The Chicago Teachers Union announced that it would begin a strike on Thursday.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot is paying the price for years of neglect under Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Mayor Richard Daley.
Teachers in Chicago announced Wednesday evening that they would go on strike, forcing the cancellation of classes for more than 300,000 public school students in the nation’s third-largest district starting Thursday.
The strike threatened to upend life in the city, as parents raced to make arrangements for child care and as city officials began to activate a contingency plan for supervising and feeding students in school buildings.
The strike in Chicago is the latest in a string of more than a dozen major walkouts by teachers across the country since early last year. It is an important early test for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who was elected this year after a campaign in which she called for more nurses and social workers in the city’s schools — some of the very changes Chicago’s teachers are seeking now.
The city and the Chicago Teachers Union, which represents more than 20,000 educators, had been in tense contract negotiations for months, and there had been signs of progress in recent days. But as a midnight deadline approached on Wednesday with no deal, Ms. Lightfoot canceled Thursday classes and both sides signaled that a walkout was inevitable.
The split between the city and the union stretches beyond traditional debates over pay and benefits, though representatives for each side disputed details of what had been offered during negotiations and what the exact points of contention were now.
The city said that it has offered teachers pay raises totaling 16 percent over a five-year contract, while union leaders have called for increases of 15 percent over a shorter three-year term. More pressing, union leaders say, are their calls for a promise — in writing — of smaller class sizes, more paid time to prepare lessons and the hiring of more school nurses, social workers, librarians and counselors. Other issues, including affordable housing provisions and protections for immigrant students, have also been raised.
The strike is the first for Chicago’s school system since 2012, when teachers walked out for seven days as part of a defining battle with the city’s previous administration.
About 7,500 school support employees represented by a different union also rejected a contract offer and planned to go on strike Thursday. Those workers include security officers, bus aides, custodians and special education classroom assistants.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One strike is not enough. Every public school teacher in the country should walk out and refuse to return until DeVos is gone, and Charter and Voucher schools are cut off from public money.
And the federal standardized testing mandate and the Common Bore are ended, having been booed and laughed off the national stage.
Absolutely. I’ve been saying this for years.
imagine
On another note, Mercedes Schneider has a new post up on her blog about a recent piece in which Mike Petrilli, of the Fordham Institute for School Privatization and the Coring of US Curricula, argues that the testing and the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list of “standards” have improved things considerably and that we should “stay the course.” This is nonsense, of course, because all the billions spent on this crap (and on VAM and school grading) and all the test preppy distortion of US curricula and pedagogy hasn’t closed achievement gaps and hasn’t, by the deformers’ own measures, test scores, improved outcomes.
Here are average NAEP scale scores over time. Despite decades of the standards and testing occupation of US K-12 schools, NAEP scores have remained, in all areas, at all grade levels, across all this time, essentially flat. The testing and standards Deform Movement has been an abject failure. NCLB became law in 2002, Race to the Top in 2004, ESSA in 2015. These, and all the damage they did, changed nothing significant. But they did make an utter mess of our schools in many ways that these figures don’t reflect.
Give it up, Mike. Testing and the Common [sic] Core [sic] are utter failures. Everyone else” these vampires are sucking the lifeblood out of our schools. Put a stake in them.
Grade 4 Reading
1998 215
2005 219
2011 221
2017 222
Grade 8 Reading
1998 263
2005 262
2011 265
2017 267
Grade 12 Reading
1998 290
2005 286
2011 288
2017 287
Grade 4 Math
2000 226
2005 238
2011 241
2017 240
Grade 8 Math
2000 273
2005 279
2011 284
2017 283
Grade 12 Math
2000 na
2005 158
2011 153
2017 152
Reply
Wow! What did we get for our billions? For Core-ing all of our textbooks? For our trillions of data walls and data chats? Well, lets look at the outcomes, in Grade 12. In reading, movement from an average scaled score of 290 to one of 297, in math, from 158 to 152.
With results like these, we should be . . . laughing, if this all hadn’t been so damaging for our kids.
So, why is Petrilli writing pieces to defend the indefensible? Must be time for Gates to write Fordham another big check.
Don’t people argue that grade 12 scores aren’t meaningful (because students don’t take the test seriously or something to that effect)? I thought I recalled Diane arguing that here on this blog, but I could be mistaken.
I don’t put much stock in 12th grade NAEP scores. I pay attention to 4th and 8th grade scores. Like all standardized tests, NAEP scores reflect family income and education.
Look at the other grade levels, too, FLERP. They are ALL flat.
But to your point, yes. I’ve seen some 12th-graders do that on standardized tests that weren’t make or break for them.
This may have been what I was thinking of.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2010/11/12th_grade_naep_scores_are_mea.html
Just from the Hawthorne Effect–from paying attention to testing and the puerile Gates/Coleman bullet list all the time, over all those years–you would expect SOME improvement, unless, of course, the testing and the moronic “standards” lists were, themselves, extremely damaging, which any sane person can see, daily, on the ground, in classrooms across the United States.
cx: all the billions . . . haven’t
About the strikes: these strikes are teachers teaching. Other workers in the US need to learn from them.
Go CTU!
I support the CTU. Striking seems to be the only way to get politicians’ attention.
Wish teachers in Indiana would get the fortitude to strike. They are grumbling but nothing ever happens. The GOP who has tight control of this state has earned some well earned kicks in the __________. [Wherever you want to put it. ] More money was given to charter schools for this year’s budget and next year’s than was give to public K-12 schools.
Chicago is a mess whether we are talking about their societal woes, shootings and other ill hardships the ole windy city is going through times many of us never thought we would witness. Now the educational system is broken again and what does the new mayor do? She creates a strike. She easily could have avoided the strike and start a fresh relationship between the city and families, teachers and the union.
But no what we have here is a city in complete dire times no doubt fueled by the people who live there now vs the people who use to live there.