Chicago teachers strike

[sumbrownkid]

Obama is like "Nothing to do here..." when it comes to this.

But he's good reasons at the moment.

 

[shortcake57]

If the city can't afford to pay them then they're not getting raises. Like Danoff insinuated, the main point of unionization is to more easily suck the life out of corporations and government institutions. If your employer can't afford to pay you then you either need to shut up and deal with it or get another job. It was their fault in the first place for going into a profession that depends on near-bankrupt government institutions for funding. What a stupid, stupid idea. Unless they're the best and highly educated, which most of them aren't, then they won't be able to get a private school or college position.

Going back to what Keef brought up before, if the city continues to pay teachers what they can afford and what they think the teachers are worth, we will, at some point, reach equilibrium. Those who think that a teacher's salary is unfair won't go into that profession. Perhaps that will leave the city with a want of teachers (or not), and, if so, the city will begin to pay a bit more. This is simple supply-demand economics, and it doesn't work if people being compensated simply because "their heart was in the right place" or because their group was a bigger bully. If you feel you're getting paid less than you feel you deserve, you're wrong--you deserve as much as you can get.

 

[Encyclopedia]

76000$?! That's like half a million SEK! A lot of doctors don't even earn that much here. And on top of that they want a 30% raise? Megalomania?

Our teachers are complaining a lot about low wages and the average pay for a teacher around here is around 40000-45000 a year. Which is still pretty good.

 

[Keef]

Going back to what Keef brought up before, if the city continues to pay teachers what they can afford and what they think the teachers are worth, we will, at some point, reach equilibrium. Those who think that a teacher's salary is unfair won't go into that profession. Perhaps that will leave the city with a want of teachers (or not), and, if so, the city will begin to pay a bit more. This is simple supply-demand economics, and it doesn't work if people being compensated simply because "their heart was in the right place" or because their group was a bigger bully. If you feel you're getting paid less than you feel you deserve, you're wrong--you deserve as much as you can get.

The law of supply and demand is only true when all parties involved have a motive to profit. Government, by definition, does not have a profit motive and so the law of supply and demand doesn't apply.

 

[Omnis]

Is that $76k a median or mean average?

 

[shortcake57]

The law of supply and demand is only true when all parties involved have a motive to profit. Government, by definition, does not have a profit motive and so the law of supply and demand doesn't apply.

Perhaps "supply-demand" isn't the correct word for what I mean. The government does want to pay its employees as low as it can get away with, like any business. However, it's motive to do so is infinitely smaller, as it won't lose profit--it'll just raise taxes on us. What I want to see is schools, as well as almost every other sector of the government, be privatized. Government has no real incentive to perform fficiently or well but "for the good of the people", which generally isn't good enough.

 

[Keef]

Is that $76k a median or mean average?

It was stated as an average in all the news stories.

Perhaps "supply-demand" isn't the correct word for what I mean. The government does want to pay its employees as low as it can get away with, like any business. However, it's motive to do so is infinitely smaller, as it won't lose profit--it'll just raise taxes on us. What I want to see is schools, as well as almost every other sector of the government, be privatized. Government has no real incentive to perform fficiently or well but "for the good of the people", which generally isn't good enough.

I agree that ultimately all school systems should be privatized. I'd be happy with the Federal government getting out of the business of education and leaving those decisions up to the people of the states, local governments, and state governments to decide. At least then it would be constitutional.

 

[Omnis]

If it's a CPSS mean it's going to be pushed way up by bloated superintendent and admin salaries. Unless they counted teachers and only teachers.

 

[Keef]

I already offered a link to the local news story that said, "A Chicago Public Schools spokesperson said average pay for teachers, without benefits, is $76,000."

Apparently the average salary for CPS teachers is $76,000*. That's average, and you know with a school system that large there will be regular retirements and fresh hires. It's not like the system was started 30 years ago and all the teachers have been there for decades.

*According to a CPS spokesperson. Only $71,000 according to the union, which places CPS in either 1st or 2nd place, with New York averaging ~$73,000.

But who knows, maybe they included the local congressman in that calculation.

 

[BJBEOSmitty]

Cost of living is very high in Chicago and its enormous suburbs. Not that $70,000 there is equal to $25,000 in other big cities, not saying that at all...

But I would not be surprised if $70,000 there is about $50,000 in Indianapolis. Come to think of it, I know Public Elementary School Teachers who make around $50,000 in an Indy suburb.

A nice 30 year old 2,500 square foot 4 BR house on a large lot in a great neighborhood with a pool and parks/playgrounds is about $170,000 here. Same house in Chicago may be double that.

Still, unionized teachers? Meh. Unionized Grocery Store Workers, even sillier.

 

[bzking23]

nobody has majorly hit the subject on the students and a possible increased school year about this. what do you guys think about the students?

