Schoolmarms of the World UNITE!

So, the Chicago Teachers'  Union has announced that upwards of 90% of its membership voted for the strike authorization, thereby handsomely overcoming the unprecedented 75%+ requirement imposed on us by the (mostly Democratic) Illinois General Assembly and (Democratic) Governor Quinn.  This is a pretty massive slap in the face to Mayor Rahm Emmanuel and Chicago Public School CEO J.C. Buzzard -- oops, ahem, I mean of course, J.C. Brizard.

If you had asked me a year ago, or even a couple of months ago, if I thought there was a chance the union could muster anything close to 3/4 to support such a measure, I would have said: precisely a snowball's chance in hell.  I happily stand corrected.

Part of my pessimism stemmed from the inherent difficulty of getting 75% of any group of people to agree on anything, much less something as momentous as a possible strike.  Teachers are no more unified by nature than other groups, and perhaps slightly less so.  For one thing, there is the El-Hi division, which often manifests itself in the primary school teachers tending towards reluctance to vote for strike measures, while high school teachers always seemed more willing to take the risk.  I don't pretend to understand why this is, and I don't intend to pass judgement either way; I merely observe that in past votes on strike issues, elementary schools tended to vote not to threaten walk-outs.  What this unprecedented 90% vote for strike authorization means to me is that Management (JC Brizard, Rahm and crew), have managed to piss off all the kindergarten and elementary school teachers as well.  That's alot of irate Schoolmarms!

[As a matter of principle and standard operating procedure, I welcome corrections to any errors of fact or interpretation that my Fearless Readers might discover]

My pessimism was entirely justified: the whole point of the Illinois SB7, the law which singled out the Chicago Teachers' Union for the draconian new rules, was to make a teachers' strike in Chicago an impossibility.  One of the prime movers behind the bill, the lobbyist Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children, was quite blunt when he talked to a friendly audience a year ago at the Aspen Ideas Festival, explaining how the new law's effect was "essentially isolating Chicago."  "We'd done our homework -- we knew that the highest threshold of any bargaining unit that had voted...on a contract was 48.3%.  The threshold that we were arguing for was three-quarters, so in effect they couldn't have the ability to strike even though the right was maintained."  So, even though the fiction of a right to strike was maintained, Edelman was convinced that "The unions cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75% threshold."  Imagine his, and Rahm's, surprise this week!  (For the full transcript of Edelman's candid remarks see http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2426)

Gloating aside -- we can't afford to be smug given how the deck is stacked against us -- what depresses me is that this was a Democratic lobbyist talking to mostly other Democrats, gleefully talking about eviscerating the unions and bragging that they would "jam this proposal down their throats the same way pension reform had been jammed down their throats six months earlier [with SB 1946]."  The language is worthy of the reddest-meat, most carnivorous evil bastard union-busting Repubs.  And these are members of the party that Labor sees as its ally?  With friends like that....

Brizard and other management types have recently been making semi-reasonably-sounding noises.  Such as that, while the 30% 'raise' the CTU is demanding is way out of line, teachers probably do deserve something more than the 2% he had initially proposed.  Before you see signs of a conversion on the road to negotiations on the part of Rahm, Brizard & Co, however, bear in mind the following facts as to what comprises this unreasonable 30% 'raise.'

1). 4% is to replace the contractual raise the teachers got (after long years without any raise at all) in the last contract but which was unilaterally taken back ..... That 4% raise did not even recoup the ground we lost in cost-of-living increases over the preceding years.

2). 20% is compensation for increasing our working hours with the much-touted "Full School Day" implementation coming up in the fall. Since we are being mandated to work 20% more hours, we should be paid for it. At least that is how most of us teachers understand how employer-employee relations work: employee is paid (P) a certain amount of money (M) per hour (H) worked. For the algebraically-minded, this works out to

P = H x M

However -- and please forgive my inept History teacher's attempt to give a Math lesson -- it seems that Rahm, JC and friends skipped regular Algebra in school and took instead the Special Management Relativity Algebra class, in which the extended hours (EH) do not conform to any known formula, but instead would look like this

P = (H - EH) x M

This calls to mind the well-known workers' corollary in former communist bloc countries: "We'll pretend to work as long as the government pretends to pay us." If management can change the rules arbitrarily, maybe we teachers can pretend to adhere to them....

