Powerful, Politically Connected Teachers' Labor Union Close Schools for a Week in Chicago to Force Labor Deal

Chicago Teachers Rally After Tentative Labor Ddeal

September 16, 2012

Reuters - Thousands of striking Chicago teachers rallied on Saturday to keep the pressure on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to wrap up an agreement with their union to end a strike that has closed the nation's third largest school district for a week.

The rally brought labor leaders, community activists and thousands of striking teachers to Chicago's Union Park for one of the largest demonstrations against Emanuel's education reforms since the strike began on Monday.

"You have proven to the world that you're not going to take it anymore," Lorretta Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, told demonstrators the day after the two sides reached a tentative labor deal.

Led by Chicago Teachers Union president and former high school chemistry teacher Karen Lewis, 29,000 unionized teachers, counselors, nurses and other support staff staged their first strike in 25 years, leaving 350,000 Chicago students with no school this week.

Emanuel angered the Chicago teachers by trying to push through proposals to radically reform teacher performance evaluations and weaken job protection for teachers whose schools are closed or perform poorly academically.

He retreated from some of his proposed reforms, although details of what he has agreed to with the union have not been made public. Negotiators for the mayor and the union announced a tentative agreement on Friday that could lead to an end to the strike.

The confrontation has left many Democratic mayors and politicians supporting Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff for President Barack Obama. Other Democrats have sided with the unions, which are major financial supporters of the party and are needed to help Obama win re-election in November.

Emanuel denied on Saturday there had been any pressure from the White House to settle the strike.

"The short answer is no," Emanuel's spokeswoman, Sarah Hamilton, said. "There was no pressure, and no pressure would have worked, because they know that the mayor firmly believes that what we are doing to reform and improve our schools is the right thing."

The union is wary of Emanuel, who has been called a "bully" and a "liar" by Lewis.

Organizers hoped Saturday's rally would rival some of the huge demonstrations last year that protested the efforts of Republican Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to curb the power of unions. The Wisconsin protests were unsuccessful, but drew tens of thousands of government workers, including teachers.

Activists and supporters from other unions joined the sea of strikers wearing red T-shirts at Saturday's rally.

"This is not just a Chicago struggle, this is a struggle for workers everywhere," civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said. "You've led a new struggle for courage."

'IT'S BEEN DRAINING'

If all goes well in the negotiations between the Chicago School Board and the union this weekend, Lewis said she would ask some 800 union activists on Sunday to suspend the strike and teachers would return to classrooms on Monday morning.

Lewis told reporters at a news conference on Friday that the union was making sure all of its "i's are dotted and t's are crossed."

Gideon MacKay, who teaches on Chicago's West Side, said he hoped Sunday's meeting would lead to a new contract, or at least a suspension of the strike.

"It's been draining," MacKay said. "We're teachers. That's what we do, we teach."

The strike is the biggest U.S. labor dispute in a year and has galvanized the national labor movement. It also has shone a light on a fierce U.S. debate over how to reform struggling urban schools across the country.

High school teacher Colleen Murray said the rally was meant to send the message that teachers were united.

"I'm hoping to see a fair evaluation process that recognizes that teachers cannot control all of the variables that go into student achievement," Murray said.

Both sides agree Chicago public schools are not doing well. Students perform poorly on standardized tests of math and reading, and the high school graduation rate is 60 percent, compared with 75 percent nationally and more than 90 percent in some affluent Chicago suburban high schools.

The union has railed against Chicago's unelected school board, which is stacked with representatives of business such as Penny Pritzker, an executive of Chicago's billionaire Pritzker conglomerate and a major Obama fundraiser. They say the board is trying to privatize and corporatize the public school system.

They have criticized Chicago's effort to open more publicly funded non-union charter schools, sometimes run by philanthropists, while some poor-performing traditional community public schools are being closed.

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Test: Most Students Not Proficient in Writing

September 14, 2012

AP - Just a quarter of eighth and 12th grade students in the United States have solid writing skills, even when allowed to use spell-check and other computer word processing tools, according to results of a national exam released Friday.

Twenty-four percent of students at each grade level were able to write essays that were well developed, organized and had proper language and grammar. Three percent scored as advanced. The remainder showed just partial mastery of these skills.

"It is important to remember this is first draft writing," said Cornelia Orr, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which administers the Nation's Report Card tests. "They did have some time to edit, but it wasn't extensive editing."

Students who took the writing test in 2011 had an advantage that previous test takers did not: a computer with spell-check and thesaurus. Previously, students taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress writing test had to use pencil and paper, but with changes in technology, and the need to write across electronic formats, the decision was made to switch to computers.

Orr said students use technology and tools like spell-check on a daily basis.

"It's as if years ago we had given them a pencil to write the essay and took away the eraser," she said.

She said word processing tools alone wouldn't result in significantly better writing scores if students didn't have the core skills of being able to organize ideas and present them in a clear and grammatical fashion.

Still, students in both grades who used the thesaurus and the backspace key more frequently had higher scores than those who used them less often. Students in the 12th grade who had to write four or five pages a week for English homework also had higher scores.

Because this was the first version of the computerized test, the board cautioned against comparing the results to previous exams. In 2007, 33 percent of eighth grade students scored at the proficient level, which represents solid writing skills, as did 24 percent at grade 12.

The results at both grade levels showed a continued achievement gap between white, black, Hispanic and Asian students. At the eighth grade, Asian students had the highest average score, which was 33 points higher than black students on a 300-point scale. At the 12th grade, white students scored 27 points above black students.

There was also a gender gap, with girls scoring 20 points higher on average than boys in the eighth grade and 14 points higher in 12th grade. Those who qualified for free and reduced price lunch, a key indicator of poverty, also had lower scores than those who did not; there was a 27 point difference between the two at the eighth grade.

For the 2011 exam, laptops were brought into public and private schools across the country and more than 50,000 students were tested to get a nationally representative sample. Students were given prompts that required them to write essays that explained, persuaded or conveyed an experience.

Kathleen Blake Yancey, a professor at Florida State University who served on the advisory panel for the test, said one factor to keep in mind is that research shows most students in the United States don't compose at the keyboard.

"What they do is sort of type already written documents into the machine, much as we used to do with typewriters four decades ago," she said.

Yancey said for this reason, there was some concern about having students write on the computer as opposed to by hand. Likewise, having the advantage of spell-check assumes students know how to use it. And in some schools and neighborhoods, computers are still not easily accessible.

"There are not so many students that actually learn to write composing at the keyboard," she said.

Yancey added that many kids who do have access to computers are not necessarily using them to write at school, but to take standardized tests and filling in bubbles.

"Digital technology is a technology," she said. "Paper and pencil is a technology. If technology were the answer, that would be pretty simple."