 

[Danoff]

nobody has majorly hit the subject on the students and a possible increased school year about this. what do you guys think about the students?

They're being held hostage by teachers who want pay increases for the same work.

 

[Keef]

Cost of living is very high in Chicago and its enormous suburbs. Not that $70,000 there is equal to $25,000 in other big cities, not saying that at all...

But I would not be surprised if $70,000 there is about $50,000 in Indianapolis. Come to think of it, I know Public Elementary School Teachers who make around $50,000 in an Indy suburb.

A nice 30 year old 2,500 square foot 4 BR house on a large lot in a great neighborhood with a pool and parks/playgrounds is about $170,000 here. Same house in Chicago may be double that.

I'm sure Danoff has already considered the cost of living aspect. I don't have any property-owning experience but he's lived in LA and recently move near Denver, the two areas probably having very different real estate values and wage demographics.

 

[Pupik]

Gives them them legal protection to demand higher salaries and for no reason.

Come on, you're made of better words than that.

 

[Danoff]

Come on, you're made of better words than that.

They're accurate.

 

[Pupik]

They're accurate.

Okay, I'm not in full support of this strike, but if asked to do more work and use up more of your time, you'd probably ask for a raise, too. (Unless you were quite satisfied with the situation, naturally.) If the demands aren't met, you have largely the same right.

On the other hand, teachers have more asked of them every year, and attempts to tie students that don't perform and parents that do not care about their kids' grades is not an accurate way to decide on the pay-rates of teachers. This isn't a problem for most middle-and-upper class neighborhood schools, or those with specialist programs/magnet schools, but for many poor and lower-class areas, this idea is going to unfairly penalize teachers and administrations who are already likely in a school that has far greater dangers than making sure the kids turn in their homework.

We likely all came from safer, middle and upper class backgrounds, and we we're schooled in suburban neighborhoods in which poverty, crime, and a tax base that doesn't exactly serve the needs of maintaining a school and inspiring the best out of kids was a issue we never dealt with.

Sure, there are teachers who think nothing else than "it's 5pm somewhere" and can get by on past curricula, or flat-out borrow an entire year's lesson plan from another instructor from that grade. And there's plenty that will never be satisfied...but tons that enjoy it and love the challenge. And a few that should have been put out to pasture years ago. Yes, the summers off and every Christmas holiday season is also a massive perk...something my wife agrees is totally worth 9-10 months of hoop-jumping.

Teachers in public schools do not get to choose their students in advance. Public schools don't get to turn away students that have mental disabilities, and are not allowed to do much in the way of discipline, and deal with complex behavioral problems. Hell, they don't even necessarily have students that have to know or understand English.

I could go on and on, but mull some of this over before assumptions that they're greedy ne'er do wells that failed grad school or the local college of business (not your words, but to extinguish some of the crap I've read so far in this thread).

Public schools need an overhaul, but just as we whine about it with finance and government, this crap doesn't happen overnight, and as long as the Supreme Court stated that everyone has a right to it...changes are going to occur at a rate that mountain ranges are formed.

 

[Danoff]

On the other hand, teachers have more asked of them every year

Not seeing it. What I do see is public schools asking more of parents every year. They're starting to do some really underhanded things to get parents to take a day of vacation and spend it babysitting kids so that teachers can kick back and relax.

A friend of mine who was a lawyer making $200k per year was given the choice between showing up at school and teaching kid how to make macaroni necklaces and cut construction paper or instead have to explain to her kids why she's the only mom who didn't spend a day babysitting the kids... and the teachers will pile a load of "you don't care about your child's education" on as well... as if making sure they don't hurt themselves with safety scissors is somehow education.

Now, she doesn't get paid if she doesn't work. So spending 4 hours babysitting a classroom of kids costs over $1000 of her money.

It's an alarming trend in public schools (even and especially in high income neighborhoods) to start strong-arming parents into volunteering at the school. They have your kids, and they will use your kids against you to give themselves a break.

Supreme Court stated that everyone has a right to it.

Kids also have a right to food, clothing, and housing. None of that needs to be provided by the government.

 

[Pupik]

Kids also have a right to food, clothing, and housing. None of that needs to be provided by the government.

Then your stated problem is with something essentially outside the scope of this thread.

 

[Danoff]

Another even more alarming way that teachers are starting to offload their work onto parents is by over assigning homework. In class they can spend the time doing arts and crafts, and at home they have 100 math problems that their parents need to teach them. How about the teachers do the math problems and the parents do the fun stuff? Or how about parents' time at home is spent focusing on the things parents want to teach the kids that isn't getting taught in public school. When they pile enough homework on kindergartners (yes you read that right) you can't read them the books or do the mental exercises that you choose - because 100% of your child's free time is spent working on what the public school system chooses.

I've seen this with a lot of friends of mine, and I think it's a major step in the wrong direction. If teachers are sending kindergartners home with homework, they're not teaching enough in class. That should be seen as a failure of the teacher.

