This is an usually thoughtful reprise of the issues and context of the strike.
It pulls together a lot of different threads:
Research about class size; conditions of teaching and learning in Chicago; the ongoing efforts to destroy unions; the poverty level among children in Chicago.
I recommend it.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Made the following comment on Daily Kos:
The author observes: “These are our children. The providence and problem with Chicago’s schools, like public schools in urban areas all throughout this country, is the same, enrollees. Students are a blessing; each is innately eager to learn. Mentally every child comes prepared for education. Indeed, from birth we all crave knowledge. We look. Listen. Think and Learn; our surroundings, parents, people teach us.
Teachers understand this; supposedly the public school system does as well. . .”
But do they? Many teachers are prepared with very worn outdated and ineffectual preparation; primarily for two reasons (a) there certification programs are ineffective and (b) the vast majority of teachers do not actually experience the same conditions as their students. Even when teachers may reflect the populations of theirs students (very often not the case), they often do not even live in the same neighborhoods or communities as their students (not sure about Chicago, but in Minneapolis/St. Paul, nearly 95% of the teachers in urban schools live outside of their districts). This observation is not criticism of this article, but intended to supplement the nature of the problem. For example, the charter school movement and the online education industry exacerbate the problem of distance between students and their educators only making outcomes even worse.
Without recognizing that teachers are ill-prepared and often beleaguered in their classrooms not solely because of the problems of their students, it will always be difficult to convince communities and parents that “good teachers need more and better resources”. Today, the nature of schooling from the point of view of children is that if they are lucky to have that ideal “good teacher” who believes in them, they may get the support they need. However, because such teachers are too few and far between, education remains what amounts to a game of “rolling the dice”. There are entirely too many teachers who will not frame the problems of their students in terms of teacher inadequacy. It is far easier to blame “resources” and corporatist politicians like Rahm Emmanuel. It is easy to do so because it is so frightfully true. But it is not the whole truth. Until teachers recognize that they must question their own competencies and, most important, their assumptions of their students and students’ communities, they will fail at what they are trying to accomplish.
For example, let’s say CTU had gotten all its demands–explicit and implicit–in this last contract. Does anyone really believe that if we eliminate forced, ineffective, and pejorative evaluation of teachers that things like academic disparity will go away? What if Obama all of a sudden actually got his head on straight and began to fund education like he funds the military now (thereby removing the impetus for war and improving the lot of children all at once)? Would all those available resources, with less inappropriate evaluation (and, let’s say a teacher-oriented and directed evaluation system) bring about a different result by holding the competence of teachers–at the moment–as a constant? Some may say yes, but most anyone who is truly an educator would know better.
Malcolm X once noted that you can’t “make a chicken produce a duck egg . . . unless it is a revolutionary chicken”. He was referring to so-called “progressive” politicians, but in other terms, without revolutionizing the educator and her curriculum, revolutionizing the school and the classroom will simply not be enough.
I certainly can agree that the context in which schooling is conducted is paramount, but that context follows the teacher as much as it does the student. We can not really afford to hold teachers as good “by nature” when they are created by design. That design must be addressed and a vibrant united teachers union is indeed an essential ingredient. It simply will not be enough.