WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Jesse Sharkey

CTU's Jesse Sharkey

As the threat of a teachers strike looms larger in Chicago, the result of Rahm's unwillingness to bargain seriously over job security and longer school day, Sharkey says:

“There’s still some more runway left where we can land this plane.”

Sharkey says a key to unlocking the stalemate is the hiring back of "effective veteran teachers" who currently are being replaced with lower-paid teachers who are just starting out, many of them TFAers. 

“We know that teachers just starting out have a 50 percent [dropout] rate. It’s actually a job that lot of people can’t do. This is something that would not only be the right thing to do, it would help settle the contract” with a smaller pay increase.

Bloomberg's perverse view of teachers

“The union keeps protecting people that shouldn’t be in the classroom that touch, have sex, whatever it may be.” -- School Book, "Question of the Week (Decade?): Are Charter Schools Better?"

Remember when Michelle Rhee took the same course in attacking D.C. teachers and then had to backtrack? She lied to the media, bragging:   

"I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school."

I suspect this is all in the Eli Broad union-busting playbook.

Bloomberg's new schools are a complete bust, according to a Daily News review.

 “This is additional evidence that these (new) schools are not performing better than their peer schools,” said NYU Prof. Robert Tobias, who led the city’s testing program before Bloomberg took office.

He can't blame the unions, since nearly all of his new schools are privately-managed charters which ban unions and would rather close or move their operations than have union teachers.