If Chicago public school teachers strike, public education could be undermined

Chicago Sun-Times ^ | August 30, 2012 | Mary Mitchell

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Maybe CTU President Karen Lewis is just rattling her saber by announcing the teachers union has filed a 10-day notice of intent to strike.

....Parents with children in Chicago Public Schools should definitely be putting together an alternative plan given the rhetoric from the union.

“CPS seems determined to have a toxic relationship with its employees,” Lewis said at the news conference. “[T]hey attempted to ram a poorly-thought-out longer school day down our throats . . . It has been insult after insult after insult.”

Now that Lewis has taken the next step toward a showdown, I’m betting there will be drama.

But a strike would not just be devastating for the mayor, teachers, students and parents.

A strike could further undermine public education in this city.

Chicagoans are fed up.

They are fed up with high gas prices and boarded-up homes. They are fed up with rowdy teens, gangs, shootings and homicides. They are fed up with schools that warehouse kids but don’t educate them.

....Increasingly, parents in these struggling communities are discovering options to public education.

That is why thousands lined up to attend the “New Schools for Chicago” fair last spring — desperate to send their kids to a “charter operation.”

The children who are being left behind are the most vulnerable.

So if Mayor Rahm Emanuel has to skip most of the Democratic National Convention next week, then so be it.....

[sarasmom]

“At one time, all education was private. I am advocating a return to that model.”

Darteaus94025, you go for it, for your own children.
I dont support that.

Many of us seek a fast return to a more recent USA history of mandatory basic education for all children of citizens, overseen by individual states, and implemented on local levels.

I advocate the abolishment of the entire current Federal Department of Education, and disbanding all Federal Public Employee Unions.

The various States remaining free to govern themselves on those issues as they choose, IAW their own laws, enacted IAW the Constitution of the USA, and as mandated by their own State Constitution.

After that, each State can address civil servant unions as they see fit, IAW their own laws. Can we three agree to that?

[Darteaus94025]

“you go for it, for your own children.
I dont [sic] support that.”
And, that’s the beauty of the private system: You are not forced to support me, and I am not forced to support you.

“...mandatory basic education...” is not incompatible with private schooling, so you are objecting to something that I am not proposing, i.e. I am not proposing to end mandatory basic education.

Let me break it down to a simpler model for you:
1) You want the taxpayer subsidized and customer unaccountable US Post Office, and
2) I want the privately funded and customer accountable Federal Express.

God bless.