Thread: Chicago Teachers Union Strike: Che Shirts, Anarchists Flags and Students as Props

Chicago Teachers Union Strike: Che Shirts, Anarchists Flags and Students as Props



by Rebel Pundit11 Sep 2012, 9:11 AM PDT

Monday, thousands of striking Chicago Public School teachers, the highest-paid teachers in the country, stood in solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Union as they took to the streets—and caused a traffic nightmare for the rest of downtown Chicago.

To get their message across, these protesters brought hundreds of Chicago Public School students to march and chant on behalf of the teachers. Students chanted alongside their teachers, “we are the teachers, the mighty-mighty-mighty teachers,” and “hey-hey, ho-ho, Rahm Emanuel’s got to go.”

When questioned, the teachers who were leading their students in the march replied that it is appropriate to bring children—some as young as seventh grade—out to the protest, “because it affects their future.”
Some students were holding signs from Chicago Jobs with Justice. When asked if they students knew what Jobs with Justice was, they responded, “I don’t know, jobs with benefits? “ Chicago Jobs with Justice is a socialist lobbying group that was recently honored at the Democratic Socialists of America’s Annual Eugene Debs Award Dinner.





Those students in the march would have observed that many of their teachers chose to wear red Che Guevera t-shirts and wave revolutionary anarchist flags.


When interviewed, one teacher said he believes that the Chicago Teachers Union supports the “revolutionary unionist” movement and pointed to a local school network in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago, where teachers have adopted a “syndicalist platform” (revolutionary unionism) and elected their delegate based on those values.

A frequent complaint from teachers was that they were there to lobby for air conditioning in schools. During an interview with one teacher on the subject, he couldn’t point to any statistics about which schools have air conditioning but argued that “the schools that are predominantly African-American and Hispanic don’t have it, but the schools that are predominantly Caucasian…the schools that I go to, have it.”

SEE Second Video Below - IMO - racist

For a movement that is contorting itself to be presented to the public as “for the kids,” teachers in Che Guevara shirts, complaining about air conditioning, that knowingly use their students and place extremist signs in their hands, without educating them as to what they’re asking them to represent, couldn’t be further from “for the kids.” Try, “for solidarity”—and “for ourselves.”
Chicago Teachers Union Strike: Che Shirts, Anarchists Flags and Students as Props

Che-cago Teachers Union radicals strike for revolution - and air conditioning!

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

When teachers' union bosses place themselves above children

So teachers in Chicago public schools have decided to leave the children they are responsible for out on the street while they fight against accountability? For those who haven't followed the situation, the Chicago Teachers' Union is entering Day 2 of its strike today and children attending Chicago Public Schools have nowhere to go. (The 45,000 children attending the area's charter schools are in better luck, though, because teachers at those schools recognize that a strike during classroom hours wouldn't be "fair to the children," according to this article in the Chicago Sun-Times. Apparently, their peers at the traditional public schools aren't hung up with such concerns.)


So what's at the center of this dispute? Is the school board trying to strip away teachers' retirement or health benefits? Is it trying to reduce teacher pay? Surely, for teachers to leave their classrooms and take to the streets, they must be in danger of losing something significant, right?

Not really. Although the Chicago school district faces a projected budget deficit of $3 billion over the next three years, they've offered what amounts to an average raise of 16 percent over the duration of the next 4-year union contract.

You read that right. The CTU was offered a 16 percent raise and took to the streets in anger. How many Nevadans have been offered a similar pay raise in the past few years? Could you imagine taking to the streets and making children pay because of your outrage at such an offer?

What's really at stake here isn't about pay, of course. It's about accountability. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (former Obama Chief-of-Staff) has taken a page out of the Obama Education Department and insisted that student performance play a role in teacher evaluations. Indeed, it's not just the Obama White House and federal education Secretary Arne Duncan who believe that teachers' should be measured, in part, by their ability to improve the academic performance of their students. Nearly every education researcher or advocate from Left to Right (outside of the union camp, that is) has reached similar conclusions.


After all, if public education is meant to benefit the students involved, then success should ultimately be measured by whether students are benefitting, right?

But the CTU will have none of it. As they see it, the purpose of a public education system is to dispense jobs and goodies to adults and not to help children. That's why this Reason video, aptly titled "The Machine," is particularly poignant.




To its credit, the Nevada State Teachers' Association didn't have the gall to go this far when the 2011 legislature, at the behest of Gov. Brian Sandoval, voted to require that student performance account for at least 25 percent of future teacher evaluations in Nevada. However, its representatives did fight vigorously to make the requirement subject to collective bargaining agreements at the district level, so that local union representatives would later be able to quash the new accountability requirements.

Thomas Jefferson believed that an educated populace was indispensable to the preservation of the republic, which is why he was such a fierce advocate for public education. That legacy of American public education, however, was focused on providing children with the means to be successful in life and contribute meaningfully to society. It wasn't about dispensing patronage or other goodies through a shamefully political process.

It's time we return to that legacy because education is too important to be subverted by special interests.



Write on Nevada: When teachers' union bosses place themselves above children