Chicago school strikes

The teachers in Chicago are on strike this week, and Richard Fernandez discusses that the sticky point is not the pay raise, offered, not accepted, but rather how the teachers are going to be evaluated (the weight of testing) and who will be hired first (the unions want first fired first hired.)and not about the children.

Klein notes that the “2010-11 annual teacher salaries ranged from $47,268 for teachers with bachelor’s degree with a year’s experience or less, to $88,680 for those with doctorates who have at least 16 years of experience … All told, teachers in Chicago make an average of $74,839 a year.” And a 16% raise is not bad in a recession economy.

But with 80% of Chicago students unable to meet the Department of Education standards in both literacy and mathematics, it not obvious that taxpayers are getting a lot of value for money. All the same, it’s good theater.

As Fernandez' discussion moves forward, he observes the irony of Rahm Emmanuel taking on the unions. Is it a "Richard Nixon goes to China" moment? Perhaps not, but at some point, the rule of law needs to be upheld, even by those that don't necessarily adhere to it.

Politics is a rough world. That’s just a fact. Why is it so? Perhaps Mammon has something to do with it. The Bible — that two-thousand year old book of delusions — observes that “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Ironically, many in DNC agree that money is the problem, especially when somebody else has it.  Peter Schiff, interviewing delegates during the Democratic convention, noted that disdain for money was so great that many were eager to ban profits altogether, the better to transfer it to themselves.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2012/09/10/harbinger-2/?singlepage=true

Unless you have money in the US, your children are stuck in public schools: whether they are good schools or not seems to depend on your neighborhood (so again, on what you can afford to rent/buy.) Both in Germany and in France, private schools are subsidized, so that even though parents don't have too much influence on curriculum, they have a choice on how it is taught. In the US, there are two ways to get around this problem, neither which are mainstream/acceptable options. Homeschooling and vouchers.

If you accept that this strike is about maximizing income and job security, and not about job conditions, it is clearly not about teaching children. Most teachers begin their career, I would suspect, because they truly love to work with children, and then they get sucked into a system when Mammon is key. What is the way out? What truly helps out children?