Dear Friends:
The Chicago Teachers Union is getting ready – it would appear with glee – at the prospect of another teacher strike. A series of deliberate attempts to disrupt education planned by the AFT, you’ll recall that they walked out on thousands of kids for days at Chicago International Charter School, where they’d taken over some of the schools in years prior, only to settle for precisely what was originally offered, showing that this is about politics, not kids.
This tweet was the union’s response to Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s comments Monday that she’s still waiting for the Chicago Teachers Union to bargain in good faith before a strike starts. As kids might say, that’s pretty mature (not!)
It is way past time that we change the way the teaching profession is structured, as I argued in a recent oped I wrote about making all teachers entrepreneurs. We’ve also advocated that teachers who do well and earn additional skills and responsibilities should get compensated accordingly. But as long as we have an industrial factory model of teacher pay (to fit the industrial factory model of education), we will not solve the problem of teacher comp, union domination or the fact that most kids have to be the political pawns in this sinister game of chess.
CER is the only national organization that consistently – for TWENTY-SIX YEARS THIS WEEK! – challenges conventional wisdom and forcefully advocates for transforming the way we do education. We don’t simply weigh in on whether it’s right to negotiate. We take our battles and our credibility to the public, to lawmakers and to the media. That’s how we changed the education landscape to have the first charter and choice laws, and it’s how we will change policy so that all teachers who want to teach and achieve success in modern schooling will be the most capable and highest paid public employees we have.
Hope springs eternal here at CER. The CTU still has the opportunity to prove once and for all that it puts the welfare of Chicago’s many outstanding teachers and well-being of the city’s school kids at the top of their list. Short of that, however, we know we can succeed in the state halls – if you’ll help us.
Donate today and we’ll make sure every lawmaker in the country has a new model for how to deal with strikes, support teachers and ensure that every child in America has the opportunity that best meets their needs.
