The Chicago Tribune reports that the Chicago Teachers Union will protest a proposal to close fifty-four schools by marching over three days beginning Saturday, May 18.

Kim Geiger and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah write that the Chicago Board of Education will vote on a plan to close fifty-three elementary school and one high school on May 22, with the CTU’s protests timed to lead up to the vote.

The district’s school closure plan is unpopular with not only teachers, but also with residents:

“A Tribune/WGN-TV poll found that 59 percent of Chicago voters don’t approve of the school closings proposal.”

School officials hired hearing officers who reviewed the proposal and declared that thirteen of the fifty-four schools should stay open. Details of the proposal were also criticized, as a retired judge serving as a hearing officer reported that the transition plan laid out for Mayo Elementary School’s students did not properly address special needs students.

CTU President Karen Lewis, who is expected to be reelected with her ‘CORE’ slate — which stands for “Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators” — for a second term of leadership this Friday, wants to shed light on what she calls ‘misguided corporate reforms’. Lewis’s slate is opposed by Tanya Saunders-Wolffe, who faces long odds to take control of the Union.

CTU has been in conflict with Chicago Public Schools and Mayor Rahm Emanuel constantly since Emanuel assumed office, which culminated in a September, 2012 strike that lasted weeks and even became an issue in the 2012 Presidential election. The battle also claimed schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard, who resigned just 3 weeks after the strike concluded, and has continued to the present including a lawsuit against closures and charges by CTU that Chicago Public Schools is engaging in ‘racist’ behavior with the plan.

But Chicago Public Schools isn’t giving up the fight, and they’re standing firm against the Union’s protest:

“Responding to CTU’s announcement, CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said in a statement that the district “is determined to upend the status quo that threatens to keep another generation of our children trapped in under-resourced, underutilized schools where they are not getting the quality education they deserve.”"

The union also plans to protest the Walton Family Foundation’s donations, which funded some community meetings reagrding school closings, by busing protestors to Springfield where they will picket Walmart. Lewis famously quipped in November, 2012 that corporate donors for education reform were nothing but “dilittantes.”

In a long-term effort, the Union plans to have a voter registration campaign and political recruitment in hopes of pushing officials such as Mayor Emanuel out of office.

The post Lewis to Lead Chicago Union Protests as School Closure Vote Looms appeared first on Education News.

Illinois officials have spoken out against standards set out by the federal No Child Left Behind Act after it was determined that 98% of the state’s high schools fell well short of meeting them in 2012. Despite applying for a waiver from NCLB, until Illinois’ waiver is approved, its schools continue to be bound by the law’s provisions — which means even the state’s best-performing schools are currently carrying the “failed” classification.

Only 11 of the state’s 671 high schools met the Adequate Yearly Progress benchmark as measured by the results of the Prairie State Achievement examinations. Six of the 11 are located in Chicago.

Among those high schools failing to make the federal standard are several renowned for their academic prowess: New Trier, the Lincoln-Way high schools, the Hinsdale schools and Stevenson.

Under No Child Left Behind, all public schools must have 100 percent of tested students meet state standards in reading and math by 2014. In the interim, states must set gradually increasing targets. If even one subgroup of students does not meet a target, the school does not fails to make the federal standard.

Gery Chico, the chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education, called the law “severely deficient” because it forces the state to categorize some outstanding schools as underperforming. He added that classification of the schools under NCLB gives parents the wrong idea about the quality of their local schools. It puts school heads in a difficult position by forcing them to explain why a school that has been serving their kids so well is being labeled a failure.

Only 51 percent of high school students passed their standardized tests, yet 82 percent of elementary students did, Chico said.

“The PSAE scores continue to reflect the discrepancy between elementary education and high school, where standards and tests are more rigorous,” he said.

Next year, scores are expected to drop further as new standardized tests will measure the Common Core learning standards being taught in classrooms statewide for the first time this year, he said.

The delay in the waiver approval caps a very difficult year both for Illinois public school system — and for Chicago in particular. After contract negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union went awry, union leadership called a strike that shut down Chicago schools for nearly two weeks. School closures served to frustrate parents and forced teachers to rush to catch their students up once the schools opened their doors again.

Further adding to the state’s woes was a recent report that Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System could be in danger of insolvency unless the government ponies up around $3.4 billion to the fund by 2014.

Dick Ingram, charged with overseeing the Illinois’ TRS, says that the shortfall is the result of the state shirking its funding responsibility over more than three decades. He says that while the fund can continue to meet its obligations to retired teachers in the short term, its long term health continues to be in grave danger. He added that the only way that the fund’s future could be assured would be for the state to start meeting its obligations soon, and in full.

