A news bulletin:
NEWS ADVISORY:
For Immediate Release| ctulocal1.org
CONTACT: Chris Geovanis, 312-329-6250, 312-446-4939 (m), ChrisGeovanis@ctulocal1.org
Wednesday, 6:30 a.m., Dec. 5: Picket lines continue at Acero campuses
Wednesday, 10:00 a.m., Dec. 5: Press conference and rally at Chicago Board of Education, 42 W. Madison. St.
CTU charter educator strike against UNO/Acero enters second day
Picketing continues at 15 UNO/Acero sites, culminating in a rally downtown at the Chicago Board of Education.
CHICAGO—CTU teachers, paraprofessionals and support staff at 15 charter schools run by the Acero charter network formerly known as UNO will enter the second day of their historic strike—the first against a charter operator in U.S. history—starting with 6:30 a.m. picket lines outside of their schools.
Educators will then rally and hold a press conference at the board of education at 10AM to update the press and public on the status of bargaining, in advance of the Chicago Board of Education’s monthly meeting. CTU President Jesse Sharkey will raise strikers’ issues at the CPS board meeting at 10:30 a.m. Those issues include why CPS has allowed the charter operator to stockpile tens of millions of public dollars designated for students’ education instead of investing those funds in classrooms.
Management and the CTU bargaining team remain far apart on critical issues that include: class size, sanctuary school community language in the contract, fair compensation for paraprofessionals, and lower class sizes, which are currently set at 32 students per class—four more than what Chicago Public Schools seeks to meet at district-run schools. CTU members have called those class sizes both outrageous and unsafe for students, particularly children in kindergarten through second grade, where one adult simply does not have the capacity to safely supervise, let alone educate, 32 young children.
Management continues to refuse to include language in the contract that would provide assurances that Acero would follow federal law in providing special education services to students, and refuses to include a commitment in the contract to ensure that its schools operate as sanctuary schools, a virtually no-cost commitment that would provide protection for UNO/Acero’s overwhelmingly Latinx student population.
# # #
The Chicago Teachers Union represents nearly 25,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in schools funded by City of Chicago School District 299, and by extension, the nearly 400,000 students and families they serve. The CTU is an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers and is the third-largest teachers local in the United States. For more information, please visit the CTU website at http://www.ctunet.com.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Somewhere Samuel Gompers is smiling.
LikeLike
Hooray for these teachers and their union! Same issues we fought for in Columbus and elsewhere in the 1970’s. Part of the empetus for privatization was to get away from teacher unionization. Charter teachers striking will be an antedote for that.
Jack Burgess
Former Ex. Dir.
Columbus E.A.
LikeLike
Jack,
The main motive for privatization is to break the union.
LikeLike
Management continues to refuse to include language in the contract that would provide assurances that Acero would follow federal law in providing special education services to students
What’s wrong with this picture?
Teachers at a school have to ask for assurances in their own contract that Federal laws not be violated?
Where is the US Department of Education to enforce the existing laws?
Where is Betsy DeVos?
Where WAS Arne Duncan?(because the flagrant disregard for the law certainly did not start with the Trump administration and was in full swing under Obama)
We have got to an absurd point where neither Republican nor Democratic administrations enforce existing laws (or have any respect for them), which is actually a violation of the oath of office that these people took and of the Constitution.
LikeLike
Major changes in SPED regulations happened under Arne that SPED wonks noticed but was easily missed among all the other reformy noise. One of the key principles of IDEA is that individualized student needs are determined at the school level by a team and written as an Individual Education Plan (IEP). Once an IEP is written, the school cannot refuse to provide IEP services- cost or lack of personnel is not a legal reason to deny meeting a child’s individualized IEP.
In a healthy regulatory environment, when charter schools claim they do not have the capacity to meet a child’s IEP they would be held to account by state & federal DoEds for violating federal regulations.
In 2011, Duncan deregulated Special Education IEP compliance at the federal level. That allowed him to avoid saying explicitly that he was going to ignore system wide IEP violations of IDEA. It also sent a message to every SPED director & charter operator- the only thing we care about are test scores. Don’t meet children’s IEP related service requirements? We’re not going to look. (Duncan did maintain strict regulations for isolation & restraint of students with disabilities.)
Second, he stopped all in-person compliance monitoring at the school system level and changed it to simply monitoring student standardized test scores at state & federal levels. Prior to Duncan, every state had compliance offices with paid, full time education professionals who visited schools regularly. The compliance officers made sure schools were meeting the legal requirements of IEPs. TN had 3 compliance offices across the state.
Duncan was clever in how he eliminated the state compliance offices. He replaced them with parent training centers. The parent centers are valuable places for parents to learn & get help advocating for their child’s rights & protections. But parents of children with IEPs do not have the state & federal regulatory apparatus watching their backs.
As is the case with all corporate Dems, they dupe their base by giving with one hand & taking with the other.
LikeLiked by 1 person
WELL said, a succinct understanding of the Democratic morass: “As is the case with all corporate Dems, they dupe their base by giving with one hand & taking with the other.”
LikeLike
“The chief executive of Acero, Richard L. Rodriguez, earns about $260,000 annually to manage 15 schools, a similar salary to that of Janice K. Jackson, the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools system, which includes over 500 schools.”
I really don’t understand that. I don’t have any problem with him being paid commensurate with his duties but 15 to 500 is a big difference.
It isn’t “performance pay” because the charter company schools perform about as well as Chicago Public Schools on standardized tests.
LikeLike
The idea that these people are getting performance pay is just a joke.
In our society, pay iis certainly not dependent on performance.
Just look at all the Wall Street execs who made millions of dollars driving their companies into the ground with risky and fraudulent actions. Many actually got bonuses for doing so!
The idea that those at the top get paid for performance is a myth (unless by performance one means acting, which many of these people are very good at and deserve Academy Awards for)
LikeLike
If ed reformers are consistent and rational, they shouldn’t object to unions in charters because charters often claim private sector status – if they’re private sector companies then their employees are private sector union members, and ed reformers supposedly support private sector unionizing.
Just one more completely incoherent position in this “movement”.
Someone should ask Democrats for Education Reform exactly what their position is on private sector employees joining unions. Do they support people being permitted to join a union and collectively bargain in the private sector? Then they should support employees of government contractors joining one.
It becomes a REAL dilemma for them as they outsource more and more public functions to private contracts, because then they’re just flat-out opposing labor unions in ALL instances. They’ll have to develop a whole new set of “principles” 🙂
LikeLike
Democrats for education reform should be a question for the current forty candidates for president…..do you support them or do you not support them. It needs to be a litmus test. It needs to be an issue. Trump constantly and mindlessly criticizes the media………teachers you voice their outrage for the media getting by with being to bored to talk about education issues……..especially the moderate sensible media, worried about democrats starting to stand for families.
LikeLike
teachers should voice their outrage and too bored, not to bored……sorry.
LikeLike