The Chicago Teachers Union has collectively decided that a sixteen percent pay raise in an economy where 23 million people are looking for work isn’t enough. Public school teachers in Chicago are currently among the highest paid in the nation, with an average annual pay of $71,000, before benefits.
Seriously -- Chicago teachers walked away from a sixteen percent pay raise, because it wasn’t enough. Sixteen percent!
At the same time, Chicago public school students are among the most undereducated in the country. Which leads to the question: What are these teachers being paid for? This week, apparently they’re being paid to shop for red shirts and to not teach.
The teachers just want things to be fair. I’m not sure how ignoring your students to strike in the street to protest a measly sixteen percent pay raise while not improving your job performance is fair, but whatever.
Karen Lewis, the president of the union, has called Mayor Rahm Emanuel a bully and a liar for calling for accountability for the teachers and a 41-minute longer school day. As many as 6,000 teachers may lose their jobs if they are evaluated based on performance, which is apparently a bad thing in Chicago. In the real world, you get fired if you do a crappy job, but in Illinois you go on strike because your raise wasn’t big enough.
The Chicago Teachers Union is giving great teachers a bad name. No one goes into teaching for the money … it’s a difficult, time-consuming, mostly underappreciated job. The hope is that teachers go into teaching because they love kids and want to help shape their future. Not so they can protest a massive pay raise in a down economy as not enough.
Maybe it would be different if Chicago schools were flourishing. You get what you pay for, and all that jazz. If they teachers were being underpaid, that would be another matter as well. That was the original intention of unions, after all, to make sure that the working class was not being oppressed or taken advantage of. But Chicago teachers make over twice the average local income of just over $30,000 a year.
Chicago teachers are already overpaid, Chicago students are underperforming, and the Chicago Teachers Union’s demands are unreasonable. This is not about the students and what’s best for them, this is about a teachers’ union demanding more than its fair share.
Image via firedoglakedotcom/Wikimedia Commons
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Comments 122
Weren't the Chicago teachers asking for a "raise" because Emanuel decided to increase their work day and work week without adding any additional pay?
i'm frustrated because I have not read a single article about the strike, anywhere, that gives all the facts and presents the whole picture.
If you want state and federal funding to be cut expect YOUR taxes to go up. I'm sure you don't want that. Schools need state and federal funding, otherwise they wouldn't be able to function. Yes, administrators at the local and state level do need to listen, which is a huge struggle. No one from either party wants to listen to the teachers. They want to make the standards with little to know knowledge of what running a classroom and educating students is really like. If the state and federal government would let teachers do it their way education would improve. And while I believe that teachers most certainly do need to be accountable to parents, parents also need to be accountable. They need to be accountable to their child. They need to encourage the child, keep the child healthy, send the child to school with correct paperwork and homework, etc. It's the parent's accountability to their child that is failing, not the teacher accountability. And educating children about things is different than telling them what to believe or do. We can't let children be naive. Explaining to high schoolers that birth control and abstinence are ways to prevent pregnancy is not telling them what to do. It's giving them facts. Same thing with family structure, etc. And finally, I don't know what kind of teacher doesn't accept parental involvement. I'd be doing cartwheels if all my student's parents wanted to be involved.