The post 98% Failure to Meet AYP Caps Tough Year for Illinois Schools appeared first on Education News.

Whiteboard Advisors is a consulting practice that uses its connections with the “education influentals” to get insight into current events and how they might influence education policy. This time around, WA harnesses that insight to look at the impact of the recently concluded Chicago teachers strike and the first debate between Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and Democratic President Barack Obama.

It seems like on both the strike and the debate, education policy insiders interviewed by Whiteboard are in agreement. More than two-thirds believe that union that came away a winner from the strike and about an equal percentage also thought that Romney presented a more effective and coherent view of his educational policy than did Obama.

Nearly a third of those interviewed pointed to students and the parents as the true losers of the strike, while 62% felt that the union clearly won the strike that shut down Chicago’s schools for more than a week. One of the insiders said that it was clear that the union came out ahead when CTU sent out representatives to other cities and towns to offer bargaining tips. Another praised the union for being able to “hold their line locally,” which put it in a strong position to win concessions from the city. Among the thirty people polled for the report – including current and former White House and U.S. Department of Education leaders – there were some who characterized the Chicago city government’s performance as “embarrassing,” saying that other than on the issue of layoffs, they gave away the farm.

Some offered a more measured assessment, saying that the CTU win was mainly a matter of public perception, and praised Mayor Rahm Emanuel for getting most of what he wanted in union concessions. Surprisingly, especially in light of how they evaluated the union’s performance during the strike, many of the insiders don’t see the victory as a good omen for the future of teachers unions. It was called a “negative for the teacher unions” by one interviewee, while another said that more teachers strikes anywhere in the country were unlikely.

Still, this advice was offered for how to handle similar situations in the future:

“The biggest lesson is the simplest: don’t introduce major changes to performance based teacher evaluation in the same year as the promise to close 40 schools in a place where good teachers do not have any better shot at a job than the worst ones because of Chicago’s decentralized hiring practices. Especially after threatening to make people work much longer for a little extra pay—and then backing down. It is a recipe for a strike.”

On the relative performance of both presidential candidates at the first presidential debate, the majority of insiders gave their vote to Romney — assigning him a B grade — while awarding Obama no better than a C. In all, the report found that most believed the education policies of the candidates didn’t differ all that much.

There was, however, some disbelief that Romney will be able to keep the promise he made during the debate to keep education funding at the same level in light of the current fiscal situation in the US.

The post Education Insiders Call Romney, Union Winners in Report appeared first on Education News.

Fearing that the recent Chicago teachers strike might have eroded union support across the country, labor organizations are ponying up for an extensive publicity campaign to improve their image. The Washington Times is reporting that an umbrella group for many of the nation’s teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers, will be holding community events in cities all over the U.S in the waning weeks of the 2012 election season.

Some speculate that this new push is an indication that far from being chastened by the events in Chicago, the unions are going on the offensive.

“Unless the balance of power changes, there will be another strike,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform and critic of teachers unions. “Just because [Chicago] was the first strike in a while does not mean they’re less interested in sticking to their guns. It’s not yet to the point where there’s outrage [among the public] to spark a revolution against this.”

Teachers strikes are a fairly rare occurrence. Even in Chicago, where the influence of the teachers union is fairly extensive, teachers hadn’t walked out of their jobs in more than a quarter of a century. This fact might serve as a true indicator of the bitterness of this particular round of negotiations between the teachers and the city’s new administration headed by the recently elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In the end, both sides offered concessions to get teachers back in classrooms and reopen the schools.

Teachers will get an average 17.6 percent pay raise, significantly less than the 30 percent hike initially sought, over the next four years. The union successfully fought off Mr. Emanuel’s efforts to have student test scores count for as much as 45 percent of teacher evaluations, negotiating the number down to no higher than 30 percent, according to terms of the deal.

Still, the latest move to put themselves in a more positive light in the eyes of the public could be seen as a concession to the reality that unions don’t enjoy the same level of support — even within the Democratic Party — that they once did. While the voices of the teachers unions were heard at the Democratic National Convention held earlier this year, education reformers like Michelle Rhee were also very visible and vocal. Several prominent Democratic politicians, like Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is coming off his own bruising contract negotiation with LAUSD teachers, offered support for Emanuel during the strike.

Groups such as Democrats for Education Reform continue to grow in stature and influence, and are among the loudest critics of the power that teachers unions have over education policy in the U.S.

