One Big Union!

Rallying in front of, around and on the famous
Picasso sculpture, Phoenix.  Full album here.

There was plenty of bad news here at Chicago Public Schools for teachers at my school and others this introductory week before classes start.  I shall leave the bad news for another essay.  The good news in this first week was the ample evidence of solidarity amongst us teachers, both within my own school, and across the city.  We are ready and willing to confront the powers that be and demand justice for our students and ourselves. 

My Fearless Readers might recall (see posts from June, below)  that towards the end of last year the Chicago Teachers’ Union had called a strike authorization vote, determined to overcome the union-busting requirement of a 75% majority that Mayor He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named imposed on the CTU.  This, our Democratic Mayor accomplished with the help of a fellow Democratic Governor and a Democratic Illinois Assembly. Mayor HWSNBN, aka ‘Rahmbo’, had pissed off enough teachers that the union received an unprecedented 90%+ endorsement, in spite of a dirty-tricks campaign on the part of HWSNBN and outside monied interests including a public relations blitz to convince everyone that the teachers were hasty in voting before the independent fact-finding commission issued its report on July 16^th.  In the end, the ink on the commissioner’s report had scarcely dried when the CPS board rejected it out of hand the same morning it was released; apparently, they didn’t like the fact that the report lambasted the Board and Mayor Rahmulus for insisting on a scrooge-like 2% raise, after having taken away our contracted 4% raise on false pretenses, among other dastardly deeds. The CTU, meanwhile, held a meeting, examined and debated the various components, and ended up objecting to several of the findings by that evening. 




Possible English Teacher

I could go on about the Mayor’s and the Board’s shenanigans and all the energy and money they are spending on undermining the teachers and the CTU.  I probably will, but first, a few facts about the CTU’s position.  Our dispute with the Board is about salary and benefits, yes, and much more besides. 

Let’s start with the ‘much more besides’ category.  What the CTU and Chicago Teachers are demanding is a ‘Better Day’, which means:

<!·      Limit Class Size.  Currently the Board can unilaterally increase class size without any input from teachers; CPS currently has the fifth largest class sizes in Illinois.  Just about every study ever conducted on this issue has shown that small class size is a major determiner of academic achievement.  This belies the CPS motto Children First.

•  Stop the hemorrhaging of ‘Enrichment’ Education – Art, Music, World Language, Physical Education, as well as clubs and teams and sports.  My own school is down to one Music teacher, after having let go a dynamic and award-wining Chorus teacher two years ago; our championship-winning Girls’ Volleyball team was eliminated at the same time.  Two of our five Art teachers this year were told they don’t have programs and might not at all and were therefore on tenterhooks all week; ditto a P.E. teacher/coach.  We lost a World Language teacher who retired and wasn't replaced; as a result cannot offer French I this year.  Other neighborhood schools are in the same dire straits.  With no Music or Arts or PE teachers, one wonders just what HWSNBN intended to do with the extended day.  More Math?  Yay...what fun...

• Stop the replacement of closed public schools with dubious charter schools.  Our current mayor if anything outdoes his predecessor in his enthusiasm for charter schools.  Many so-called educational reformers champion charter schools.  All this in spite of studies now coming out that show that these privatized public schools perform overall at…exactly the same level as actual public schools.  There are some outstanding charter schools, some execrable ones, and a lot of middling charter schools.  They are not the silver bullet that will revive US education; they only serve to undermine public schools and teachers’ unions and take troublesome neighborhood schools off the mayor’s books and out of his hair.

• Related to the above, are concerns about the increased use of standardized testing to evaluate our students and schools.  These measures are often unfairly biased against urban minorities, ESL students and SPED students, do not measure students’ true achievement, and are used to penalize schools that do not reach often arbitrary and unreasonable goals.  Under this framework, a struggling school with low tests scores gets penalized and loses funding.  Follow that neighborhood public school down a year or two and the inexorable logic and reality is that you will find a charter school. 

  Now for the salary-benefits demands, for which we CPS teacher have been pilloried as greedy bastards for demanding a raise during a recession.

