Teachers are striking and preventing some 400,000 students from having a chance of an education. In their own words they say their chief gripe is that somebody would have the unmitigated gall to rate or evaluate their performance; as if they don’t rate their STUDENTS’ performance every single day. They are also demanding that if teachers get laid off, they must be rehired not on the basis of MERIT but on the basis of union seniority.
The smartest parents in Chicago right now are those whose kids attend charter schools, private schools, or parochial schools. Those institutions don’t employ Chicago’s unionized public-school teachers, who went out on strike this morning for the first time in 25 years.
The coverage of the strike has obscured some basic facts. The money has continued to pour into Chicago’s failing public schools in recent years. Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city at $76,000 a year before benefits. The average family in the city only earns $47,000 a year. Yet the teachers rejected a 16 percent salary increase over four years at a time when most families are not getting any raises or are looking for work.
Source: nationalreview.com
Are Chicago teachers bothering to do their damn jobs?
(CNSNews.com) – In the Chicago Public Schools, where the teacher’s union is now seeking a 30 percent raise over the next two years, only 21 percent of 8th graders tested at grade-level proficient or better in reading in 2011 and only 20 percent tested at grade-level proficient or better in mathematics, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests administered by the U.S. Department of Education.
The reading and math scores of Chicago public-school 8th graders not only ranked below the national average and the Illinois average, they also ranked below the average for 8th graders attending public schools in other large cities around the country.
It gets even WORSE if your kid is a 4th grader:
Small wonder. Just 15 percent of fourth graders are proficient in reading and only 56 percent of students who enter their freshman year of high school wind up graduating.
In spite of earning 62% more in salary than the parents of the kids who trust their children to these “teachers,” we find that:
The city is being bled dry by the exorbitant benefits packages negotiated by previous elected officials. Teachers pay only 3 percent of their health-care costs and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois in the last five years, a full 71 cents has gone to teacher retirement costs.
Did you hear that? There’s no room in the education budget for stuff like BOOKS because 71 cents out of every single dollar that goes to education in Chicago ends up in the bloated Chicago teacher pension system.
Do you know what Illinois’ unfunded pension liability is? Well, that wasn’t a fair question, given that NOBODY does. But it was estimated at $210 BILLION going on a year and a half ago.
Fellow überliberal California’s unfunded pension anvil that is queued over our collectivists heads is estimated at $500 billion. And we can’t even figure out how to pay 1/20th of that!
When these blue states implode they will take the rest of America down the toilet drain and into the sewer right along with them.
Your child CAN’T have any educational resources. Because we’ve got vile liberals running the system in so many of these big cesspool-cities and they take care of themselves at the peoples’ expense year after year even as they demonize Republicans whose “crime” is wanting to break these damn unions.
Where are public school teachers putting their own kids?
In Philadelphia, 44 percent of the teachers put their children in private schools; in Cincinnati, 41 percent; Chicago, 39 percent; Rochester, N.Y., 38 percent. The same trends showed up in the San Francisco-Oakland area, where 34 percent of public school teachers chose private schools for their children; 33 percent in New York City and New Jersey suburbs; and 29 percent in Milwaukee and New Orleans.
Michael Pons, spokesman for the National Education Association, the 2.7-million-member public school union, declined a request for comment on the study’s findings. The American Federation of Teachers also declined to comment.
Public school teachers told the Fordham Institute’s surveyors that private and religious schools impose greater discipline, achieve higher academic achievement and offer overall a better atmosphere.
“Across the states, 12.2 percent of all families — urban, rural and suburban — send their children to private schools,” says the report, based on 2000 census data.
In Chicago, 39% of public school teachers get their kids the HELL out of public school hell, which is 220% higher than the rate of non-public teachers. If that doesn’t scream how bad the public school system is and scream that public school teachers recognize it more than anybody, you are too deaf to hear ANYTHING.
These Chicago teachers are simply godawful. You could literally argue that by striking and refusing to teach the children, they might actually be doing the kids a service. Because they’re just that bad at their jobs.
But damn it, they are liberals, they are Democrats, they are bureaucrats. And that means they are bloated leeches sucking taxpayer money like the parasites that liberals are.
They actually had the balls to turn down their noses at a SIXTEEN PERCENT PAY INCREASE. When non-union-government-school-teacher families are count themselves lucky to get ZERO raises if they just HAVE a job. So these pathetic failing teachers who frankly should have their asses fired so they can finally understand reality are demanding that they get MORE pay and benefits while demanding that they NEVER be held accountable for their failure to teach our children. Which is another way of saying they are PERFECT DEMOCRATS.
And, of course, their “official position” is just a meaningless posture of lies. This is what they REALLY demand:
In public, the Chicago Teachers Union uses generalities to describe its demands, with the union president, Karen Lewis, saying the teachers want a “fair contract.” But according to one senior Chicago official with direct knowledge of the negotiations with the union reps, “Their public rhetoric has almost nothing to do with what’s happening at the table.” Media accounts indicate that the city’s latest offer was to raise teacher pay 16% over the next four years, but the senior city official and other sources with knowledge of the negotiations say the union demanded raises that would amount to at least a 35% salary increase over three years as well as guaranteed jobs for any teachers who get laid off as Chicago’s schools downsize. The city does not have that kind of money, and other changes the union is demanding would essentially render meaningless a new law in Illinois that mandates improved teacher evaluations there.
Rahm Emanuel has already caved. He’s already offered them the keys to the business. Only union teachers don’t just want the keys to the business; they’re demanding the entire damn BUSINESS DISTRICT. It’s ALL or bust.
To be a Democrat is to be an entitlement pig. It is to demand a society in which they get more at somebody else’s expense.
Illinois is already the worst deadbeat state in the country. Ordinary residents (i.e., that’s people who DON’T belong to a government union) are getting I.O.U.s from the state to the tune of millions of dollars being stiffed while the teachers unions fight for the entire farm. Watch this 60 Minutes video if you don’t believe what I’m saying.
It’s just like what Obama just did to welfare (as the Government Accounting Office has stated for the record): these people don’t want to be held accountable; they don’t want to work. They want to be able to keep collecting more and more and more because they were able to force somebody else to pay for it.
Under Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s leadership, overall crime in New York City fell 57%, murder was reduced by 65%, shootings dropped 72% and New York was recognized by the F.B.I. as the safest large city in America for five consecutive years. Under Democrat Obama thug Rahm Emanuel, the exact opposite has happened. The murder rate is skyrocketing so fast under liberalism that it is beyond crazy. Just don’t let those kids work in a Chick-Fil-A; better that they embrace gangbanging instead.
The only thing that Chicago public school teachers seem to be able to teach is that if you tilt your gun sideways, it looks cooler when you’re shooting bullets into a crowd. And they think they should get a raise for that success.
When you vote Democrat, you vote for more stupid and more evil. And you’re going to get plenty of both if you get four more years of Obama.
Update, 9/11: Obama promised that he would walk the picket line of any union that went on strike in 2007 “as president of the United States of America”:
I hope Obama finds those shoes and actually fulfills JUST ONE promise he made and walks that picket line. So the American people can see once for all that Obama stands with the rabid union agenda and against America’s children.
Get out there and WALK for your fellow Marxists like you cynically promised, Obama. Let us see you for the radical and rabid community organizer you truly ARE.
Start Thinking Right 