Waiting for Scabby (Schools in Crisis III)

I know unions are often vilified as the unjust protector of the lazy, incompetent, shiftless worker. Especially when it comes to public sector unions. And it's particularly fashionable to blame teachers unions such as the Chicago Teachers Union for poor performance of schools and students, especially thanks to liberal movies like Waiting for "Superman." There are times when it is true that unions protect bloating, ineffeciency, or bad workers, but those few cases are stymied out of proportion. The enemy isn't the unions. No, in fact, they protect against growing inequity, and in the case of education unions, against the corporatization and privatization of education. They protect against the current tides that would turn our students into commodities - a tide that we see is unrelenting in the post-secondary world with overwhelming debt to an increasingly costly higher education.

Rather, the enemy is a mindset that says most of our children are not welcome to the education that the wealthy kids in the wealthy regions have. The enemy is a mindset that places high "accountability" on teachers to bring test scores of students with high stress levels, with malnourished stomachs, in overcrowded and underresourced schools up to par with wealthy, well-fed, well-regulated students with private tutors and classes no larger than fifteen a piece. Our children are taught to the test. Wealthy children are taught to succeed. I'm not hating, it's just that we need that as well.

The enemy is a system that takes what little money goes to working class and black/brown students and sucks it out through the Industrial Testing Machine to "assess" what students are learning through worthless and disenfranchising bubblesheets - bubblesheets that teachers spend the better part of the year teaching their kids how to fill correctly so they'd have a chance to allow the school to not be drastically defunded.

No, the union member who is teaching my daughter how to read and add in English and Spanish is doing a fantastic job. Because she has some protections. And she is being compensated decently for it as well - not as high as should be. But decently. As should be.

I worry about the next few years, as my daughter will have to - in order to meet national "standards" that unions are trying to fight against even as the administrators shout "Do not resist!" - conform more and more to testing apparatuses that stifle intellectual curiosity.

The main problem isn't the unions or their pensions. The main problem is that teachers are not encouraged to educate in a cooperative and meaningful fashion - but compelled to conform to normalizing and competitive corporate powers.

That's what propaganda like Waiting for Superman is about. Diane Ravitch:

It bears mentioning that nations with high-performing school systems—whether Korea, Singapore, Finland, or Japan—have succeeded not by privatizing their schools or closing those with low scores, but by strengthening the education profession. They also have less poverty than we do. Fewer than 5 percent of children in Finland live in poverty, as compared to 20 percent in the United States. Those who insist that poverty doesn’t matter, that only teachers matter, prefer to ignore such contrasts. 

If we are serious about improving our schools, we will take steps to improve our teacher force, as Finland and other nations have done. That would mean better screening to select the best candidates, higher salaries, better support and mentoring systems, and better working conditions.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Teachers unions are among the only forces fighting for education of our youth in the US. So-called liberal education reformers, whether their names be Duncan, Pritzker, Guggenheim, or Byrd-Bennett, fight for educational funds, using the the people's investment money to make a few people rich. This is the price we pay for not wanting to adequately fund our future.

Proudly Union Free and Immoral

From Michael Lind's article, Southern poverty pimps, at Salon:

The essence of the Southern economic model is not low taxation, but a lack of bargaining power by Southern workers of all races. Bargaining power at the bottom of the income scale is created by tight labor markets; unions; minimum wage laws combined with unemployment insurance; and social insurance, such as Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid. 

Naturally, the 21st-century descendants of Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun want to weaken everything that strengthens the ability of a Southern worker to say to a Southern employer:  “Take this job and shove it!” 

Tight labor markets are anathema to Southern employers.  They want loose labor markets that create a buyer’s market in wage labor.  That is why, at a time of mass unemployment among low-skilled workers in the U.S., most of the calls for expanding unskilled immigration in the form of “guest worker” programs are coming from Southern and Southwestern politicians.  Guest workers — that is, indentured servants bound to a single employer and unable to quit — are the ideal workers, from a neo-Confederate perspective.  They are cheap and unfree.

