One thing is clear from the move by the American Federation of Teachers’ Chicago affiliate to go on strike — and the union’s overall quest to once again render the district to the servile state it was in before former Mayor Richard Daley took control of it two decades ago: This isn’t exactly beneficial for the Second City’s children. While current Mayor Rahm Emanuel and schools czar Jean-Claude Brizard have developed contingency plans to provide school meals and safe environments to students during the work stoppage, the district has fallen on the job by not hooking up with a blended learning provider such as Rocketship Education to provide online instruction and curricula during the breach in order for kids to keep up with their studies.
The fact that the district hasn’t taken up some of the suggestions offered by Dropout Nation back in June on how to capitalize on the AFT’s use of its nuclear option — including offering up a Parent Trigger provision allowing Second City families to take over and overhaul failure mills and dropout factories in their neighborhoods — also gives pause about whether Emanuel and Brizard can rally communities to their side. The district also made a mistake last month in conceding an important trump card in its favor — the move to increase the time students spend getting instruction each day by 39 minutes — when it agreed to hire 477 teachers instead of forcing the AFT to allow teachers to work longer than the six hours or so worked each day on instruction (or an hour less than the time spent by peers in New York City). Certainly your editor doesn’t think increasing school time on its own will improve student learning; but the district could have easily made the point to the public that the teachers’ union decided to stop work in part because it didn’t want the kids to spend more learning. And negotiating with the AFT behind closed doors does little to help families or other taxpayers understand the district’s positions.
At the same time, the Chicago strike needed to happen. It offers an opportunity for Emanuel, Brizard, and other reformers throughout the nation to crystallize the critical educational, economic, and social reasons why we must continue the overhaul of American public education.
As Dropout Nation readers know by now, the strike is the culmination of two years of effort by Karen Lewis, the bellicose head of the AFT’s Chicago unit, to roll back Daley’s reforms, and oppose the efforts that Emanuel wants to put in place. Driven by the demands of Baby Boomers in the rank-and-file to preserve the lavish traditional teacher compensation system (which includes average annual salaries of $71,000, near-lifetime employment, and defined-benefit pension benefits) at the heart of the local’s (and the national union’s) influence, the need to stem a two decade-long decline in influence over education policy at both the local and Illinois state levels, and Lewis’ own likely desire to succeed Randi Weingarten as national AFT president, the Chicago local has decided that now is the time to beat back Emanuel, the former congressman who took office last year after serving as President Barack Obama’s chief of staff.
But so far, the AFT hasn’t gained much sympathy, either from parents or taxpayers. For good reason.
Given that the AFT insists on salary increases of at least 16 percent over four years, especially in a time in which most families can’t even dream of such high pay hikes and amid the city’s long-term fiscal woes, the union comes off as being fiscally inconsiderate. [That the union decided to strike just after rank-and-file members collected paychecks this past Friday — ensuring that the union collected its booty through dues — strikes everyone observing the strike as especially cynical.] The fact that Emanuel has backed away from his push to replace obsolete seniority- and degree-based pay scales for a performance-based model (as well as agreeing to even restore part of the four percent hike that the district moved to rescind earlier this year), is another reminder that the AFT is being particularly unreasonable. This is especially true when families take a look at the defined-benefit pension that pays current retirees an average of $57,144.41 (based on Dropout Nation‘s estimate of the payout by the pension during the 2010-2011 fiscal year) — and the $20 billion in teachers’ pension deficits and unfunded healthcare liabilities (as of 2011, according to the city’s teachers’ pension board) they and their children will bear for decades to come as a consequence for the lavish deal the union struck with the district.