 

[Pupik]

Curricula increases, and some teachers aren't thrilled with the idea of giving kindergarteners and first-graders homework, either. But if we're not dazzled by supposedly being the 29th-smartest country the world (this is a made-up statistic, it's never top-three or some such number, and that gets people cranky), then all these initiatives to ratchet up scores has to fall back somewhere. America is not going to be number one, because there's many kids, parents, and yes...instructors that don't value an education. I'm never going to say we're not a smart country, but we're diversified in so many different facets of society and not all values are juggled or prioritized in the same order.

There's other things kids need to learn which aren't norm-referenced by textbook manufacturers: The kids are supposedly lazy and obese so they have to have physical education...never mind they're kids, so they have energy to expend. We don't want them ignorant of the arts, so we inspire them in those types of classes. And we sure don't want them thinking Rebecca Black or Usher are musical geniuses, so we get them involved in that, too. Schools also teach "technology", but in most decent neighborhoods, this is meaningless, since most households have access to a computer and the Internet. However, this does have some use in poorer neighborhoods, where access is limited.

I'm not sure if there's a shortage of available teachers in the area, in which I generally disagree with keeping a teacher's position when and if a capable individual is able to teach. And that's where I disagree with union contracts of that sort. But a parent or school could potentially screw up a teacher's life with accusations of improper behavior (there are periodic checks and balances by principals and other "reviewers"), and they can assist with a grievance or legal issue.

The divide between parents and teachers is something I can talk about later...

(sorry, gotta catch a flight.)

 

[bzking23]

Not seeing it. What I do see is public schools asking more of parents every year. They're starting to do some really underhanded things to get parents to take a day of vacation and spend it babysitting kids so that teachers can kick back and relax.

i feel like your making stuff up now, school teachers dont do those kind of things, well not good ones at least, and are you focusing on just low grade children because thats not the main group affected by this. The only time when parents are required to do things with students are in meetings, confrences, etc

 

[Danoff]

i feel like your making stuff up now, school teachers dont do those kind of things, well not good ones at least, and are you focusing on just low grade children because thats not the main group affected by this. The only time when parents are required to do things with students are in meetings, confrences, etc

I don't have kids of my own, but MANY of my friends have complained about this with kindergarten and elementary school-aged children. I don't have many friends with kids at the high school level. I did not make up my lawyer friend who got roped into doing the teacher's job for half a day - and that was a rotational slot, other parents filled in on other days. And this was a "good" school. I've heard this complaint a lot.

I also am not making up the stay at home moms that I know that have practically become part-time volunteers at the local schools.

I'm also definitely not making up the fact that teachers are more and more pushing the real education off as homework, but somehow manage to retain the time wasting for while the child is at school. More and more parents are being asked to do the teachers' job either by teaching their kids in the evening what they should be learning during the day or by actually coming in to school and managing the kids there.

Curricula increases, and some teachers aren't thrilled with the idea of giving kindergarteners and first-graders homework, either.

Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. Kids don't need homework in kindergarten in order to keep up with the rest of the world, they need to learn while they're in class. Homework is such a friggin crutch at ALL levels of education (including college).

Want to get kids to keep up with the rest of the world? Cut down on the construction paper and dried macaroni and focus more on math and reading DURING CLASS!!!

That goes for all levels of education, including college. Drop the macaroni and focus on math and reading.

 

[Joel]

I wish education was a little more flexible. I remember in English class (when we were reading "To Kill a Mockingbird) I asked the teacher (it was a Thursday), if I could go home and read the book that night, then do the final essay over the weekend, and write the test that Monday. She said no, and then we spent two months wasting time reading the book as a class.

 

[Azuremen]

i feel like your making stuff up now, school teachers dont do those kind of things, well not good ones at least, and are you focusing on just low grade children because thats not the main group affected by this. The only time when parents are required to do things with students are in meetings, confrences, etc

You are flat-out wrong about this, hate to break it to you.

As for the homework load, more and more lazy teachers prescribe to the model that if kids do a lot of homework, they'll learn the material. There is reason why college professors complain about how many high school students, those with perfect grades, are only capable of doing busy work and don't actually learn anything. Public high school teachers are incredibly lazy at times, and the fact that crap ones are impossible to figure because of tenure and unions isn't helping children at all.

Want to get kids to keep up with the rest of the world? Cut down on the construction paper and dried macaroni and focus more on math and reading DURING CLASS!!!

That goes for all levels of education, including college. Drop the macaroni and focus on math and reading.

And at higher levels, including middle school, teachers will make kids read out loud to practice. In front of the whole class, and kids that read ahead and lose their place because they are fast readers are yelled at. While they have to patiently wait for the slower kids to spend 10 minutes slowly sounding out each syllable in a paragraph of some Goosebumps level book.

