Barack Obama, then still a U.S. senator from Illinois, said
this back in 2006 about teachers, unions and education:
“If we’re serious about building a twenty-first century
school system, we’re going to have to take the teaching profession seriously. …
It also means paying teachers what they’re worth.”
These words, from his book The Audacity of Hope, would seem to put now-President Obama decidedly on
the side of the 29,000 striking public school teachers in Chicago. So would
these:
“Teachers unions have resisted the idea of pay for
performance, in part because it could be disbursed at the whim of a principal.
The unions also argue—rightly, I think—that most school districts rely solely
on test scores to measure teacher performance, and that test scores may be
highly dependent on factors beyond any teacher’s control, like the number of
low-income or special-needs students in their classroom.”
Furthermore, “working with teachers’ unions, states and
school districts can develop better measures of performance, ones that combine
test data with a system of peer review.”
I remember Obama’s speech at the 2005 AFL-CIO convention in
Chicago and his resounding endorsement of organized labor and praise for its
contributions to American life and well-being. So why are some of his closest
political allies—Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and U.S. Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan—acting like Republicans, pushing privatized education in the form
of publicly funded-but privately run charter schools, a new and intense focus
on standardized test scores to assess teachers, and a general anti-union
attitude when it comes to public school teachers?
At times Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff at the White
House and a featured speaker at the recent Democratic National Convention in
Charlotte, N.C., and school leaders in his administration have come perilously
close to sounding like one of those Mississippi legislators back in 1985 who
dealt with an 11-week statewide strike by public school teachers by granting
them a $4,400 pay raise over three years but at the cost of no-strike provision
in state law that prevented them from ever striking again.
Chicago is not Mississippi, however, even if a whole lot of
people live there who have Mississippi roots. Despite what Emanuel and his ilk
may prefer, Chicago is still union country with 25 percent of its
workforce—some 500,000 workers—proudly carrying their union cards. Polls have
shown the public in Chicago sides with the teachers, not Rahm Emanuel in this
dispute.
The week-long strike in Chicago may be nearing its end as
leaders from both sides prepare for a key bargaining session on Sunday.
What will continue beyond that bargaining table, however, is
the debate over the future of public education in this country.
Across the South and indeed the nation, politicians have
pointed an accusing finger at teachers in decrying poor performances by
students in public schools. The billionaire Koch Brothers, virulently
anti-union, have poured many millions into efforts to push charter schools to replace
public schools, to impose a test-based teacher assessment, and bust teacher
unions.
Koch Brothers money generally goes to Republican
politicians, but you have to wonder if they and their ideological brothers also
don’t have the ear of major Democrats like Emanuel.
Like the privatization of prisons, public school privatization offers yet another opportunity
for big corporations to get their
hands into public coffers and earn a hefty profit. To borrow a point from the
late George Wallace of Alabama, is there indeed “a dime’s worth of difference”
between Republicans and Democrats on some of the most important issues facing
Americans?
In Chicago, Emanuel, like former Mayor Richard Daley and
former city schools chief (and now the nation’s schools chief) Duncan have
pushed hard for standardized tests in the classrooms, charter schools, and
closures for under-performing schools.
Public education in Chicago is a study in poverty. Nearly 90
percent of the students are from low-income families, and 42 percent of them
are African American. Some 160 schools in the city have no libraries.
Yes, teachers have asked for pay raises—raises to match
their increased workloads and workweeks—but also on the table is a call to the
city leadership to invest in public education. Put social workers into the
schools, try to save rather than eliminate struggling schools, at least fix the
broken air-conditioning units.
The heart of the problem is poverty, and politicians of both
parties often have a real hard time dealing with that problem. It’s much easier
to schmooze with the big bucks types on Chicago’s Gold Coast and talk about
running schools like a business and how that’s going to solve everything.
Meanwhile, students sweat it out, and their teachers sweat
it out with them.
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