This is my analysis of the strike, posted on the website of the New York Review of Books.
Archives for category: Chicago
I was on an NPR show called “To the Point” today, where a panel debated the teachers’ strike. The discussion of the strike begins 24 minutes into the show.
Other panelists included Juan Jose Gonzalez, the Chicago director of Stand for Children, who opposed the union; Timothy Knowles of the University of Chicago, who advised Mayor Rahm Emanuel; Rick Perlstein, author; and me.
It was a spirited discussion, to say the least.
An article that appeared in “In These Times” describes the school where Mayor Rahm Emanuel sends his children. It is the University of Chicago Lab School. President Obama chose it for his girls when he lived in Chicago. Arne Duncan is a graduate.
It is a wonderful progressive school, originally founded by John Dewey. It has small classes, a broad and rich curriculum, wonderful facilities, a beautiful library, seven full-time arts teachers for a student body of 1,700 students, and a lovely campus.
This is from the article:
The conditions at the University of Chicago Lab Schools are dramatically different than those at Chicago Public Schools, which are currently closed with teachers engaged in a high-profile strike. The Lab School has seven full-time art teachers to serve a student population of 1,700. By contrast, only 25% of Chicago’s “neighborhood elementary schools” have both a full-time art and music instructor. The Lab School has three different libraries, while 160 Chicago public elementary schools do not have a library.
“Physical education, world languages, libraries and the arts are not frills. They are an essential piece of a well-rounded education,” wrote University of Chicago Lab School Director David Magill on the school’s website in February 2009.
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis agrees with Magill, and believes what works for Mayor Emanuel’s kids should be a prescription for the rest of the city.
“I’m actually glad that he did [send his kids to Lab School] because it gave me an opportunity to look at how the Lab school functions,” Lewis told Chicago magazine in November 2011. “I thought he gave us a wonderful pathway to seeing what a good education looks like, and I think he’s absolutely right, and so we love that model. We would love to see that model throughout.”
One of the key sticking points in union negotiations is that Emanuel wants to use standardized tests scores to count for 40 percent of the basis of teacher evaluations. Earlier this year, more than 80 researchers from 16 Chicago-area universities signed an open letter to Emanuel, criticizing the use of standardized test scores for this purpose. “The new evaluation system for teachers and principals centers on misconceptions about student growth, with potentially negative impact on the education of Chicago’s children,” they wrote.
CTU claims that nearly 30% of its members could be dismissed within one to two years if the proposed evaluation process is put into effect and has opposed using tests scores as the basis of evaluation. They’re joined in their opposition to using testing in evaulations by Magill.
Writing on the University of Chicago’s Lab School website two years ago, Magill noted, “Measuring outcomes through standardized testing and referring to those results as the evidence of learning and the bottom line is, in my opinion, misguided and, unfortunately, continues to be advocated under a new name and supported by the current [Obama] administration.”
This is a column written for U.S. News and World Report by an experienced journalist.
Yes, she understands what teachers are dealing with.
Thank you, Susan Milligan!
We can’t improve education if we don’t improve the conditions of teaching and learning.
It is hard to read the comments that follow this post or any other.
There are many people who seem to think that teachers are vastly overpaid, greedy, lazy, selfish, and incompetent. You have to wonder, who is going to enter this profession that commands so little respect? Who are these people who think that all teachers who want a decent middle-class standard of living should be fired?
I was on a radio show this morning and one of the eminent panelists said that Mayor Rahm Emanuel should relish the opportunity to fire 6,000 teachers. I don’t understand people who harbor such enmity in their hearts. Do they think it helps kids to fire their teachers? Do they have any evidence for their meanness of spirit as public policy?
Diane Rehm is one of the best interviewers on national radio (WAMU in DC).
I always enjoy being on her show.
I defended the teachers and discussed their aims and the conditions in the Chicago public schools.
On the other side was Rick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute; Andrew Rotherham of Bellwether Partners; and former Mayor Adrian Fenty of D.C.
The three of them versus me. Mayor Fenty would like to see tenure abolished. He blames the unions for all the ills of the schools. He
loves standardized testing. Andy Rotherham says that unions are too powerful even in right to work states. Hess warned that the CTU would make the union movement as irrelevant as the referendum in Wisconsin. All three are rooting for Mayor Rahm to beat back the CTU.
I hope you find time to listen.
This is what the Chicago Teachers Union wants.
The strike is not about pay.
It is about the conditions of teaching and learning.
It is about class size.
It is about curriculum.
It is about evaluating teachers by test scores despite any evidence that it improves education.
It is about social workers for children who need them.
It is about resources and commitment.
It is about making a commitment to give the children of Chicago the kind of education that children in the suburbs routinely get.
The children of Chicago need the same things.
A few weeks ago, the New York Times published an editorial saying that teachers needed more carrots and sticks to make them work harder and produce higher test scores. The assumption is that they are not working hard now (a Gates-Scholastic survey in the spring said the typical teacher works an 11-hour day now); and that waving a bonus in front of them would raise student test scores (even though merit pay has never worked, even with a bonus of $15,000 for doing so); and that the threat of firing might move the needle (even though it is the kids who need to “produce,” and threats don’t produce better education).
Today the Times blames the Chicago teachers’ strike on the teachers and suggests it is all the fault of their leader, Karen Lewis, who is enjoying a power play. He thinks the teachers should accept evaluation based on student scores because everyone else is doing it.
But let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe he didn’t have time to read the research that shows this method is junk science.
Maybe the Times missed the story about the strike having been authorized by more than 90% of the union’s membership.
Maybe the editorialist didn’t hear about classes of more than 40 children.
Maybe he didn’t know about the schools with no art teachers, no library, no social worker.
