The editors of the Chicago Tribune wonder what the heck the striking teachers want:
Mayor Lori Lightfoot was going to get a strike no matter what. That’s the undeniable take-away as 300,000 Chicago school children lose crucial instructional time and athletes miss out on their playoff and college scholarship dreams.
Here’s what should infuriate Chicagoans: This strike is about power and relevancy for leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union. It always has been.
How else do you explain this walkout even as Lightfoot continues to offer a generous pay and benefits package while committing to the union’s demands for additional support staff, smaller class sizes and a social worker and nurse in every school? The parameters of those arrangements are in writing. Lightfoot bent to most of CTU’s key demands.
Yet teachers still were marching on sidewalks and street corners Thursday instead of teaching in classrooms. CTU members participated in “civil disobedience training†and planned a rally for Saturday. Union leaders Jesse Sharkey and Stacy Davis Gates in media interviews continued to push the false narrative that Lightfoot was resisting their student-focused contract demands at the bargaining table.
That assertion wasn’t true. But in their group-think hive, teachers are failing at the critical thinking skills they so often request of their students. It should be clear now to everyone that the strike is about nothing more noble than a CTU power grab.
From the get-go Lightfoot has given all she can, arguably more than Chicagoans can afford. Yet the teachers won’t take “yes†for an answer.
Not to mention that Mayor Lightfoot’s offer to the teachers consisted of money she didn’t have. Her proposed budget, as I have pointed out, is a prayer rather than a plan.
An important objective of the strike is and always has been to show Mayor Lightfoot who’s boss while demonstrating enormous disdain for the people of Chicago. As I’ve said before she has been much more conciliatory than I would have been in her position.
Detroit, Newark, Baltimore…
Paul Kersey calls this Black Run America (BRA).
An aspect of the strike I haven’t touched on. 75% of the students in Chicago public schools are non-white. The majority of the teachers in Chicago schools are white. Most retired Chicago teachers are white.
Sadly,this is how diversity works out in practice. Black mayors, police chiefs, white teachers and cops. Prisons full of Black citizens who were told that they could achieve anything but taught nothing. Having only knowledge of criminal ways. The public school system has failed Black Americans and should be abandoned. What they produce academically is actually worse than nothing.