The post Teachers Unions Go on PR Offensive in Runup to Election appeared first on Education News.

Classes will resume on Wednesday for Chicago’s 350,000+ students as the Chicago Teachers Union voted Tuesday afternoon to suspend their week-old strike.

Just under 800 members of the CTU’s House of Delegates voted almost unanimously to suspend the strike based on a tentative proposed contract. The union membership will vote on the contract’s approval in coming weeks.

NBC Chicago has posted 23 pages of details of the tentative deal on its website.

Details of the proposed contract address many contentious issues between Chicago Public Schools and its teachers, including:

• 50% of teacher vacancies will be filled from the pool of highly-rated laid off teachers;
• Merit pay has been tabled; though the union claims victory on this issue, it will be discussed in the future;
• WBEZ Chicago summarizes the deal reached on teacher evaluations:
  “Student growth will be phased in over three years and will count for no more than 30 percent, the minimum required by state law.  Controversial “value-added” test scores will count for anywhere between 0 and 25 percent, depending on what grade and subject a teacher teaches.

  In the optional fourth year, student growth would count for 35 percent.”

• Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s promise of a longer school day will be realized. Elementary students will have a 7-hour day and high school students will have a 7.5-hour day.
• On compensation, teachers will receive a 3% cost of living raise in the first year, followed by a 2% raise in each of the second and third years. Depending on the union membership’s approval, a fourth year would see an additional 3% raise.

Union membership appears to be relieved to have made progress — especially before the strike lasted through the first pay period — and Chicago’s families who struggled to find alternate daytime arrangements for their children can now return to a normal schedule.

The post Chicago Teachers Union Votes to End Strike, Return to School appeared first on Education News.

by Wana Duhart

As Chicago’s teachers’ union and city school officials hopefully finalize the details of a new labor agreement, it seems ironic that you have all the grownups holed up in meetings while the students and their parents have been left to fend for themselves. It is quite strange that the adults are debating adult issues like job security and professional evaluations, while the children and youth are being shut out of schools and losing valuable classroom time. It doesn’t seem to make much sense that the very ones who are supposed to be served – the students – are the ones who are left in limbo during these negotiations.

Wana L. Duhart

How is it that the actual delivery of public education can be brought to a complete standstill when the grownups don’t get what they want? One wonders what they would do if the students actually decided to go on strike to protest poor teaching, crumbling school buildings, or unsafe learning conditions. Once again, the grownups continue to have things twisted and backwards. As a national priority, we should have established a long time ago, that classroom time or school openings never be held hostage by labor negotiations.

One would think that Chicago’s union leaders and their membership would understand this and figure out a more effective way to get what they want, instead of allowing school-aged youth to be shut out of school buildings. Do the adults have a conscience or moral compass, or is it always about self interests? Surely they understand that the education of our youth demands a different kind of union response, one that does not prevent kids from attending school.

Perhaps what we have not fully acknowledged is that some unionized teachers are like every other unionized profession — they will take whatever steps are necessary to gain what they deem is theirs, at whatever cost. And in this case, it does not matter that students are suffering as schools are closed. Somehow many of us have wanted to believe that all teachers’ unions operated differently from other workers’ unions — that the education of our youth was front and center no matter what.

The scene is Chicago is a strong reminder that even though some unions and others who fight back against school reform efforts tell us that they care about the children, what many of them don’t say is that their support is dependent on whether they get what they want. They’ve told us for years that K12 schools are not to be treated as businesses, that the delivery of public education is unique. We agree! But what some unions are proving to us once again is that they view it as their business and will use it to get their fair share of security and professional respect whenever they feel like it.

Unionized teachers will surely say they work hard and demand adequate tools to do their jobs well – we agree wholeheartedly! But what they won’t say is they don’t teach at the pleasure of their students. Unions have every right to fight for its members; however, it would seem in the case of public schools, a strike should never consist of not showing up to teach the very students who depend on you. Teachers’ unions, like the one in Chicago, need to figure out alternative approaches to protesting when labor disputes arise.

Organized strikes and shutting down whole school districts unfairly punish innocent young people who have nothing to do with what goes on in labor negotiations. Protests and boycotts in business, other industries, and sectors are necessary and make sense, but in K12 education, they serve to inflict a great injustice on students, especially in a district such as Chicago where there’s much work to be done to transform schools that are already failing to deliver high quality education.