The article is worth a read. But it contributes to the malaise of false dichotomies. As if the North and the Rustbelt weren't taking on these same practices. Wisconsin, Indiana and even Michigan have elected pro-big business governors and legislatures who are working hard to dismantle worker's rights to bargain and act as professional organizations to temper corporate malaise affecting both the public and private sectors. Even union-happy Chicago is under attack from our overwhelmingly-elected mayor, a Democrat who was former Chief of Staff for President Barack Obama.

So, yeah, there's that. Meanwhile, capital created by workers continues to climb back to the top - or rather, flow back to the lowest levels- the ultrarich. But it's the working poor who are blamed for being poor and demanding anything of worth for their work. Got it.

Oh, and there is this from Lind's article for my fellow Christians who either hear or peddle the nonsense that charities should take care of the poor, not government (and for whom the words "economic justice" do not ring a bell):

In order to maximize the dependence of Southern workers on Southern employers in the great low-wage labor pool of the former Confederacy, it would be best to have no welfare at all, only local charity (funded and controlled, naturally, by the local wealthy families).

We've dealt with that nonsense here and here and here, though. 

Thinking of the Children, Will Not Anyone?

Recently, a cavalcade of aldermen and pastors have come out saying, while they support the aims of the teachers that went on strike in Chicago, or that while they are not siding with the Rahm Emanuel administration, they are with and for the kids (you know, like Helen Lovejoy) and, ergo, against the strike. They argue that striking now is just not the right move. That if the teachers were just a bit more patient and went through the proper channels, they would see the changes they need in due time. That now is not the time for protests, rallies, marches, unrest...

These arguments sound oddly familiar to me.

I find it ridiculous and somewhat telling that many of the same civic and religious leaders in Chicago that ostensibly support the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960's (or at least say they do), who hold them up as models of participating in civic democracy and empowerment, currently begrudge workers of what little non-violent tools they have for their own empowerment.

As parents, educators, and citizens, we must realize that educational power has been wrestled from the classrooms by millionaires, allowing those millionaires - untrained in and oblivious to the ways of education - to set the agenda, aims, and measurements of the classrooms, teachers and students. Despite the claims of "educational reform", however, the objectives have been the same since the halcyon days of the anti-Dewey "educational reformers" of the industrial age: Continuing to line the pockets of millionaires and keeping the lineage within their families.

And the rest of us are supposed to believe that we stand a chance to also be millionaires.

Are we supposed to expect to get that educational and economic power back to the educators through, what, a political system that is stacked up against them? Through, what, the good-hearted nature of Chicago's bosses? Because employers always desire the best for their employees? Because the rich are fair and good people by nature (is it because the influx of money has given them moral character or did they deserve their wealth because they are such good, moral folks)?

Yeah...

Liberals and progressives have decried teachers and social staff for desiring change. My daughter's entire elementary school has one nurse, who comes in once a week. In a school system filled to the brim with children with allergies, asthma, chronic health problems, trauma, diet-based obesity and related health problems - and they share nurses! What is that, one medically-trained nurse per thousand students? Counselors and therapists help, but the counselors are mostly academic/collegiate (though they, like the teachers themselves, stretch way beyond their designated, official roles and become de facto therapists and care-givers for the students). Teachers have the odds stacked up against them because the students have the odds stacked up against them. In this scenario, students lose - no matter how Superman you think the teachers can ever be, they can never be the extra necessary mother/father figures and grief counselors and therapists to thirty students at a time. Let alone do that plus their academic and basic social jobs they're expected to do. They sure aren't paid for that.

I know many Chicago Public School teachers - none of them are fat cats.

Not a singular one.

So why do progressives and civil servants begrudge hard-working professionals from getting a decent living wage? Do teachers really make too much? I thought, being good capitalists, progressives believed in a strong middle class? And this being a period when the middle class is dwindling and the economy and tax base is struggling as a result - I'd much rather that we have ten well-paid, professional teachers than one more executive pocketing another $760,000 (base salary for average teachers plus benefits allotted in monetary value times ten) and bemoaning the lazy poor. Because at least I know the teachers will spend their money and pay their taxes - rather than hiding it like a moocher.

