Monday’s lesson plan from Chicago
Monday was a long day at the Chicago Teachers Union Strike HQ that began before my 5 am arrival. CTU staffers and volunteers were glued to laptops and cell phones. The sound of staple guns attaching signs to sticks competed with the voices of people reporting on the latest news from the picket lines. There were huddled meetings sharing data and a mass meeting of the strike coordinators that erupted into cheers as the overwhelming success of the strike became clear.
Across the city parents, students and teachers joined together on the picketlines. There were very few scabs and massive participation on the picketlines. In fact it was hard to travel anywhere in Chicago without seeing a picketline. Across the city people were stopping anyone wearing the now well known red t-shirts and asking about the latest news, offering thanks or just wanting to express their opinion, either for or against.
Bus drivers sounded their horns in support along with truck drivers and ordinary motorists. Cops and firefighters made their solidarity known. Working class Chicago was expressing its opinion and by the reports that I heard, the opinion was overwhelming in support of the teachers, even by those who were inconvenienced by the strike. Read more
Filed under: Education, Unions
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Spirits were high at the Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) Strike HQ
UPDATE: No agreement was reached between the Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union. There will be a strike beginning Monday morning.
I was walking my bike out of the CTA Blue Line stop nearest to the CTU Strike HQ at around 11:15 am Saturday morning when I encountered two Chicago cops standing at the entrance. They noticed my red shirt with the “Stand with the Chicago Teachers Union” emblazoned across the front.
One said, “You must be a teacher.” I replied, “Yeah, I’m headed for the Strike Headquarters to volunteer my services. He answered,”Good luck,” while his partner smiled. I thanked them both and was on my way. It was the first time a Chicago cop had ever wished me well during the entire 36 years I have lived here.
The CTU Strike HQ is in the Teamster Local 705 building
The CTU Strike banner had gone up late Friday afternoon September 7. The CTU had chosen the Teamsters Local 705 building as their Strike HQ because of the easy parking and its quieter, less crowded West Side location. The choice also symbolized the need for organized labor to stick together in solidarity. The Chicago Board of Education and the Chicago Teachers Union are still far apart even though negotiations have been going on for months. Sunday midnight is the strike deadline.
I was at Strike HQ Friday night as a volunteer for the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign (CTSC). The CTSC is an outgrowth of Occupy Chicago and works closely with the CTU to organize community and labor support.
Filed under: Education, Unions
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The U.S. Postal Service is essential to our democracy and our economy
The free exchange of ideas is critical to representative government and was one of the reasons why the US Postal Service(USPS) was created. At its founding the Postal Service had a deliberate policy of subsidizing the mailing of newspapers and other periodicals, precisely to encourage the communication of ideas. The importance of this was understood by President George Washington who signed the bill authorizing the US Postal Service in 1792. The idea of a postal service is enshrined in the US Constitution.
Filed under: Society and Economy, Unions, US politics
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The Chicago Teacher Revolt—- of 1933
“When America’s great crisis is a story in the pages of history, there will be a significant chapter devoted to the unfailing sacrifice of the Chicago teachers, who are now carrying on under inconceivable difficulties, far beyond the point which might be fairly considered the limit of human endurance.” —The NEA Journal April 1933 (NEA: National Education Association)
On the eve before the Great Depression, what the NEA called “America’s great crisis”, Chicago’s teachers found themselves in a contradictory and uncomfortable position. Although their pay and working conditions were better than the blue collar workers in the city, their work in the classroom was becoming increasingly difficult. There had been a dramatic increase in Chicago public school students all through the 1920s which left the schools scrambling for funding.
The schools were largely financed through property taxes, and powerful corporations, along with real estate interests, had been dodging taxes for decades. The system was plagued with corruption and mismanagement and by the late 1920s was bogged down in lawsuits, court actions and a business-led tax strike. To make matters worse, the appointed school board had become a cesspool of financial corruption, especially under the gangster-tainted reign of Mayor William Thompson, an ally of Al Capone. By 1929, the year of the Wall Street stock market crash, Chicago was essentially broke.
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy, Unions
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Corporate America wants inexperienced teachers in the classroom
It’s true! The big money people want to put the rookie squad into our classrooms. Corporate funded attacks on public education and teachers’ unions have portrayed higher paid, more experienced teachers as the villains of the current financial crisis. It’s good-bye, Mr. Chips and sayonara, Ms. Frizzle.
In 1987-88 the typical primary or secondary teacher had 15 years of experience. But by 2007-2008, the typical teacher had 1-2 years of experience. Not only that, but 50% of teachers leave the profession within 5 years. Veteran educator Larry Cuban has estimated how long it takes to actually learn the job.
“Only by the end of the fourth or fifth year of teaching do most newcomers become competent and confident in figuring out lessons, knowing the ins-and-outs of classroom management, and taking risks in departing from the routines of daily teaching.”
Brad Juppe of the US Department of Education is blunt:
“The crisis is upon us. The mode of experience being one to two years should be the most alarming thing we have come upon.”
