Is there a prevailing feeling amongst the general public w/regard to sympathy or lack of it for the teachers?
Everyone I know, who has expressed an opinion, thinks the teachers union is a bunch of greedy thugs.
I’ve heard mostly sympathetic views, but I know relatively few parents and more people involved in education.
I honestly don’t know the current demands well enough to feel like I have an informed opinion.
So they think their kids are being taught by thugs?
Yup. And I hang with a bunch of liberal douches who always support all workers who strike, and they’re all “Whiny little bitches.”
Ontario feels the same way: $60,000 a year, including summers off, to teach 8 year olds to add and subtract.
Fuck you.
Oh, and just so we’re clear, I don’t think the teachers are “thugs,” but there’s been a lot of talk of lack of regard for “the children” and greed.
Most of my friends (and I) don’t have kids. So yes, to us, they are thugs who want even more of our money to provide us something we have no use for.
Because there is, of course, no secondary benefits to living in a country where education is a field that might actually attract and reward talented individuals.
I heard that the teachers there were the highest paid of any big city. And they turned down a 16% raise. That doesn’t make them look good. One more reason to rethink our school system. Starting with getting rid of the teachers’ unions.
But the good news is that Rahm Emanuel’s children aren’t missing a single day in their private school. He can afford it, fine. But the poor people are stuck with the government is able to cobble together and serve up, with the unions’ blessings, of course. We need to more charter schools in our cities and work our way to a voucher system. This is disgusting.
No offense, but you seem to be ignorant and/or uninformed as to the situation in Ontario.
Secondly, to bemoan the salary and benefits of a profession that you chose not to pursue is ridiculous.
And FTR I am not a teacher.
That said, in the court of public opinion, a general strike does not promote their cause.
Or if you aim slightly lower (as I am wont to do): no benefit to preventing—or at least slowing—society’s inescapable descent into Idiocracy.
I confess to being mostly ignorant about vouchers and charter schools, but find myself reflexively skeptical— as with the flat/“Fair” tax initiatives, the loudest proponents (all due respect to magellan01) always seem to be people with whom I disagree on almost every other issue.
I understand your position, and under different circumstances I could almost agree with it. But this is the *CPS *we’re talking about, remember?
How does this sound for an idea? The city sells the entire CPS system - schools, land, contracts, everything - to a private management firm. We never dump another city dime into it, and all our property taxes go down (or at least, stop increasing for awhile). The private firm runs it as they best sees fit, and charges students for the educational services they provide. If the students (or their parents) don’t think it is good value for their money, they are free to spend their money at other private schools.
It’s a win-win!
I knew someone who was a CPS teacher until two years ago. Eighty thousand bucks a year, could take nearly six total months of vacation between seniority benefits and the summer, and managed to charge all of his travel expenses from his vacations to the school district as “educational research” no matter what he was actually doing.
The idea that Chicago teachers need MORE is bullshit. I hope they dissolve the union permanently over this.
Oddly enough, my experience has been exactly the opposite, and mostly from people who are Romney supporters, of all things. I guess they hate Emanuel more than the unions, or something.
47% support it
39% against it
14% no opinion
So the plurality of voters, so far, are pro-strike. I personally thought the number would be closer to 60%+.
The average person doesn’t give half a wet shit about education until it comes to their own child, and fuck all the other kids.
I think this is the root of a lot of problems with our approach to education. The parent’s who don’t even care about their own child’s education get all the blame; maybe it ought to be shared.
Then there is the deep mistrust of learning which is our legacy as a frontier nation. That’s not talked about nearly enough.
I am not a CPS grad, a teacher, or a parent, so in some important ways I don’t have a dog in this fight. I do, however, pay Chicago property taxes and have several friends/colleagues who are current or former CPS teachers, or who have a CPS teacher in the immediate family. And I also have a number of friends with kids in CPS, including some who had the choice of sending their kids to private school but chose not to for various reasons.
Pretty much everyone I know backs the teachers. As far as I can tell, much of the contract dispute is not about money, but about working conditions and performance evaluations and protecting teachers from BS politics. I agree that it should be easier to get rid of underperforming teachers, but how can you determine which teachers are underperforming when the deck is stacked against their students in some very difficult to quantify and quite uneven ways, which are not their fault and which they have little to no ability to control? The teachers have what sound to me like some quite valid complaints, as outlined by a friend of mine (who is not a teacher or CPS grad, but has 3 kids in CPS at the moment) here.
I understand that there are a lot of factors boiling down to “bad parents having kids they are incapable of raising” that make it difficult to teach some students. Not that the people backing the teachers’ union are willing to do anything to address those factors, of course. My question for YOU is, if you believe that those factors make it impossible for teachers to do their jobs in a better or worse way, why NOT hire any old people at minimum wage? Why do teachers deserve six-figure salaries and a golden benefits package if they are just putting in hours at a job that no one is apparently capable of actually performing well at?