At what point do we make sure the kids get what is due them – a high quality education administered by highly competent classroom instructors? At what point do the students get the same academic security that unionized teachers are fighting for? Our kids deserve to know that when we fail to gain security and benefits in our jobs or professions, we won’t leave them out in the cold (or heat) as we negotiate our own professional interests. Students need to know that we won’t use them as scapegoats to gain personal equity and fairness without providing them with the same academic equity and fairness they deserve as students.

Wana Duhart is the Founder and CEO of Trahud Enterprises, which develops alliances in education that yield innovation, creativity, and flexibility in public schooling. and has spent three decades working in varying capacities across many sectors. She is the author of the book A Call to the Village: Retooling Public Schools and publishes her own blog, The VillageSpace.

The post Wana Duhart: In Chicago, It’s Still Not about the Children appeared first on Education News.

Does anything basic strike the eye about the Chicago teachers’ strike?  Issues and personalities vary place to place, but is any angle of it broadly replicable and useful?

“Basic” means one condition that determines others.  When I was a kid, my father set about constructing a two-story, four-apartment building in the lot beside our house.  He cleared the lot, leveled a pad, and built forms for a concrete footing around the perimeter.  As the concrete hardened, he inserted bolts into it and then laid 2 x 4s over the bolts that protruded through the wood.  He set up a surveyor’s transit and carefully leveled these 2 x 4 plates as they floated on the soft concrete before bolting them in place.

John Jensen, Ph.D.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked him.

“If you get the plates level,” he said with a satisfied smile, “then everything else is plumb and square as you go up.  Everything fits.”

We might call “basic” what enables everything else to fit; when you build on it, your work proceeds smoothly without glitches. Amid school conditions that have accumulated for decades, what could qualify?

The most common response today doesn’t merit the label “basic.”  Political and economic powers take sides, issues are too narrowly construed, and uses of power overwhelm a range of less influential values left to fester.  The public discussion of Chicago schools shed light on sharp imbalance in the allocation of resources, racial segregation, homelessness, multiple impacts from poverty, the needs of children, and the varied conditions of children’s and teachers’ experience in school.

With so many adjustments to  make, where do we start?  What comes first in our discussion so other issues are dealt with more easily?

The answer lies in a shift of attitude.  People facing each other across a table expecting contention  might well find it novel ground, but their first duty is to examine their personal stance. Will they try to appreciate the other person’s viewpoint? Decades ago, Jack Gibb, a pioneer in group process, uncovered six dimensions of trust that speak to this issue.  Participants should strive toward being equal instead of superior, provisional rather than certain, spontaneous rather than strategic, seek problem-solving instead of control, be empathic instead of neutral, and seek evidence and information rather than evaluate and blame.

Such changes occur only out of a root desire.  A personal quality begins with one wanting the quality; in this case wanting what benefits everyone ultimately.  Adopting this desire oneself in a situation of conflict makes it more likely that others will do the same, and appreciating another’s point of view expands one’s own picture of salient reality.  As we grasp how others regard the issue, our thinking incorporates circumstances that before were closed to us.  We might not have penetrated to those corners on our own, but seeing through another’s lenses, we grasp them: “Oh! That’s what you’re saying!”  And that tendency carried through to completion produces significant benefit.  Economist Beardsley Ruml remarked that “reasonable people always agree when they understand what the other person is talking about.”

The willingness to appreciate another’s viewpoint is itself an outcome of a yet more basic choice, to relinquish a subjective mind for an objective mind. The difference is not just  philosophical and it is not mysterious.  The subjective mind is immersed in “how I see it.”  Its own priorities are presumed correct, its intuitions  regarded as accurate, its values legitimate, and its aims above criticism.  Consequently it feels defensive when questioned, blocks out feedback, blames others or conditions for what it causes, fails to appreciate the distorting effect of emotions, and when upset sabotages communications.

An objective mind instead is immersed in a world understood  to be larger than the self or group self-interest.  The larger reality is apprehended through objective information rather than subjective impressions, feelings, and intuitions.  Consequently, an objective mind values feedback, draws profit from criticism, questions its own intuitions, seeks to understand cause and effect, acknowledges the distortion possible from feelings both positive and negative, and attempts to maintain constructive communication even when upset.

This suggests an agreement contentious sides can make before addressing their issues. They agree on objective thinking as the basis of solutions. In practice, they agree up front to allow themselves to be dragged, even kicking and screaming, back into objectivity when they depart from it.  With this as common ground, everything else can at least be negotiated.  Solutions will align with reality.