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy
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The new Chicago school budget strangles public education
“When you wage war on the public schools, you’re attacking the mortar that holds the community together. You’re not a conservative, you’re a vandal.” —Garrison Keeler
The 2013 Chicago Public Schools(CPS) budget received a resounding thumbs down at a community forum held at Malcolm X College on the West Side the evening of July 11. Over 200 people filled the auditorium to listen to an explanation of the budget from Chief Operating Officer Tim Cawley and then ask questions and make their own recommendations. The reaction of those who spoke from the audience was overwhelmingly negative. Cawley was loudly booed several times. Similar meetings were held at Kennedy-King and Daley colleges on the South Side. No meetings were held on the city’s North Side.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) described it as a “fantasy budget at best.”
Earlier that day Moody’s Investor’s Service lowered the CPS bond rating, noting that the $431 million dollar reserve fund had been emptied to pay for the 2013 budget. Moody’s warned that,”The drastic use of reserves will eliminate the district’s unreserved operating fund balance and significantly reduce operating liquidity.”
Moody’s said that a second rating drop may happen in the near future. The ratings drop means that the CPS will have to pay more to borrow money. It already has accumulated a 5.6 billion dollar debt.
The budget has ignited a firestorm of opposition across the city, with even the normally conservative Chicago Tribune and Crains Chicago Business chiming in. The Chicago schools budget fight has national implications as other cities struggle with similar problems. Read more
Filed under: Education, Society and Economy, Unions
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Medicaid for all poor people? Don’t count on it.
State governments across the USA have been cutting Medicaid and health care-related funding faster than Smithfield butchers hogs. These programs were supposed to help low income people, many of whom already suffer from the poor health that often comes with poverty.
When care is restricted or cut off altogether, some people are going to die prematurely. They will most likely die quietly, perhaps mourned by their families and friends. Some will die alone.They may die in great pain or they may pass away in their sleep, but inevitably, some deaths will result from decisions made by politicians who don’t worry about choosing between food and medicine. One of the persistent myths in the USA is that poor people can “always get free health care” if they want it. We need to dispel that myth. Somehow.
Filed under: Society and Economy
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The Chicago Public Schools: Another World is Possible
“The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.” ― Jean Piaget
Chicago public school teachers are taking a collective deep breath and preparing for what may become their greatest challenge of all, saving public education in the city. While the corporate-owned Chicago media has focused on pay issues, the length of school days and the strike authorization vote, the media consistently ignores how public education is under relentless attack by corporate “reformers” who use their wealth and power to starve public education of funds, silence its advocates, sabotage its improvement and pursue privatization of schools.
One only has to enter the realm of Chicago corporate school reform to see what a grim and cheerless world it can be. Rows of mainly working class children are crowded into cramped classrooms doing hours of repetitive drills to prepare them for hours more of hi-stakes standardized testing.
Many of the children are deprived of art, music, and physical education. They can be housed in poorly maintained deteriorating buildings with falling plaster, balky heating systems, broken windows and leaky roofs. Their teachers, many of them excellent veteran educators, try to hide their anxiety as they worry about being replaced by cheaper inexperienced nonunion labor.
The parents will organize sit-ins and Occupy-style encampments, their faces anxious about the possibility of arrest as they press for building repairs, libraries, creative activities for their kids and the assurance that their neighborhood school will still be there in the fall.
Neighborhood public schools are deliberately starved for funding and resources which go to the proliferation of “turnaround” schools and charters, many of which perform no better and sometimes worse than their predecessors.
Filed under: Education
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Chicago Nurses Say: We Need a Robin Hood Tax!
National Nurses United(NNU) took up the cause of Robin Hood at Chicago’s downtown J.P. Morgan Chase building on June 19. With its merry band of tax reforming nurses, the NNU held a lunch hour rally to press for a financial transactions tax (FTT) or as it is more commonly called, a “Robin Hood Tax”. Chicago was among 15 cities where similar rallies were held.
Easily recognized by their red scrubs along with their Robin Hood hats and masks, NNU members described the Robin Hood tax in signs that read,”It’s Not a Tax On the People. It’s a Tax For the People.”
Continuing a campaign that saw several thousand nurses and their supporters in Chicago’s Daley Plaza during NATO week, the nurses hope that Congress will pass such a tax to help finance a genuine economic recovery by investing in housing, education, health, infrastructure, green jobs and other needs.
Filed under: Society and Economy
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The Killing Towers of the US Telecom Industry
He fell 120 feet to the ground while dismantling an unused communications tower in Lincoln, Illinois on June 8, 2005. Although identified only as employee #1 in the official OSHA report, he was 43 year old Toby Wheale of Glendale, AZ. Wheale’s employer, Wireless Horizon Inc. of Lincoln IL, was fined $750. The head of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) once called tower climbing “the most dangerous job in America.” Apparently $750 was the worth of this person’s life in the communications industry.
A total of 100 people died falling from communication towers between 2003-2011. Of these, 50 fell from cell phone towers. The worst carnage was between 2006-2008 when the iPhone rollout caused a spike in phone traffic that ATT had not anticipated and a major overhaul of the system was required. The death rate for tower climbers is about 10 times that of construction workers.
Tower climbing in the telecom industry is non-union.
Filed under: Society and Economy, Unions
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