My Own Private Chicago

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Education now is all about making money and covering their rear ends. The focus for at least 20 yrs. (I'm guessing at the number of years) has been to change the method of teaching with no attention given to what is being taught.As many know, at least if they haven't been living under a rock, that our education system is a complete joke for k-12 students. To give the impression that academics are doing something about it, every few years they put an effor forward to change the method of teaching, but totally ignore what is being taught. This covers their rears and give the impression that they're doing something. They would never what to admit all those "studies" classes were a failure. Or that they've welcomed with open arms millions of illiterates and their anchor babies and flooded the system. After all, they get more federal dollars for ESL/ELL and extra money for all those free breakfasts and lunches.

Remember these teachers only teach 9 months a yr. Have all holidays and weekends off and work less than 8 hours a day. But they'll cry they have to check homework and such. I've watched then check homework during school board meetings, and they take less than 5 seconds, yes I said seconds, to check a students homework. The students are given a check mark if they did something (anything), it may not be correct, but they're still given credit, same as the student who did study and got it correct. They do this because they don't want the student to feel bad bout themself. It's all about "feelings".And there's still a question of why Johnny can't read!!!

My Own Private Chicago


At least one college professor is looking at the Chicago teacher’s strike with envy. “What should be our model to defend community college education and our working conditions?” Héctor R. Reyes, Associate Professor of Physical Science at Harold Washington College asks in the academe blog maintained by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). “I propose that it be the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE), which succeeded in turning the Chicago Teachers Union into the solid force it is today.”

Such a model may indeed lead to plush working conditions but the educational value of their output is more questionable. In a column in The Washington Times, Marybeth Hicks looks at the impasse between the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and CORE.
“Average teacher pay in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system is $76,000,” Hicks noted. “(For reference, according to the 2010 census, median household income in Chicago is $38,625.)”

“Teachers asked for a 30 percent increase to reflect CPS’ desire to extend the elementary school day from 5 hours and 45 minutes, one of the shortest school days in the nation, to a more average 7 hours, and to add 10 school days per year. This would bring CPS’ school year closer to the national average of 180 days.”

“Even though CPS offered as much as 16 percent in pay increases over four years (who in America is getting that?) and agreed to hire additional staff and classroom aides to handle the increased workload, the union rejected the contract. For the children.”

Meanwhile, “Current scores already prove Chicago’s students are not being educated properly, “ Hicks asserts, “and Chicago’s graduation rate is a scandalous 56 percent.”

As for CORE, “CORE’s philosophy is in line with the political and social agenda of Rethinking Schools, a curriculum development and publishing company that is part of the legacy of the late Howard Zinn,” Hicks claims. “Rethinking Schools hopes to improve the quality of education with publications such as ‘Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word,’ ‘Rethinking Globalization: Teaching for Justice in an Unjust World,’’Rethinking Columbus’ (expanded second edition!) and ‘The Real Ebonics Debate’ (why teachers need to acknowledge and understand Ebonics to teach English more effectively).”

Indeed, we’ve been receiving and reviewing Rethinking Schools for years. Among other things, they have championed:

1. Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, who openly advocated sterilization and segregation.

2. Occupy Wall Street (or whatever noun you chose to put after that verb) and

3. Illegal immigration.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

[Jeanfromfillmore]

“A” Is for Agitation: Radical Chicago Teachers on Parade
Michelle Malkin — September 14, 2012

Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis walks, talks and barks like a rootsy Occupy Wall Street activist. But this Big Labor loudmouth who’s leading the abandonment of nearly 400,000 schoolchildren in the Windy City is just another power-grabbing union fat cat.

Instead of academic excellence, she rails about “social justice.” Instead of accountability, she fumes about “profits” and curses merit pay. Lewis has marched with the Occu-clowns denouncing capitalism and promoting “socialism (as) the alternative.” She raves: “Occupy Wall Street and the whole concept of the 99 percent is an extraordinarily important movement.”

And she earned praise as a “fist-in-the-air, crowd-rousing, dynamic union leader” by former Communist Party revolutionary turned Obama-funded “school reformer” Michael Klonsky.

While she pays solidarity lip service to the 99 percent, Lewis is part of the deep-pocketed elite of public employee union chiefs who blame everyone else for their own financial and educational ruin. She’s good at pandering to her Che Guevara T-shirt-wearing colleagues and trash-talking the political machine. But she is the machine.

The Chicago Teachers Union rakes in nearly $30 million in forced dues from rank-and-file teachers every year. CTU is an affiliate of the behemoth AFL-CIO, which dropped an estimated $100 million in forced dues to support Democratic candidates and causes during the 2008 and 2010 election cycles.
Before Lewis took control of the CTU, the union was teetering on bankruptcy and owed millions of dollars in loans. The previous CTU president pulled down nearly $300,000 a year in base salary and compensation. Local union watchdogs reported that top CTU officers and staff with six-figure salaries and bonuses also received:

“… a monthly expense account for each administrator — officers, coordinators and field representatives — of $1,500; a car allowance of $7,000 per year (whether or not you have a car); 85 percent of car insurance and expenses paid; parking allowance; cellphone allowance; life insurance paid with union dues; and among other perks, a 53rd week of yearly pay for “working” over the Christmas holiday.”