Such a principle emerges at the beginnings of western civilization in the Dialogues of Plato narrating the conversations of Socrates in ancient Greece. Underlying the discussions was the assumption that reasonable people accept reality evidenced to the eyes and ears.  When Socrates made an assertion of fact—“Is it not true that…”—his interlocutors responded reasonably.  Granting his point, they could expect, would place them at a disadvantage as Socrates followed up his train of thought, yet they answered logically. They acknowledged fact, and fact then was subjected to reasonable argument and interpretation.

Such a standard might serve as a criterion for whether one approaches an issue objectively.  Do I allow my opponent to confront me with a reality I prefer not to accept? Because I am committed to objectivity, do I concede the point and face what I need to  face?  If in such situations the behavior of adults  instead remains intransigent, then their own education has failed them, the influence of church and family and personal development have failed them, and personality has claimed for itself an indefensible social standard.  It must matter to us that reality is larger than our mind, and our solutions must take account of it.

Able to concede a point against our self-interest, we declare the broader reality to be our home.  A society today cannot prosper for long without accepting a real world in common that all help to sustain, a world negotiated by objective information and reasonable thought.

John Jensen is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the three-volume Practice Makes Permanent series (Rowman and Littlefield). He will send a proof copy of the volumes to anyone on request: jjensen@gci.net

The post John Jensen: Chicago Strike Shows Need for ‘Back to Basics’ appeared first on Education News.

As the Chicago teachers strike goes into its second week — and signals remain mixed about when the strike might end — parents affected by school shutdowns are growing increasingly frustrated. Many families stuck with figuring out alternate childcare arrangements are now expressing this frustration out loud, even as they attempt not to place responsibility for their hardship on one side or the other.

Dan Rosen, a father from Wicker Park, says he doesn’t see why closing the schools was required as part of the contract negotiations. If the option of keeping the schools open while the talks were ongoing was available, then it should have been more vigorously pursued, he said. It is hardly fair, he added, that the kids and their families were put in the middle of this conflict.

During the strike’s first week, Rosen’s wife, Debbie, took care of their two children and a few others in the neighborhood whose families didn’t have back-up plans. Though they weren’t forced to scramble like some parents, the couple had hoped to spend Sunday night making sure their son and daughter were caught up on school work and in bed early.

But signals from the union leaders have been decidedly less rosy over the weekend, as the membership vote on ending the strike was pushed back in favor of the negotiators taking more time to look over the district’s proposal. This means that it’s unlikely that the strike will be resolved before Wednesday. This proved to be a big disappointment to many families who were hoping that the schools would reopen on Monday this week.

“My thought was that the teachers were going to make a statement and be out of class for a week and at the end of that week hopefully things would be resolved,” Rosen said. “The fact that they are not going back to the classroom to me is unconscionable.”

The main issue for Gerald House, a parent of five, is that with the schools closed, there are no safe places for his children to spend their days. While some of them have been going to work with his wife, the rest must stay home with House. A few times the whole families took their children to the church to break the routine, but for the most part, their South Side neighborhood isn’t a good place for children to be on their own.

The post Parent Frustration Grows as Schools Remain Closed in Chicago appeared first on Education News.

Some parents around Chicago are thankful for the options given to them by the school choice movement as the city’s public schools are shut down due to the strike called by the local teachers unions. All around the city, private, parochial and charter schools are reporting an uptick in interest as parents are looking for alternatives as the public schools remain shut and concerns about long-term stability increase.

Since the strike began, UNO Charter School Network, which is publicly funded but employs non-unionized teachers, has accepted 30 new students. Sister Mary Paul McCaughey, superintendent of the Catholic Schools at the Archdiocese of Chicago, has been fielding a growing number of requests for entry. According to UNO’s CEO Juan Rangel, who also headed up the election campaign of the city’s current mayor Rahm Emanuel, he expects that the longer the strike goes on, the more interest parents are going to show in alternatives to traditional public schools.

Although both sides are claiming that they are close to reaching an agreement to get teachers back in the classrooms, it is unlikely that enough progress will be made at the end of the week or even over the weekend to allow schools to open Monday. Meanwhile, 350,000+ of the city’s elementary, middle and high school students — and their families — are faced with filling their days and hoping that they don’t fall too far behind.

While school has been out, parents have sought alternative care for their children at local churches, with relatives, or at “Children First” programs at 147 public schools, which have taken in children for activities for half a day for the first three days, and a full day starting Thursday.