Nope: Math

·      Salary Raise.  Mayor 'Tiny Dancer' (for that was his Secret Service moniker) has from the beginning, through the middle, and now towards the end of this whole process, insisted on a 2% raise over four years,  meaning 8% all told.  (Keep in mind that this is accompanied by a 10% increase in H.S. teacher’s hours and preceded by the unilateral withdrawal of the contracted 4% raise).  He has not budged from this figure, in spite of the Independent Commission, the 90%+ teacher slap-down, and being forced to back down from increasing our hours by some 20%+ without any added compensation.  Meanwhile, the Independent Fact Finding Commission chastised the Mayor for being in fiscal la-la land and mostly sided with the teachers on salary issues.  While the Union has some issues with the commission’s calculation of a 14.85% raise, that is clearly more in line with the contract history and long-delayed cost-of-living increases we have yet to receive.  Additionally, the Board wants to increase the school year without compensation (i.e. we work more for the same pay), and eliminate ‘step’ salary increases for years worked. 

·      Benefits.  The Board wants to increase health insurance premiums for couples and families while simultaneously tying premiums to a ‘Wellness Program’ that would financially penalize teachers who do not meet certain health goals.  The Board also wants to take away our accrued sick-days (effective immediately but not affecting previous years’ accumulated days).  This would, in fact, create a disincentive to come to work every day, as unused sick days would disappear at the end of the year.

·      Job Security & Teacher Evaluation.  Without going into arcane details, the Board is implementing this year – without proper consultation with the Union – a new paradigm instruction and for evaluating teachers that will likely result in the ability of school administrators to fire teachers with little justification and no provisions for appeal.  None of the teachers I know object substantively to the overall teaching philosophy of the new program; it's how the admin will be using it to undermine teachers that we object to.

The above is only the sketchiest of outlines of the many issues at stake in this dispute.  If you want a detailed account of the Union positions, please consult www.ctunet.com.

As of last Thursday, Aug 30, the union has issued its 10-day countdown to a strike, meaning 30,000 teachers will likely walk out on Monday, 10 September, leaving 400,000 students and their parents in the lurch.  This is not a prospect to be relished or crowed over and is, in fact, an avoidable disruption in tens of thousands of lives.  It’ll take the combined pressure of the teachers union, other unions, and, especially the parents and students and communities around the city to get the Mayor to see reason and stop worrying about his reputation for combativeness and confrontation. 

I could think of worse ways to spend Labor Day, for a kid

In that regard, I have been pleasantly surprised by some of the spontaneous comments I have gotten over the past week and more.  When I called up my dentist to cancel an upcoming procedure due to the strike, the receptionist’s reaction was “We’re all for you!  Good luck!”  I got similar thumbs’ up from my vet (another cancelled appointment), a Postal clerk, baristas, and some passers by who saw my red CTU t-shirt.  Then, there was the Labor Day rally in Daley Plaza (full album here), which was heartening and inspiring.  For those people out there who equate labor unions with some sort of un-American crypto-communism, you gotta come to a teachers’ rally and see the funny, creative, and literate signs on all sides, the moms and dads with babies in strollers, the kids running around waving signs, getting a civics lesson and having a gas climbing the Picasso Phoenix statue, the young and middle-aged and elderly teachers and supporters of all stripes, the brother and sister unions who come out in support.*  It is a sight to behold.

See my Strike Album for an ongoing, edited collection of my images from the picket lines.

______________
* A hearty solidarity shout-out to some of the organizations and unions whose t-shirts, signs and banners and buttons I noted: Chicago Police and Fire unions, CCCTU (Cook Co. College Teachers Union), American Postal Workers' Union, United Steel Workers, United Airlines Pilots' Union, various locals of AFSCME (American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO), SEIU (Service Employees International Union), CBTU (Coalition of Black Trades Unions), ISPC (Illinois Single Payer Coalition), IUPAT (International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, ATU (Amalgamated Transit Unions) and, bless their hearts, the Unitarians.  I have no doubt left someone out -- please let me know if I did.  But as far as I could see, it was one big happy union out there!