Lewis assumed the CTU presidency in June 2010. “Teachers union officials declined to provide information on Lewis’ salary,” The Chicago Tribune reports, but records show that she made more than $71,000 for half a year’s work in 2010 — along with compensation from the Illinois Federation of Teachers in 2011 totaling at least an additional $64,000 on top of her unknown base salary and benefits.

When she’s not urging other teachers to ditch the classroom or organizing traffic blockades to impede everyone else in Chicago from getting to and from their jobs, Lewis spends her time trashing public charter schools and business leaders trying to reform our Soviet-style monopoly in education. The results speak for themselves: While CTU members earn an average of $74,000 a year and are now spurning 16 percent pay hikes, 71 percent of the third-largest school district’s 8th-grade students can’t attain the most basic level of science proficiency, and nearly 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in reading.

Lewis, a vulgar standup comic wannabe who has joked publicly about smoking weed in college, sneered at parent-centered charter schools that defied the strike on Monday as not “real” schools. Competition is the enemy of union-enforced stagnation. She also played the race card like a Vegas poker pro. And in a stem-winder straight out of the Barack Obama/Elizabeth Warren/Occupy rhetorical handbook, Lewis blasted the “wealthy” at a strike rally this week: “You don’t make money by yourself,” she hissed.

Nope. In Social Justice World, you make that money by climbing up the public employee union ladder and extracting it forcibly through a compulsory dues racket that redistributes hard-earned dues from nearly 30,000 captive members to the union leadership’s class-warfare demagogues.

It bears repeating often: The goals of the teachers union radicals are not academic excellence, professional development and fairness. The goals are student indoctrination, social upheaval and perpetual grievance-mongering in pursuit of bigger government and spending without restraint: 2, 4, 6, 8! One agenda: Agitate!

[Jeanfromfillmore]

Chicago Strike Shows Why we Need School Choice

It says something about today’s public education reality that the two sides in the teachers’ union dispute in Chicago are the union and the mayor.
Allegedly the point of schools is to educate children. But which side in this dispute has sole interest in children and their parents?

The answer, of course, is neither side.

Unions are about the economic interests of the teachers. The mayor is about his budget and the economic interests of the city.

No one solely represents the interests of the kids.

It’s not to say that the union or the mayor has no interest in the quality of education being delivered. But this is just part of their agenda.

Do union members have to worry that their jobs will be gone if children don’t get the best possible education? No. Does the mayor have to worry that his job will be gone or his career over if children don’t get the best possible education? No.

In private sector labor disputes, sitting across from the union representative is the representative of a private company. The survival of that firm depends on its ability to serve its customers. Its labor cost is one line item in the cost structure of the products it sells.

The firm negotiating with the union does have to be concerned that union demands will drive it out of business – that it won’t be able to deliver the best, most competitively priced products.

This helps explains why private sector union membership has dropped dramatically. In the mid-1950’s, 36 percent of the private sector labor force belonged to unions. Today it is less than 7 percent.

Union demands that cause uncompetitive pricing or poorer quality products threaten the survival of the firm because it cannot serve its customers. The customer is king. If the customer doesn’t like what he’s getting, that customer will go somewhere else.

But what about parents and kids? They have no where else to go. In Chicago, they are stuck with whatever outcome the confrontation between the mayor and the union produces because there is no competition.

Beyond this, even the best public school teachers have their hands tied because they cannot provide what so many of these kids need. A structure of values, discipline, and a clear sense of meaning and right and wrong.
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof writes, “In fairness, it’s true that the main reason inner city schools do poorly isn’t teachers’ unions, but poverty.”
But now we have a chicken and egg problem. Are kids not getting educated because they are poor or are they poor because the public schools, generation after generation, provide such poor education in these communities? Poverty is preponderant among single parent households, and single parent households have grown dramatically in black communities over the last half century. In 1970, 38 percent of black births were to unmarried women. Today it’s over 70 percent.

Should we consider it an accident that over this same period a cultural transformation took place in this country? Court decisions removed prayer and traditional religious values from our public schools. Is it worth considering that the purge of traditional values from public schools and widespread family breakdown were two sides of the same cultural coin?

I think so. But whether you agree with me or not, parents who want their children in a school teaching traditional values, rather than the moral relativism endemic in K-12 public schools today, should have this choice in an allegedly free country.

Eighty six percent of the kids in Chicago’s public schools are minority kids from low income families. Meaning and teaching of right and wrong is what these kids need. Whatever compromise the unions and the mayor reach won’t matter to them.

What they need is school choice.


By Star Parker
Star Parker is founder and president of CURE, the Center for Urban Renewal and Education, a 501c3 think tank which explores and promotes market based public policy to fight poverty, as well as author of the newly revised Uncle Sam's Plantation: How Big Government Enslaves America's Poor and What We Can do About It.