Teachers doth protest too much

Editor’s note: This column is in response to Will Thomson’s column “‘Educators can’t survive on prestige alone,’” published in Thursday’s issue of the Daily Lobo. In his column, Thomson defends the recent teachers’ strike in Chicago and calls for the United States to make its teachers a priority rather than “some of the first on the chopping block” in hard economic times.

by Marcos P. Portillo
Daily Lobo guest columnist

There is a little more to the story of the Chicago teachers’ strike than what Thomson would have you believe — “Educators can’t survive on prestige alone.” Should we not further analyze the situation before jumping to conclusions? Can teacher unions do no wrong? Are teachers being taken advantage of in Chicago? Let’s take a look at these circumstances beyond the immediate seen reality, or what I like to call stage one.

What is left out of the story is the fact that 350,000 kids are still out of school, and it is not something the parents are very happy about. The teachers’ union shut down the city’s education system in the blink of an eye. We all love the kids, but the teachers can only be taken advantage of for so long, right? The main issues of the strike are with the teachers’ pay and the new merit-based evaluations. Let’s take a look at their pay issues first.

According to the Chicago Public Schools, their average annual public teacher salary was $74,839 for the 2011-12 school year.

This is not only more than Chicago’s 2006-10 median household income of $46,877 but it’s also above the national average for public school teachers in urban districts. This isn’t so bad, especially amid the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. I think it’s a little more than just prestige on which these teachers are surviving. But it’s apparently not enough, considering the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) demanded a 30 percent pay raise over two years. This would have brought the average salary to double the average income of the private sector employee. The mayor of Chicago has offered a 16 percent pay raise as a compromise. Have their performances been so outstanding that they feel they deserve the taxpayers to pay them double their own salary? Well, that’s the other issue that seems to have perturbed the union: merit-based performance evaluations. In the newly implemented system, test scores account for 40 percent of a teacher’s rating. How else would you rate a worker’s performance other than by some form of quantifiable fact? In 2007, under the old system, according to the Associated Press, 99.7 percent of Chicago Public Schools teachers received a rating from satisfactory to distinguished.

However, the Chicago education system’s record doesn’t exactly reflect the types of ratings that those seem to imply, at the very least, that practically every student passes. Actually, only 60 percent of Chicago students end up graduating. Seventy-nine percent of Chicago eighth graders are not proficient in reading.

According to a Bloomberg report citing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, Chicago fourth graders “not only lagged well behind the national average, they were nine points below the average among large cities on math and eight points lower on English.” What other method can be used to rate a teacher? Maybe standardized tests aren’t the best method, but Chicago’s educational performance is not 99.7 percent satisfactory, much less distinguished.

Being a teacher is a very noble profession and one I admire.

However, it does not mean you ignore common sense and simple economic laws. It does not mean you let the public union take advantage of the taxpayer and ignore the parents and the kids.

350,000 kids are out of school because the union doesn’t think $74,000 is enough for a 10-month work year. The union doesn’t want their members to be graded based on the performance of their students because their students’ performance rates are among the worst in the nation. The union wants the taxpayer, who is suffering amid an economic recession, to give them a raise while the Chicago Public school system faces a $700 million shortfall for 2013 and could very well be $1 billion in debt by 2014. Merit-based pay, school choice and charter schools are becoming ever more popular among the public. It is the public union that has become bloated and over-bureaucratized and politicized to the point that it is more concerned with its own institutional growth and power than either the teachers or the students. Students’ performance continues to stagnate, good teachers are ignored and bad ones carry on with business as usual. Reward good teachers, get rid of the bad ones. That is what the public wants. Thomson is right: the Chicago teachers’ strike does reflect wider problems in education, but not for the reasons he suggested. It is freedom in education that is stifled. Education used to be in the hands of parents, educators and students. That power has shifted to self-serving public teachers’ unions. That is the problem with the education system. It’s time to stand up for individual liberty for the student, parent, taxpayer and the educator, not for the union.