3). So, continuing with my (standard) math lesson, here is our 'raise' so far
                             30% (big, bad, scary unreasonable pay 'raise')
                          - 20% (not a raise)
                            - 4% (not a raise)
                              6% (actual pay raise demanded by teachers)

JC loves to do call-in forums and the like to talk to the public about issues affecting Chicago schools, although he never once showed up for one of the face-to-face negotiating sessions with his teachers.  I urge any and all Chicagoans to participate in the next forum.  Phone in or email or text or tweet: every time he talks about the 30% raise we need to call him a liar.

CTU Strike Vote Update

The good news is that it looks like we may meet and even significantly surpass the egregious 76% threshold for the strike vote.  My own school's union reps report that of over 100 staff, all but a couple voted for the authorizaton with only five votes missing -- and those votes are being rounded up, with the union reps going out to deliver and collect ballots to those out sick or on maternity leave.  Other teachers I have talked to reported similar results from around the city. 


This ridiculous 3/4 super-majority requirement is even more draconian than I reported yesterday.  It turns out that for a strike vote to be valid, 76% of the total membership has to vote Yes, not just those able to turn up for the vote.  Non-votes and abstentions are counted as No votes.  So, alone among public unions in Illinois, the CTU must meet a higher standard than any vote in any other circumstance in this country that I know of.


Quick Civics lesson.  In our national political/electoral system, there is only one instance in which a super-majority of 3/4 is required, and that is if you want to amend the US Constitution.  This requires a 3/4 majority of both houses of Congress, plus 3/4 of the states.  Note: 3/4 of those who vote in the House and the Senate, not 3/4 of all members of Congress.  This is as it should be -- it should be hard to change the constitution.  But, does a teachers' strike rise to (or, indeed, above) the standard we require for a change to our entire national governmental system?


Meanwhile, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Jean-Claude Brizard, has launched a blitz of propaganda to scare parents and teachers about this authorization vote.  Spanish language robo calls are going out to Hispanic parents warning that the teachers are out to screw their children.  Yesterday in the middle of the school day -- in the middle of final exams, to be precise -- the PA system in our school announced that teachers should send a student to the main office to collect "an important letter" from JCB to be sent home to parents.  One of his complaints?  That the authorization vote itself, which was over by 8:30 AM and took place away from any classrooms in our school, would cause a "disruption in our children's classrooms that are currently in session."  Oh, the irony….


He also, in a letter to teachers, complained about the union's "misleading representations" and characterized this early vote as "wrong" in that it includes retiring teachers who have no stake in the process and "will not bear the consequences" of a strike.  Misleading....  What he fails to acknowledge is that any new contract will certainly impact pensions -- obviously of critical import to new retirees.  Also conveniently left out of his missive is the fact that a later vote -- say, at the end of August -- will be held when 2,000 CPS teachers who are newly retired but not yet off the union rolls will be difficult to round up for the vote. 


At base, Brizard seems to be brassed off that the teachers are organizing and planning ahead for the beginning of the new school year in August and September.  This is, apparently, very bad.  The fact that the CPS management and its minions in the private sector are supremely organized, busily planning and spending buckets of money and exerting strenuous energy to prepare to fend off a potential strike is okay, however.  Thus the over-arching attitude towards unions in this country.  Management -- whether corporate, or governmental -- does everything in its overwhelming power to prevent strikes by intimidation, propaganda (including ads and commercials), and fixing the rules against labor; in short, by planning and organizing.  Workers, however, as soon as they begin to organize and plan, are demonized as somehow un-American and Communistic, or at the very least as playing unfair and trying to screw over the rest of the country by asserting their rights and demanding justice.  We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.


The students know what is at stake.  They have seen after school programs cut to the bone and have seen Art and Music offerings dwindle to near-nonexistence in some schools.  They know that their softball coaches and debate coaches and volleyball coaches have no money for buses and sometimes even resort to paying umpire fees and meals and snacks and the like out of their own pockets so their kids can compete.  They know that the grandiose “Full Day” extension of the school day threatens to be a time-suck with little to no true enrichment on offer because no new funds are forthcoming (this aside from the fact that the 15-20% increase in mandatory working hours for teachers will be recompensed with an mere 2% overall raise under Brizard’s plan).  Apparently, just keeping us recalcitrant teachers and our charges inside of a school building for another hour or so a day will somehow, by osmosis, improve results.  A very talented young artist at my school named Victor G (he is a Junior, and could easily outshine some syndicated cartoonists) came up with the riposte below.

