The Chicago Teachers Strike

First off, I was a member of a public employees union that went on strike. I was a strike captain for my unit, and after the strike I was elected Treasurer of the local chapter.

Now, let’s see about correcting some of the lies being propagated by the M$M.

The basic fact that people need to understand is that no public employees union has ever gone out on strike for a pay raise. People know going in that the pay is lousy compared to the private sector, so they aren’t going through the aggravation and penalties of a strike over pay. The local governments always say that it is about pay and the workers are greedy, but that is to deflect scrutiny from what they are really doing.

The M$M always runs with the lie because the negotiators aren’t allowed to talk to the press about the issues, and all of the major officials of the union are involved in the negotiations. The government has separate people to do their negotiating, so government officials are available to comment about things they are technically not supposed to know until the negotiations are over and there is an agreement to be ratified by both sides.

I have seen ignorant journalists saying that the teachers don’t care about taxpayers. Excuse me, but there is no ’employee discount’ when you work for the government – teachers and all other government workers pay the same taxes at the same rate as everyone else. When someone says “I pay your salary” to a government worker the proper response is “Well, we have that in common.”

We have had the “high-stakes testing” in Florida for years, and it is worthless. This year they had to pretty much ignore it because the company that created the latest test had apparently not bothered to look at the Florida curriculum – the test covered things that aren’t taught in the schools, and ignored things that are emphasized. That’s how things go with the private educational industry.

The teachers want some really ‘extravagant’ things – enough textbooks for all the students, buildings that maintain a constant temperature and don’t leak when it rains, a limit on the maximum number of students in a class, you know, a lot of far out things like that.

What they don’t want is the scheme of evaluation by proxy, using student test scores as a basis for teacher evaluation. School administrators are supposed to be evaluating teachers. If the administrators can’t do their job, get rid of them and find people who can. That’s a management problem. Most of the problems in major school districts are management problems, not teaching problems.

What Rahm Emanuel really wants is to reduce the cost of schools by getting rid of all of the ‘expensive’ senior teachers, and replace them with cheap, new teachers – a plan used by the tech sector. It will probably be combined with a two-tier system so the new teachers will never get the pay and benefits that the experienced teachers now receive – just like the auto industry. It is all about running government like a business.

Of course, the final goal is to privatize education, so the taxpayers can pay more money for less education that enriches scam artists like Michele Rhee.