Originally posted by Buick355
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Unions don't strike on an election year when a democrat incumbent is up for election. It looks like a huge setup to have Obama come in with Rahm Emmanuel and take credit for saving the day and boost his ratings. In a few days Obama will be the hero and the media will run with it as an example of his governing prowess.Leave a comment:
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I love when the politicians that birth and jerk off unions get ass fucked by them.Leave a comment:
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To be clear, I think the strike is bullshit. And I'll say again, fuck the unions. But there are much bigger issues with all this, all across America. Teachers are expected to educate students, mentor them, help them in nearly every aspect of their life. And then more or less judged strictly on scores of standardized testing, which is a complete and utter failure. No Child Left Behind has done nothing but set the American education system back by decades.Leave a comment:
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You need to work on your context clues, or give up. That is not the complaint. The complaint is that the test scores are too heavily considered in the evaluation. And it's a legitimate complaint. Do you know how public education works? At all? Do you know how most teachers are evaluated? Don't you see an issue with that?Originally posted by Forever_frost View PostLeave a comment:
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They didn't like the fact that these evaluations would be tied to test scores.Originally posted by bcoop View PostLeave a comment:
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damn it, tldr fucked me over this time..
i owe you an arbys dinner brent!
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Your comment prior to the article is misleading, and flat out incorrect.
They are not "absolutely opposed" to evaluation. Their issue is the new evaluation method puts too much importance on test scores. I don't know where you got that nonsense, but it's false.
The entire education system is fucked. This is no surprise. And fuck the unions.Leave a comment:
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i am for everything except the teacher evaluations, wtf is up with that bullshit? i understand being a teacher is difficult but that does not mean you should not be evaluated to make sure you are doing your jobLeave a comment:
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I didn't think teachers could strike
Evidently in Chicago they're on strike as of today. Reasons? They want more pay, more benefits, more teachers in the classroom and are absolutely opposed to teacher evaluations.
CHICAGO – Thousands of teachers walked off the job Monday in Chicago, the third-largest U.S. school district, as city officials prepared to look after thousands of students who could end up wandering unsafe streets.
Some 26,000 teachers and support staff were expected to join the picket after union leaders announced they were far from resolving a contract dispute with school district officials. City officials acknowledged that children left unsupervised -- especially in neighborhoods with a history of gang violence -- might be at risk, but vowed to protect the nearly 400,000 students' safety.
The walkout posed a tricky test for Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said he would work to end the strike quickly.
"This is not a strike I wanted," Emanuel said Sunday night, not long after the union announced the action. "It was a strike of choice ... it's unnecessary, it's avoidable and it's wrong."
Contract negotiations between Chicago Public School officials and union leaders that stretched through the weekend were resuming Monday.
Among teachers protesting Monday morning outside Benjamin Banneker Elementary School on Chicago's South Side, eighth-grade teacher Michael Williams said he wanted a quick contract resolution.
"We hoped that it wouldn't happen. We all want to get back to teaching," Williams said, adding that wages and classroom conditions need to be improved.
Officials said some 140 schools would be open between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. so the children who rely on free meals provided by the school district can eat breakfast and lunch, school district officials said.
"We will make sure our kids are safe, we will see our way through these issues and our kids will be back in the classroom where they belong," Emanuel said.
The school district asked community organizations to provide additional programs for students, and a number of churches, libraries and other groups plan to offer day camps and other activities.
Police Chief Garry McCarthy said he would take officers off desk duty and deploy them to deal with any teachers' protests as well as the thousands of students who could be roaming the streets.
Union leaders and district officials were not far apart in their negotiations on compensation, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said. But other issues -- including potential changes to health benefits and a new teacher evaluation system based partly on students' standardized test scores -- remained unresolved, she said.
"This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided," Lewis said. "We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve."
Emanuel and the union officials have much at stake. Unions and collective bargaining by public employees have recently come under criticism in many parts of the country, and all sides are closely monitoring who might emerge with the upper hand in the Chicago dispute.
The timing also may be inopportune for Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff whose city administration is wrestling with a spike in murders and shootings in some city neighborhoods and who just agreed to take a larger role in fundraising for President Barack Obama's re-election campaign.
As the strike deadline approached, parents spent Sunday worrying about how much their children's education might suffer and where their kids will go while they're at work.
The school board was offering a fair and responsible contract that would most of the union's demands after "extraordinarily difficult" talks, board president David Vitale said. Emanuel said the district offered the teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years, doubling an earlier offer.
Lewis said among the issues of concern was a new evaluation that she said would be unfair to teachers because it relied too heavily on students' standardized test scores and does not take into account external factors that affect performance, including poverty, violence and homelessness.
She said the evaluations could result in 6,000 teachers losing their jobs within two years. City officials disagreed and said the union has not explained how it reached that conclusion.
Emanuel said the evaluation would not count in the first year, as teachers and administrators worked out any kinks. Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the evaluation "was not developed to be a hammer," but to help teachers improve.
The strike is the latest flashpoint in a very public and often contentious battle between the mayor and the union.
The district and union agreed in July on how to implement a longer school day, striking a deal to hire back 477 teachers who had been laid off rather than pay regular teachers more to work longer hours. That raised hopes the contract dispute would be settled soon, but bargaining continued on the other issues.
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