s pretty obvious that they had no advocate in this dispute.
To me the biggest losers in this strike are the taxpayers and parents. The former is who will have to pony up the extra money, if that is possible, to pay for these teacher’s demands. And, the parents will continue to deal with a sub par education for their children.
It makes my skin crawl when I hear these educational hypocrites using the meme, “We’re doing this for the children.” The whole system has become a self-serving one, with the children being used as nothing more than pawns to manipulate sympathies towards outcomes only good for the teachers. I have seen no improvement, from any teacher strikes, in reducing the percentage of drop-outs, raising test scores, or the number of students moving on to higher education.
The CPS is quite obviously seriously in need of reform.
You want better outcomes? Don’t fire the teachers, fire the students. get better students and you will get better outcomes.
Actually, fire the teachers, too, and use the money to bring in better students to be taught by cheapie replacement teachers.
It’s pretty obvious that [the taxpayers] had no advocate in this dispute.
Well DUH.
@Icepick
Get better students and you will get better outcomes.
I think you may be right. Being a student is a job Americans will not do. More undocumented students are needed.
That wasn’t exactly what I meant TB, but okay! Between China and India they’ve probably got over 400,000,000 in the top 14% cognitively. (Those would be people ~1 whole standard deviation above an IQ score of 100, meaning none of them would be below ~116 on the IQ scale.) Assume about a third of those folks are children. Let’s import THOSE folks, even their parents. Flood the zone in the inner cities and other under-performing areas and we’ll see what happens.
….
Seriously, I’ve been on this kick (better students for improved results) for a long time. Here locally for a long time the best public high school was Winter Park High School. Even in the 1980s, long after federally ordered desegregation of Orange County schools, WPHS was very white. You were far more likely to find an east Asian* on campus than a black kid. On the other hand, Maynard Evans High School, here in Pine Hills, had a much larger share of kids being imported from the black parts of town, as well as lots of rednecks. Evans did not have the reputation WPHS did, needless to say. The traditional black HS, Jones, was even worse.**
I remember hearing about how great WPHS teachers were back then, and I though, “Suuuurrrrreee they are.” Actually, they probably were on the average much better than teachers elsewhere in the county. It was THE plum assignment, with lots of children from well-to-do families. Winter Park had a high concentration of such families at the time, and even those families that didn’t live in the zone did what they could to get their children placed there. That’s one of the advantages of having money, but especially of having social capital – you know how to game the system in ways other families don’t know.***
But even then I knew that if you took the WPHS teachers and put them in Evans, or even Jones, and took the teachers from those other schools and put them in WPHS, you’d see very little difference in school scores and student achievement two years down the line. Better teachers can help, but teaching ought to be thought of more as a craft than a profession. Not every student can get the best teachers, and we need to think about all the average teachers out there, as well as the below average teachers.
Seriously, there’s been so much BS flung about over education in this country since long before ANY of us was born that I just don’t buy much of the rhetoric I hear from any side any more. After reading Grant’s Memoirs I was ready to ditch the entire public school concept.
* Back then that meant Vietnamese refugees children, mostly.
** Don’t care why you think children from poor black families do worse than others academically, but it is a simple fact that on average they do much worse.
*** Which is why I don’t have any patience for the story of Mitt’s struggles. Sure, he gave away the family fortune. But he didn’t give away all the social capital he had, he didn’t give away the education, or the connections, or the upbringing, et cetera. I’ve got no patience for the “Poor Barack” crap either. Even when his mother was struggling he was still coming from a family with a fair amount of social (and other) capital.
@icepick, I largely agree about the teachers, and your comment reminds that I probably should have self-disclosed that my kids attend a public school system that remains under a federal desgregation order. All of the schools have fairly similar socio-economic mix, but performance outcomes show variances that are not related to the wealthiest areas of town. Parental involvement seems to be a fairly significant factor to me, which requires a certain level of economic stability, but I also see good principles working with the parents and able to hire their own teachers. (I think the union contract gives other teachers an opportunity to apply with preferance, but I think ultimately the principal can veto it)
@Icepick
Busing was supposed to be a way to flood the zone, but people who can afford to move will move. The people at the lower end cannot move. I always thought the same thing about the “good” teachers being in the “good”schools.
Today’s school system prepares children for a manufacturing based economy, but the factories are gone. The schools need to evolve and prepare children for a knowledge based economy. The three R’s are still important, but rote knowledge can be found with through google.
I agree with the social capital.
You educate the population you have, not the population that you wish you had. What’s the alternative? Do you see yourself as Snake Plissken in some sort of Escape from New York scenario?
Snake Plissken?
I thought he was dead.
I thought he was dead.
Nice!
You educate the population you have, not the population that you wish you had.
That’s crap. There are parts of Orlando I can’t function in these days because no one there speaks English and I don’t speak Spanish. The population has been changed radically since the time I was in junior high school. (I can only remember three Hispanic students from my years in the public school system, and one of them was Colombian.) That didn’t just happen, decisions were made and policies were implemented. No reason other changes can’t be made, no reason other policies can’t be implemented.
As for your Plissken reference, I have no idea what you mean by that. I do know the movie and the character, I just have no idea what your point is.