Stealing Candy from a Baby
Cartoon by Victor G, 11th grader in Chicago Public Schools

I could go on, and perhaps will at a later date.  For now I will leave you, Fearless Reader, with one last symptom of the skewed priorities of CPS and Mayor Rahm.  My high school is part of a nationally-recognized, successful program called AVID.  AVID is designed to help the middling students who are so often neglected and forgotten as teachers focus on the stars and the problem kids.  It fosters academic skills such as note-taking and organization and pushes them to take Honors and AP classes.  And it works, as dozens of studies and my own experience teaching AVID students demonstrate.  It works so well that  my high school – my struggling, forever-on-probation high school – is a demonstration school for AVID.  Folks from all over the city and beyond come to my school to see AVID at work promoting ordinary students' success.  So retaining the program is a no-brainer, right?


Not in Rahm and Jean-Claude land.  CPS has just announced that it will no longer fund AVID and its mission to raise the academic bar for  Chicago high schoolers and provide them with the tools to succeed in college and beyond. 


The official CPS motto promises “Children First.”  First, that is, to be thrown under the fiscal bus.

Hooray for the Red, Red and Red!

I woke up this morning dreading turning on the radio for fear of what the news from Wisconsin would be.  My iPhone helpfully dinged me last night with a NYT update indicating that Walker was ahead in the exit polls, so I was forewarned.  Nevertheless, it comes as a shock that such an unpopular governor could prevail in a recall election that was, at base, not about one evil bastard politician, but about whether we will in the end be a country where ordinary, unrich people have a say or...not.  Make no mistake: Walker  won not because the people of Wisconsin wholeheartedly love him or his policies; he won because the fascists dumped a mountain of money into the race.  The hapless Dems were outspent 30-1, and some two-thirds of that money came from out of state.


When Walker stripped state workers of their unions (yes, they're still breathing, but life support has been yanked and it's just a matter of time), it was part of a long-term plan to ensure Republican dominance in Wisconsin and, indeed, beyond (hence the avalanche of outside dough).  Without the public employee unions, the Dems have no ground game -- it was unions who pounded the pavement and brought folks to the polls.  The Dems will also see their already anemic coffers all but dry up, as unions, again, were their mainstay.  Nobody else -- individuals or groups -- is able to give money in the seven- or eight-digit range to the left.  The right, thanks to 'Citizens United' (how that title rankles!), have an endless supply of cash as long as there are corporations and unimaginably wealthy oligarchs willing to play politics with their bottomless bags of money .


So, the Tea Party/Republican victory in the Wisconsin recall all but ensures that it will become a bastion of the red-meat right for the foreseeable future.  We are all next.


Speaking of which, one of the things I shall do at school this morning is to vote in our own election for the Chicago Teachers Union strike authorization ahead of this summer's round of negotiations over our contract.  Here again, we are playing against a stacked deck since the Illinois General Assembly (Democratic-dominated) and Governor Quinn (D) decided that the CTU -- alone of all unions in the state -- is now required to muster a 75% majority in the case of a strike vote.  If we don't meet that ridiculous super-majority threshold, you can kiss any meaningful negotiations goodbye.


Happy D-Day everybody!

My Blog

I have chosen James Madison as the opening image for this blog.  I've spent part of two weeks at an amazing archaeological dig at Montpelier, his family's plantation/homestead in the Piedmont region of Virginia, close on the town of Orange.  

I had intended a simple portrait of JM culled from the web but stumbled upon the one with the quote on bankers.  This seems to be the season for quoting our more illustrious political leaders of the past (not very many Millard Fillmore missives floating about).  At this very moment, as I proctor one of the seemingly endless standardized tests we have been administering this year in my school, I am wearing a t-shirt with a portrait of Lincoln and the following quote:

Corporations have been enthroned and an 

era of corruption in high places will follow

Turns out that quotation itself as much as its sentiment is in dispute, with some claiming that old Abe never did, and never would have said such a thing.  While I believe the historical jury is still out on the former question(see http://www.ratical.org/corporations/Lincoln.html for an informative discussion of provenance), whether or not Lincoln WOULD have said such a thing is, I contend, not a terribly controversial proposition.  In spite of a law career in which he at times defended corporations (notably railroads), it is fair to say that our 16th president was no great fan or booster of corporatism as such.  He certainly would have been appalled by the prospect of a nation of wage-workers beholden to behemoth corporations for a paycheck, health care benefits, etc...