Maybe he was absent that day.
Jersey Jazzman calls out the conservative pundits who, in an effort to embarrass Chicago teachers,try to show how awful student perormance is in that district and paint it in the worst possible light.
If they are casting stones, you kinda wonder why they don’t throw them at Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley, whose policies determined what happened in the schools.
What they do is akin to blaming the war in Iraq on the soldiers, not the policymakers.
The New York Times has a good debate about the Chicago strike.
Eva Moskowitz and Michael Petrilli take the anti-union view.
Brian Jones, Carol Burris, and Pauline Lipman explain why the teachers’ strike is important in the fight against bad education policies that hurt children and teachers and ruin education.
Just received this:
Kevin Lee commented onSend a Message of Support to Chicago Teachers
I am one of the teachers in Chicago who is on strike. Education is one of those topics on which very few people actually have knowledge, and those who are least knowledgable seem to have the most say (or yell). The number of people with first-hand knowledge who are engaged in the public discourse is depressingly low.
Teaching in an urban school district is not like what most people think. (It certainly is not like the movies — even the documentaries.) Chicago in particular is the most segregated school district in the nation and we have schools in the middle of deeply impoverished neighborhoods. I teach at a high school which is 100% (maybe 99.9%) African-American. Some of our students have very difficult lives.
As teachers, we notice signs when a student is homeless — and we buy clothes for the student. We see students who are pregnant from rape (typically a mother’s boyfriend). For many students, the school lunch is the only meal of the day. And we have a lot of students who aren’t officially homeless, but are bouncing between the couches of relatives and friends and during the school day are worrying about where they are going to sleep that night. I have had the student who is distraught one day in class because a friend was in the hospital from a shooting or killed.
I can’t even remember all the names of students in the school where I teach who have been murdered. The awful thing is that I don’t even consider the school that I work at one of the most impoverished in Chicago. At a school I worked at previously, we would often write down in our records for some of our students the name of the students’ parole officer (parole officers are easier to contact — numbers for parents are frequently disconnected).
But we teach. We teach our subjects and we teach so much more. We use expertise from our educations and our experiences and pour our blood and sweat into the classroom each day. Unlike most jobs, we don’t really get breaks. Unlike most jobs, we take work home, even after a full day of work where we have come early and stayed past quitting time. Unlike most jobs, we buy many of our own supplies. (This past weekend, I bought $50 or classroom supplies so that my students could work on a project. This is on the low end of what many teachers spend.) And unlike most jobs, the most important things of the job are not even part of the job description. We are not rewarded for the true value that we add to our students’ lives.
There are two main issues in our strike. The school district wants to eradicate the lane and step system. They want education and experience to count for nothing. Companies base pay on education and experience, and traditionally schools districts have as well — and for good reason. When you don’t teach, you don’t really see all of the things that an experienced teacher brings to the classroom. Everything looks easy. You don’t see the fight that didn’t occur at all because the experience teacher could see it before it happened and preempt it. You don’t see the student who didn’t misbehave due to subtle nonverbal cues from the teacher. You don’t see how the lesson completely changed from the lesson plan due to a student’s question and the “teachable moment” that arose (the outside observer would hardly be able to tell that the lesson was actually being extemporaneously created — it would look completely planned). Teachers with experience are the pillars of our school community and our neighborhoods. The board of Chicago Public Schools wants to throw away that experience. And somehow, they think educational achievement and degrees are worth nothing in education. I think that this is crazy.
The school board also wants to institute “merit” pay and use “merit” in our evaluations based on test scores. But how do you really measure “merit”? Do rising student test scores measure “merit”? Does this even work for the music teacher of the foreign language teachers whose subject does not even appear on standardized tests? Perhaps. But teachers receive different students every year. How do you account for differences in the students taught from year to year? How do account for students’ home life? The district has some complicated statistical model which supposedly measures the “value added” by a teacher.
But is this valid? In New York, they are trying to do this. But under this model, there have been teachers receiving wildly different numbers in the same year and wildly different numbers from year to year. If the masters of the universe cannot even properly mathematically model the value of a credit default swap on Wall Street, how can they measure the infinitely more complicated contribution that a teacher makes for her/his students in a year? This is not “merit” pay. This is random pay.
I do not want my career based on random numbers and made-up statistical models, and neither do my colleagues. If I wanted a career based on random chance, I would have never entered teaching and have instead played the lottery every day. We have seen too many times numerically illiterate administrators drive education off the rails with “data.”
Ultimately, we teachers want to be treated with dignity and respect. Chicago Public Schools is paying us for our knowledge, our skills, and our expertise. And yet they will hire outside consultants at great cost — consultants who do not know the subjects we teach and who have never set foot in a classroom. These consultants ignore what we teachers say and give great pronouncements and edicts which are expected to follow. I have a doctorate in my subject and almost two decades of teaching experience.
Why is someone who does not know my subject and who has never set foot in a classroom being allowed to dictate what I should or should not teach? The consultants and busybodies on the school board (there is not a single educator in Chicago Public School’s board — most of the members are rich multimillionaire hobbyists and dilettantes and cronies) seem to think that we teachers are the problem and if only we did exactly what they order, then the world would be right. We teachers, with our hard-won educations and our hard-won experiences, we don’t think so.
We teachers are not a monolithic bunch. Our politics don’t agree. We come from a diversity of backgrounds and hold a diversity of viewpoints. But we are united by our classroom experiences and our everyday engagement with the community. The fact that 90% of the teachers in Chicago (98% of those who voted) authorized the current strike should tell you something. We are not motivated by ideology or theory. Sometimes we are motivated by pay. But really, it is the students with whom we share our lives that really motivate us.
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