Negotiations break down. But it's not over pay. Evaluations, testing & taxing.

CTU's negotiating team hanging tough.  

Four days ago, CTU Pres. Karen Lewis was saying, "We’re very close" to an agreement on a one-year contract. Yesterday, with the teachers’ contract expiring next Tuesday, Lewis announced that contract talks have broken off and the Chicago Public Schools’ “bargaining rhetoric is as empty as their bank accounts.”

Most interesting to me was that the deal stoppers, at least in the eyes of Rahm and his rudderless school board, were non-economic issues that wouldn't cost the board a penny. Remember, two education anti-union "reform" bills, one passed in 1995 and 2012 (SB7), supposedly limited the range of issues, with a few exceptions, that can be discussed during collective bargaining to economic ones. But that hasn't stopped the CTU from playing its role as a national model of the new unionism.

Even with major pay-raise concessions being offered by the union, Rahm and the board refuse to budge and inch on, 1) CPS's current discredited teacher evaluation system based mainly on students' standardized test scores as well as on the district's current over-testing regimen, and 2) CTU proposed revenue initiatives based on a more progressive taxing structure that would make the wealthiest pay their fair share.

Also standing in the way of an agreement by Tuesday is the simple fact that the board's leadership is in disarray. There's still no replacement for scandalized schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, which means for the second straight contract negotiations, the board side is basically leaderless. Plus the board's team includes Tracy Martin, who’s named in a federal subpoena into the $20 million SUPES contract scandal.

Only this time, there's no Byrd-Bennett waiting in the wings to come in a clean up the mess at CPS as there was in 2012 when Rahm gave J.C. Brizard the hook.

Not to mention Gov. Rauner's veto of the state budget and threatened shut down of state government entirely, which could change the game entirely.

I hope Lewis, Sharkey and team have some great strategies and tactics up their sleeves. They will need them.

Rahm pulls that old seat-at-the-table"gambit. It worked on SB7.

CTU prez says "no thanks" this time

The table is set. The menu, already decided. The guest list includes corporate reformers, charter school operators, private schoolers, some priests and an heiress. The agenda is a political one for the mayor. His PR guys tell him he has a winner in a longer school day and school year. They're probably right. They tell Rahm and CEO Brizard that they should negotiate it the press rather than in secret negotiations with the union.

The only hitch is he has to pay for it -- or does he? There's no way he's going to use his own slush fund (TIF) to pay teachers and staff for an hour and a half each day and two weeks more work each year. So he will use the media and political clout and savvy (offering to give back 2% of the 4% pay raise that was due teachers this year) to circumvent union contract negotiations -- the real venue for such discussions.

This is basically the same table and guest list that Stand For Children's Jonah Edelman described when he bragged about how he had snookered the CTU, IFT, and IEA into supporting anti-union legislation (SB7) in the past.

But this time the union said, no. They are already at a table. It's called collective bargaining.

CTU spokeswoman Stephanie Gadlin said in a statement union President Karen Lewis does not want to be part of a publicity stunt.

"CPS has loaded its advisory council with charter school proponents, parochial school leaders, administration-connected clergy, politicians and union-busting advocacy groups. This news has nothing to do with helping our children and everything to do with politicizing a really serious problem. Our children deserve better.” -- Chicagoist

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Following up on the Save Our Schools March/Rally in D.C., SOS Chicago will hold it's first meeting, Saturday, Aug. 27th at 10 a.m. at Jane Addams Hull House, 800 S. Halsted. St. Hope to see you there.

More on the sham that was SB7

No money in the state budget for mandated principal training

If you needed any more evidence to show why the anti-union, Illinois SB7, rammed through the legislature by corporate reformers and Mike Madigan, was a sham, look no farther than the budget. The Chicago News Cooperative reports that the state budget that Gov. Pat Quinn signed on June 30 is missing a key component sought by education advocates: money.

In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.Mr. Quinn included the money in his budget, but the House erased it and the Senate agreed. 

“It’s not that the House doesn’t care — they do care — but it was just a question of priorities and having to make cuts,” said Jessica Handy, spokeswoman for Stand for Children, an advocacy group that helped write the bill. 

And so, like most of the top-down corporate "reforms" being foisted on schools these day, ie. "merit pay," longer school day, test-based teacher evaluations, expanded charter schools, etc... the states will have to go begging to the power philanthropists in order to get them going. More power over policy by the corporate reformers, less in the way of public power and decision-making over our schools.

Incredible! Makes you wonder once again, how the unions could have ever bought into such a process, let alone tout it as a "model" for the rest of the country?

******

Check out brother Fred's response to a cowardly, sellout, union bureaucrat who attacked him on Daily Kos, using the name kissfan. Hmmm, wonder which part of SFC's ass she's been kissing?