Maybe Today Is the Day

Jabbo Special Edition:
Teacher Strike Day Four

It's still going, this teacher strike. Both sides left the bargaining table at midnight last night, confident that today, all their hopes and dreams would come true. Although, even if they shake hands on a deal today, Karen Lewis says teachers won't return to their classrooms until Monday at the earliest. Any deal they make at the bargaining table must be approved by the CTU House of Delegates and they won't be able to meet until sometime tomorrow.

I read that while the district has provided the union with a four inch binder of proposals, the union only came back with a single handwritten page (on notebook paper). You can read the scribble here:
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/428771/reported-union-proposal.pdf

Democrats across the country have watched this strike with concern, since it seems to evidence a growing rift in the Democratic Party, much like the contention between Tea Party and Establishment Republicans. Organized Labor (specifically, teacher unions) no longer sees eye to eye with wealthy Liberals (the ones who contribute the most money to campaigns, but also send their children to charter schools and private schools). The Obama administration is still careful not to take sides in this issue.

Obama, I read, has had an uneasy relationship with teacher unions. On one hand, he defends collective bargaining and promises government moulah to districts in financial straits. On the other, he champions opening charter schools and closing underperforming schools.

Here's where it gets wicked. Performance based evalutations, the central issue of this strike, form a cornerstone of Race to the Top, Obama's policy introduced to reform Bush's No Child Left Behind.

In 2010, Democratic Governor of Illinois, signed into law PERA (Performance Evaluation Reform Act) to comply with Race to the Top (also to get the promised moulah). The addition of performance based evaluations to the Chicago school district policy was in compliance with the state law. Part of the Chicago plan stipulated that the new evaluations (only 40% based on student performance) would not be counted for the first year, to work out any bugs in the system and to allow teachers a period of acclimation to the new evaluation system.

The CTU, though, argues that the standardized tests do not take into account povery, claiming that students from lower income neighborhoods do poorly on such tests and it's not the teacher's fault. They want to strike down evaluations based on student performance and secure a promise that any teacher laid off as a result of a school closing will get a preferential bid for new positions.

A humble rebuttle to that theory has been proffered by a joint study from Harvard and Columbia. This study asserts that poverty has less an impact on student performance than teacher quality. A poor performing teacher has the same impact on a child as missing 40% of the school year. A child with a top performing teacher gets the equivalent of two extra months of education. Then there's all this mumbo jumbo about even one year with a good teacher lowers the chances of teen pregnancy and raises the chances of higher salaries as an adult. Read it for yourself if you have plenty of coffee:
http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.pdf