But, secondly, teachers know that things have changed for the worse since the Testing Industrial Complex got a great foothold through the exasperatingly misguided (if not plain evil) No Child Left Behind and, in Chicago, the Renaissance 2010 Project - which is tied to our former school head (and Never Educator) Arne Duncan's Race to the Top initiative.

They are being forced to teach to the tests, while the tests are geared for a limited scope of the educational imagination. As a result of the high-stakes of these exams, nearly two months of each school year are spent teaching poor and underserved* students how to take tests better and more efficiently. They do not need to worry about such things in wealthier districts. Partly because the students do not have so much trauma and hunger to concern themselves with as high-poverty students do. They can concentrate much more easily on their academic studies.

But not being able to concentrate on studies, not being as focused, being diagnosed with learning disabilities are real, live, frustratingly detrimental problems among students in poverty and particularly students of color.

There were a million reasons to strike. There are a million reasons to shut down our work and demand what belongs to us and our children. Do not tell us that the time is not right for direct action or democracy, cowards.
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*The word "underserved" has a strange connotation. As if somehow, through no fault of anyone, passively some children just happen to land into this strange netherworld where they can receive adequate benefits, but they won't

Who Teaches Math to the Red Eye?

According to a lead story in Tuesday's print Chicago Red Eye (the baby sister of the Old Man Anti-Union McCormick's anti-union Tribune), the Chicago Board of Education offered Chicago Teacher's Union members pay raises in increments of 3% the first year and 2% for the following three years. According the the Red Eye, this amounts to a total of 16% for all teachers.

Now, I was taught by those same CTU teachers, and I'm more of a humanities person myself, but I don't think that math adds up...

Hand-Maiden to the Fascists?

The Chicago Tribune reported about a multi-million dollar oopsie on Chicago's public transit system that is pulling needed and promised cars from the "L":

"This is not a public process that we are going to air in public," CTA spokeswoman Molly Sullivan said last week in response to repeated questions to repeated questions from the Tribune about the production setback.
The $1.14 billion CTA order for 706 Bombadier cars is taxpayer-funded.

Brilliant piece of editing, CT.

Now, maybe we can set those same journalistic instincts on the mayor's office when they decide to criminalize protests, or bash teachers and librarians. Or privatize schools. Or force teachers to work an extra two hours a day for less money than they were promised to make before the extra hours were tagged on. And then call them lazy and incompetent for refusing to take his crap. Or force libraries to close on Mondays because he can't "find" three million dollars - but he can find patrons to pony up $80 million to fund extra "police" protection during the WTO meetings.

And he can dispatch spokespeople to tell us why we don't need to know information about our transit system and the workings of our tax moneys, and he can hold press conferences to bully teachers and principals into accepting his moral obligations, and he can stock the local news with his staff to inform us why protesters are really evil professional anarchists bent on destroying our way of life for no other purpose than being evil...

And, for the most, our media watchdogs lap it up.

When I was watching the WMAQ news propaganda post with some spokesperson from his administration, nobody questioned the assertions that most of the aldermen trusted the wise and noble Emanuel - who, unlike the rest of these hicks, spent time in the Big City of Warshington and Knows How the Real World Operates (T) - to curtail our freedom and speech and assemblage for Our Own Good (C). The Sun-Times practically labeled him a hero on the front page of its Saturday paper ("Rahm Reinstitutes Mondays at the Libraries!") and waited until the last paragraph to give any word to the opposition. And story after story after story repeats the bold-faced lie that union teachers are lazy, that it's their fault that economically deprived schools continue to "fail" (by the chosen rubrics), and that privatized charter schools (mostly for-profit schools run with public money that can choose who can enroll and can kick poor-performing students out, which regular public schools can not do) are automatically better-performing than public schools - even though tests by their own rubrics show repeatedly that that's not true.

But finally, finally, we can point to one peace of evidence to say that the entire local media is not in the fascists' pockets.

We got a lot more to keep pushing for, though.

Let's Activate!