It also hasn’t escaped many Chicago families that the AFT is as much about its effort to maintain influence as it is about pay and working conditions. This has been clear even before the strike two years ago when the union successfully took the city to court over then-CEO Ron Huberman’s decision to unilaterally end the use of quality-blind reverse-seniority layoffs, which toss out less-senior teachers regardless of their success in improving student achievement while allowing veteran instructors to keep their jobs regardless of their work product. Even as the AFT proclaims that it wants to improve education for Second City children, the very fact that it has spent the past three months threatening a strike (and pusillanimously, during summer, when families are less likely to pay attention to negotiations), and then walking off the job during the second week of the school year, belies all those pretenses. So do complaints from Lewis and hard-line activists within the union about Chicago’s efforts to use student test score growth data in evaluating teachers (and thus, being subjected to more-stringent performance management) and demands for smaller class sizes, even though the evidence after three decades shows that decreasing number of students in the classroom doesn’t improve student achievement or teacher performance. [That picket lines no longer work as a way to gain sympathy from the public, which has become more savvy about unions in general paying folks off the street to stand in and carry pickets in place of better-paid rank-and-file, also plays a part.]
The clear presence of charter schools in the city, whose doors remain open while traditional district schools are shut down also hurts the union’s ability to argue against expanding school choice. If anything, vouchers and charters become even more popular with families because they are no longer subjected to the whims of an AFT affiliate more concerned with its self-interest than the children these parents love — especially in light of the continued need to reform education in the City of Big Shoulders.
These are not just issues in Chicago. Over the past couple of years, AFT and National Education Association affiliates have battled fiercely with governors such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Chris Christie to preserve the array of deals that have made teaching the most-lucrative profession in the public sector (and the one least-subjected to performance management). More often than not, the two unions have lost (and spectacularly so, in the unsuccessful effort by the two unions to recall Walker) because they have lost the political and economic high ground. With taxpayers struggling with $1.1 trillion in pension deficits and unfunded retired teacher healthcare costs and increasing evidence that traditional teacher compensation does little to reward high-quality teachers and improve student achievement, the NEA and AFT can no longer argue that their formula works. In fact, the two unions find themselves in a quandary, proclaiming that teaching conditions need to be improved in order to ensure student success even as they defend the very practices (including shoddy, subjective classroom observation-based evaluations, and degree- and seniority-based pay scales) that essentially keep high-quality teachers regardless of experience from reaping well-deserved rewards for their work, and perpetuate cultures of low expectations and abuse that hurt top-performing teachers and children alike.
But while AFT and NEA affiliates have battled at the district level with reform-minded school leaders in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., over such matters as the use of student test score growth data in teacher evaluations, reverse-seniority layoff rules, and performance-based pay scales, the two unions have managed to avoid work stoppages in big-city districts until now. For good reason. Most districts with elected school board members, fearful of the public relations hit that strikes used to incur (and also concerned about keeping the campaign donations they got from union coffers), have been more than willing to simply let union officials have their way. Even reform-minded districts such as New York City have been skittish about the possibilities of work stoppages — and have done all they can to stop them.
But with the AFT in particular (and teachers’ unions in general) in desperate need of a victory, Chicago has become a battleground. It is the wrong one to boot. Emanuel can’t exactly claim any rhetorical victory and has done itself no favors by taking the extended learning time issue off the table and agreeing to spend $50 million to hire teachers in order to relieve current instructors of having to work longer hours; the fact that Brizard is essentially absent without leave makes one wonder whether he is truly the mayor’s school reform czar. But the union’s fiscally irresponsible demands have given the mayor another weapon in articulating how he is working to continue the transformation of education in the city without bankrupting it. And by backing off some of the more-radical reforms (including performance-based pay) while still pushing to end degree- and seniority-based pay scales, Emanuel also comes off as being more-reasonable than his AFT counterpart. giving him room to strike for even stronger reforms down the road.
Meanwhile the Chicago strike gives reformers across the nation a rhetorical opportunity to demonstrate the essential cowardice of NEA and AFT influence. The very fact that the union would rather attempt to shut down student learning in a traditional district than give up compensation systems that even younger, more reform-minded teachers no longer think are valuable to them, is a compelling example of what happens when arrogance, hubris, and adherence to failed thinking becomes more important than thoughtful consideration of how to help children and good-and-great teachers succeed.