The Chicago Public School Teachers Demand 30% Raise

[Danzig]

Originally Posted by jms62

The upside to this strike is no one was shot at a Chicago school this week. I am forcing myself to not be such a pessimist.

see, there's always a bright side.

i read earlier that one of the teachers' complaints is on test scores being used as a measure of a teachers work. they don't like that. but, how else do they think we can make sure who the good vs the bad teachers are? and there are bad ones out there. there has to be a way to judge teaching ability-i wonder what they would suggest?

[dellinger63]

Originally Posted by Danzig

see, there's always a bright side.

i read earlier that one of the teachers' complaints is on test scores being used as a measure of a teachers work. they don't like that. but, how else do they think we can make sure who the good vs the bad teachers are? and there are bad ones out there. there has to be a way to judge teaching ability-i wonder what they would suggest?

Apparantly testing and wages have been agreed to. The fight is over how much power individual principals will have hiring and firing. The union wants them to have none.

Meanwhile the city's public charter schools are in session and far out performing the rest. Their teachers coincidently are not part of the union.

The real issue is half of Chicago's schools are far from capacity. Emanuel wants to consolidate and shut down failing schools (up to 100 has been a number put out there) and the union is concerned about losing jobs.

They (the union not teachers) could give a f'k about the students.

[GBBob]

Originally Posted by dellinger63

Apparantly testing and wages have been agreed to. The fight is over how much power individual principals will have hiring and firing. The union wants them to have none.

Meanwhile the city's public charter schools are in session and far out performing the rest. Their teachers coincidently are not part of the union.

The real issue is half of Chicago's schools are far from capacity. Emanuel wants to consolidate and shut down failing schools (up to 100 has been a number put out there) and the union is concerned about losing jobs.

They (the union not teachers) could give a f'k about the students.

That's not what I read in the ST yesterday Steve...said despite all the deregulations etc there performance is no better than public schools. I'll try and find article later.

[dellinger63]

Originally Posted by GBBob

That's not what I read in the ST yesterday Steve...said despite all the deregulations etc there performance is no better than public schools. I'll try and find article later.

I didn't get to the ST yesterday but found this study of 2011 comparing 4th and 8th grade reading and math tests however it only considered low income children and is from a libertarian site.

This suggests you can take a poor, underperforming African-American or Latino child from a traditional public school and put him in a charter school, where he has the chance to improve or thrive educationally.

Because charter schools are free of the restrictions on teacher hiring, firing and evaluations that hamstring Chicago's traditional public schools, they recruit and retain demonstrably better educators. This is not to say there are no good teachers in traditional public schools–far from it. But it does suggest strongly that the inflexibility and high cost of unionized public school teachers does not help in educating students well. That is, of course, everyone's goal with taxpayer-financed, government-provided education, right?

http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-li...arter-schools/