Before anyone says "I wish I was making $71,000 a year!'', Chicago is one of the most expensive cities in the country so don't think the teachers are living large. The city offered a 16% pay raise and the union wasn't interested. So the union isn't "being greedy" and hoping for a huge payout. The teacher union doesn't want new accountability measures that the think is unfair to them.On Monday morning, 350,000 kids in Chicago found themselves without a classroom to bustle about as the city's teachers went on their first strike in 25 years. The sticking point? A new teacher evaluation system.
The city's 25,000 public school teachers are on strike for the first time in a quarter-century, after the latest contract talks broke down Sunday with no deal to avert a walkout.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said late Sunday night there had been some progress in contract talks, but "we have failed to reach an agreement that will prevent a labor strike."
The city's public school teachers make an average of $71,000 a year. Both sides said they were close to an agreement on wages. What apparently remains are issues involving teacher performance and accountability, which the union saw as a threat to job security.
I have to side with the teacher's union here. States are now attempting to balance their budgets on the backs of teachers. Lazy stupid parents are of course going along with this because they have a rose tinted view of the past and thinks that our schools are getting worse. Because most parents think 'it is the school's job' to teach their kids and don't take any responsibility at home, teachers end up getting all the blame for their stupid children.Union supporters argue that evaluating teachers using tests can be tricky, and that this "value-added" measurement can be volatile and inaccurate. Additionally, [h]teachers who have a high proportion of poor students may have a harder time lifting their kids' scores than teachers who work in affluent districts. (About 80 percent of Chicago students qualify for free or reduced federal lunches.) As many as 6,000 teachers would wrongly lose their jobs under the system, says Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Karen Lewis. "Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children we do not control," she said while announcing the strike, according to Reuters. But reformers counter that teachers should be responsible for helping their students score better on tests, and that current evaluation systems provide no way for ineffective teachers to be identified or removed from classrooms.
One of you guys is going to try to be cute and say "Schools are getting worse, Macbeth! It is a proven fact!!" No they haven't.
"But Macbeth, why are we scoring so low?! Something is wrong!!" Yes, something is wrong. It's called childhood poverty.Loveless is one of the nation's leading experts on PISA and TIMSS. He has been part of the cohorts of specialists who advise those programs. In his report he says the first international test comparable to those two was the First International Math Study (FIMS) in 1964. It assessed 13-year-olds in 12 countries. The United States placed next to last, just ahead of Sweden.
We were beaten by Israel, Japan, Belgium, Finland, Germany, England, Scotland, the Netherlands, France and Australia, in that order. Other age groups were tested with similarly disappointing results for the United States.
In the latest PISA and TIMSS tests, the United States did better, scoring in the middle of the pack. On PISA, the United States was up 5 points in reading, 13 points in math and 13 points in science. If we maintain that pace, Loveless says, we will boost the U.S. gross domestic product by at least $41 trillion in the next 20 years, according to an analysis of PISA results by Stanford University economist Eric A. Hanushek.
So, since the problems with our schools aren't on the teachers end but in fact a problem with the country's inequality issues, how would making teachers jobs more difficult be a good thing?!Why are our international rankings low? Our test scores are dragged down by poverty. On the latest international test, called PISA, our schools with low poverty had scores higher than those of Japan, Finland, and other high-scoring nations. American schools in which as many as 25% of the students are poor had scores equivalent to the top-scoring nations. As the poverty level in the school rises, the scores fall.
Rhee ignores the one statistic where the United States is number one. We have the highest child poverty rate of any advanced nation in the world. Nearly 25% of our children live in poverty.
Last edited by Macbeth (2012-09-10 16:29:07)
