What do you expect when a town is saturated with leftwingnut union thugs?
What do we want? More money and no merit-based evaluations. When do we want it? NOW!
From Big Government.
Obama’s home town is in chaos as the Chicago Teachers Union has declared a strike starting Monday for the first time in 25 years, defying former Obama chief of staff, now Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel.
Parents are outraged as children struggling through the city’s troubled school system will now miss critical days at the start of the year. Working families are scrambling to make alternative arrangements for child care.
The strike pits Emanuel, a key figure in Obama’s political constellation against a vital left-wing constituency–namely, teachers’ unions. Teacher pay, benefits, and job security were all issues upon which the two sides failed to agree. However, the broader picture is the political struggle between unions and Democrat politicians as a new wave of Republican reformers and conservative reformist policies has emerged to threaten both.
Though Chicago is a virtual one-party system, the example next door of Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms has potentially strengthened Emanuel’s hand in negotiations–and increased the union’s willingness to take risks to secure its power. The teachers, irritated by Emanuel’s brash style, also no longer feel threatened by Emanuel’s powerful predecessor, Richard Daley, and are flexing new political muscle in the post-Daley era.
Obama relies on the donations and activism of teachers unions on his behalf. They drive his enduring resistance to meaningful school reform. But the Chicago strike adds to the emerging image of a city that has become ungovernable, with a skyrocketing murder rate and faltering economy, despite the presence of a strong advocate in the White House with close ties to the mayor and the city’s professional and business elite.
The Chicago Teachers Union strike risks becoming the symbol of future governance under Obama as the nation confronts inevitable budget constraints that will pit special interests against each other, to the public detriment.
For the uninformed, Chicago teachers make an average salary of $75,000/yr plus benefits.
400,000 students are now locked out of school while their parents struggle over last-minute child care, and missing work.
They can’t afford to send their kids to private schools like 39% of Chicago teachers.
Here are 5 facts you should now about Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Teachers Union:
Out-of-state agitators and Che Guevara fans having a blast:
Charles Lane summarizes the strike:
“…events in Chicago illustrate rather dramatically the contradictions between public-sector unionism and the efficient delivery of vital public services.
They also heighten the contradiction between the Democratic Party’s need to show it can deliver sustainable good government and its dependence on public-sector unions for political funding and get-out-the-vote foot soldiers.
Common sense says there should be some link between compensation and job performance. But the very idea tends to make teachers unions recoil like Dracula confronted with a garlic clove. And so the Chicago Teachers Union is picketing schools that graduate only 60 percent of their students and where fewer than 8 percent of 11th-graders met all four college readiness benchmarks on 2011 state tests, according to the school system.
……To some extent we are witnessing a quintessentially Chicagoan fight over “clout”: (Chicago Teachers Union President Karen) Lewis is determined to show Emanuel who really runs the Windy City, and vice versa.”
BTW: Home boy Obama hasn’t seen fit to call up and tell the teachers to get their high-paid asses back in the classroom.
They’re using kids as fodder on the picket lines.
The ‘Occupy’ assclowns have reared their ugly heads in support of the CTU.
Union thuggery. It’s the Chicago Way.
Related articles:
http://hotair.com/archives/2012/09/11/chicago-teacher-strike-a-collective-scream/