 

[Tornado]

And at higher levels, including middle school, teachers will make kids read out loud to practice. In front of the whole class, and kids that read ahead and lose their place because they are fast readers are yelled at. While they have to patiently wait for the slower kids to spend 10 minutes slowly sounding out each syllable in a paragraph of some Goosebumps level book.

I had to put up with this crap in 11th grade from one teacher of mine (English class, for the record) who was particularly awful.

 

[Pupik]

I think you're equating macaroni with a waste of time...there's hands-on concepts of patterns and shapes that are learned from that, if we're talking about youngsters. If it's middle school, then that's a nasty kettle of fish...

How do you say "nonsense" if I've agreed with you on this point?

Not all of it off-loaded onto parents, unless the kids aren't doing well in school (mainstreaming and being all-inclusive doesn't help in some cases), or the parents want the teacher to challenge their so-called "above average" student.

[Yes, my wife's a teacher, my mother is a retired teacher, and my dad was a teacher (he realized being a stockbroker/financial kit salesman was a better financial route). And so is my sister, so I'm not pulling these scenarios out of thin air.]

Certainly we have a smart bunch here, so we feel a little "superior" to the system. But thanks to initiatives like No Child Left Behind, and other state-created ideas, there's a dumbing down of the way things are taught, ruthless security measures added every year, while making the after school activities such as homework more important...the last aspect wasn't too much different when I was in high school; there were times I load balanced which course I couldn't do homework for that night.

Anyhow, the teachers are given more tasks, and although there's many school districts that haven't given raises for years, I can't specifically say this is the case in Chicago's schools.

 

[Danoff]

I think you're equating macaroni with a waste of time...there's hands-on concepts of patterns and shapes that are learned from that, if we're talking about youngsters.

Yup, and yup. I don't disagree with you that there is some benefit in it. But not enough to require parents to teach math and reading while you focus on that in class. If you have to push something off to parents how about pushing off the arts and crafts and focus on what's most important in the classroom?

How do you say "nonsense" if I've agreed with you?

We didn't agree on the nonsense part.

[Yes, my wife's a teacher, my mother is a retired teacher, and my dad was a teacher (he realized being a stockbroker/financial kit salesman was a better financial route). And so is my sister, so I'm not pulling these scenario out of thin air.]

Ask them what they think about my theory that assigning large amounts of homework is a crutch - asking parents to do the teaching.

 

[Submerged]

The teacher isn't asking the parent to do the teaching. The teacher is allowing the student to make mistakes so the teacher could understand what they need to work on in the class.

For example, if little Johnny understands how to add and subtracts, but not multiply, then the teacher will work on that in the class.

However, with kindergarten it just sounds like that they're introducing the concepts of homework a tad early.... However, looking in the East Asian culture, they are INSANE about education. I've got friends of mine in those countries who have already sent their children to private schools to be taught languages and how to learn effectively at the age of 5 to 10 years old. These are not rich people, these are people who are average earners.

Sometimes to introduce things early for the child and to get the child to work the answer out in their own way is better than to get help from their parents.

 

[kenny355]

Most kids from my school never did homework the majority of the time, only really those who were top of the class at everything, yet most of us finished with good grades somehow . One particular example was my maths teacher, She always seemed to think I was crap at it because I never did the homework or really put the effort in, yet I still passed both exams with a B and an A (Double GCSE). Every time she saw me not doing anything, she'd have a whinge about it until I started doing something. However, in just about every lesson once we'd been set some work, she'd go on and on to the girls in our class about her wedding, going travelling or other such drivel which stopped said girls from getting on with their work, and she had the nerve to complain about me not doing much? Needless to say, I'm glad I finished at the school back in June and haven't gone back for sixthform, there were a lot of teachers with double standards there. Saying that has reminded me of another example, we were all made to to performing arts in Year 9 or 10 (our school blew £26 million on a department just for it) and for drama we were told we had to learn a whole script over Christmas as homework, yet we'd had a whole term where we could have learnt it instead of doing other trivial stuff. Oddly, only one person actually made an effort to learn it, and she didn't even learn all of it. I could never imagine why

 

[Azuremen]

The teacher isn't asking the parent to do the teaching. The teacher is allowing the student to make mistakes so the teacher could understand what they need to work on in the class.

For example, if little Johnny understands how to add and subtracts, but not multiply, then the teacher will work on that in the class.

This example would be fine if it was a few problems from each, not 50 or more problems that cover addition and subtraction. It is very clear when someone gets a concept like that in math, and doesn't require more than a handful of problems.

Kind of like how when teachers force kids to memorize the times-table with pointless exercises. Then you get kids that can tell you what x * y is quickly as long as x and y are less than 13, but don't really understand the concepts still. Just pointless memorization, and it shows up later when you try to teach them fractions and decimal math.