Among the students enrolled in public schools in the city, the strike hasn’t affected the 50,000 enrolled in the public charters. Expanding school choice options has been a campaign promise by Emanuel, who said that nearly 20,000 of Chicago’s students would take advantage of them if the seats were available. The mayor’s charter school push is one of the issues that has put him in conflict with the union representing striking teachers.

Charter schools already enroll about 12 percent of Chicago students. The Noble Network of Charter Schools has also had more inquiries in the past week, but the 12 high schools are full and can’t take more students now, according to Rhonda Kochlefl, chief external affairs officer. She said 4,700 students are on the waiting list, and she expects that to increase.

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We are witnessing history unfold in Chicago.  It is ironic that the first large scale teachers strike in the United States in over two decades takes place in Chicago, the home of the Father of Community Organizers, Saul Alinsky, and the current Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, not to mention President Barack Obama.  Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff of President Obama, faces a tough challenge and now that he is on the other side of a militant union he must confront the same issues Governor Scott Walker faced in Wisconsin.

J.C. Bowman, Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee

Clearly unions are still revered in Chicago.  However, a protracted strike and/or labor battle will rigorously test the support of teachers and the teachers’ union. Conversely, the damage and the harm to the teaching profession and students cannot be denied or easily reversed.  This strike, like any work stoppage at a public school, has not only halted schools from functioning normally; it is keeping students from learning. In addition, it causes emotional stress by disrupting the routines of many families—no doubt impacting many poor and single-parent families.

Our organization, Professional Educators of Tennessee, vehemently opposes strikes, which ultimately deprive children of their right to an education. Our priority is to support students by supporting educators.  We understand intimately the difficult challenges teachers face daily, and against all odds most educators succeed because they refuse to fail.  But we reject the premise that minority and low-income students cannot succeed, which somehow has been one of the messages conveyed by the union in this “unnecessary strike” as Mr. Emanuel called it.  Even the liberal New York Times ran a scathing editorial calling this the “Chicago Teachers’ Folly.”

Since 1979, striking has been illegal for public school employees in Tennessee. This prohibition has enjoyed bipartisan support for many years in our state legislature.  As a penalty for breaking this law, employees may be subject to dismissal and, further, shall forfeit their claim to tenure status, if they have attained tenure.  Any professional employee who engaged in, or participated in, a strike and who is not a tenured teacher may also be subject to dismissal. Strikes, work stoppages and the threat thereof are detrimental to educators and the students we serve.

Where labor union leaders continue to cling to outdated labor laws in order to expand their power, militancy and radicalism soon follows.  Unions are not well known for their ability to foster innovation, opportunity, and flexibility in the workplace. The battle is not so much a fight between ideas or differing points of view, but rather a clash for power and control.  It is Labor Union versus Education, or what is in the best interest of the union versus what is in the best interest of education.  The longer this or any strike goes on, the more damage will occur to the education profession and public support is further eroded for public education.

Does that mean there are not legitimate complaints or that management is always right?  Of course not.  Our organization has been critical of the overuse of test scores in evaluating teachers.  In 2010, it was the teachers union in Tennessee that readily jumped on the Race to the Top bandwagon.  Throughout the strike in Chicago, some grievances about pay, extending work days, strengthening the union and keeping a seniority system in place have been presented.  However, very little has been heard from the union about how to improve the quality of education.

Unions wield incredible power, especially in states that are not “right to work” and force compulsory unionism and mandatory dues on workers.  In fact their union power strong-arms elected officials into spending tax dollars in salary and benefits for people who are performing union work.  By seemingly always underscoring the labor aspect and neglecting the educational aspect of the debate unions miss the bigger picture.  The greatest obstacle in education may not be some of the obvious challenges, but rather government mandates and bureaucracy.

Keep in mind that labor union officials enjoy countless powers and protections that were created by legislatures and the courts. Union officials maintain that they have the confidence and support of rank-and-file teachers. Yet, they exert tremendous political effort in the government arena to acquire and increase their power and control.  Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Big Labor spends about four times more on politics and lobbying than what was previously thought. This enables union officials to exercise enormous political clout, even though public sector union membership continues to steadily decline and dues continue to increase.

Why is the union not using such vast influence to fight for teachers against the impediments that have stifled educators’ ability to teach children such as updated textbooks, more supplies and materials? Instead of being focused on such items as divisive collective bargaining or binding arbitration, they should fight for increased collaboration, improved parental involvement and more reasonable evaluations.   And by fighting for benefits for teachers they should never interrupt the education of public school children in the process. Striking may be the “Chicago way,” but in public education it should not be the “American way.”

J. C. Bowman is the Executive Director of Professional Educators of Tennessee.

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