Chicago teachers asking for 30% raises over next 2 years

[opebo]

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041

In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.

The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

Good lord man, you realize this line of thinking makes all raises impossible or very short-lived - just like in the private sector.  Anyone who gets a raise over time will inevitably be fired and replaced by someone cheaper.  Can't you see that this destroys any possibility of well-being, progress, or a decent life for ALL workers?

[krazen1211]

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041

In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.

The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

Good lord man, you realize this line of thinking makes all raises impossible or very short-lived - just like in the private sector.  Anyone who gets a raise over time will inevitably be fired and replaced by someone cheaper.  Can't you see that this destroys any possibility of well-being, progress, or a decent life for ALL workers?

Not at all. One merely needs to display added value with something more than grey hairs.

Of course, displaying 3x added value is a tad more difficult than 1.5x added value.

[muon2]

The grand bargain, that I think "the right" will embrace (they certainly should), is that teachers can be fired like anyone else who are substandard (rather than have a sinecure where they are only fired for serial child molestation captured on a video), while on the other hand, the best and brightest after 10 years or whatever, become master teachers, and make like 150K a year, adjusted regionally by the cost of living. That is the way to attract the talent we need, while getting rid of the drones. You have a career track, and if you have the knowledge, and the talent to teach (which includes acting ability) to achieve excellence, you get rewarded in a serious way - with an upper middle class standard of living. Will it cost more?  Of course! But it is a moral imperative that we make this "investment" with, and only with, the ground rules that I outlined. Make sense?  Anyone disagree?

I agree in principle, but I do have one question that I feel hasn't been adequately answered.

How do we objectively judge merit? Test scores? Teacher grading by the pupils? I see some problems with judging who to promote to a "Master Teacher".

There are well-defined procedures that are used in higher education, including at public universities to judge merit for raises and promotion. Higher ed uses promotion to tenure and to the ranks of associate and full professor. There's a department-level committee that reviews the candidate's teaching and scholarship and recommends to a vote of the full department. Their approval in turn must be approved by the whole faculty and then to the board of trustees. It's a pretty good system for vetting promotions, though like any system there are instances that get it wrong.

As similar process can work for raises, too. A faculty committee (with forced rotation of membership) can assess members and create a ranking based on teaching, scholarship and departmental service. The rankings can be used by the college to award merit raises. By rotating the peer evaluators any bias tends to average out.

[muon2]

Chicago Public School enrollment has plunged 17% in the last decade with the fine job done by these teachers.

As it has in most urban areas...your point?

No one cares about this strike btw...

Obviously with a plunging school population, teachers need to be fired and schools need to be closed.

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041


In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.


The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

The threat of school closings are another big undercurrent to the strike. Emanuel has suggested massive closings to match the population loss. He's also made it clear that he'd like many more charter schools to accommodate the long waiting list, and that portends additional closings. The city he took over is deep in red ink, and the one time sale of assets like the Skyway and on street parking is not viable.

Though there is attrition, it wouldn't be enough to bring staffing down to the levels envisioned in the mayor's plan. That's why the recall provision is a big sticking point in negotiations. The CTU wants seniority control over which teachers are rehired as needed and the CPS wants the principals to have primary control of hiring from a pool of laid off teachers.

[BigSkyBob]

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041

In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.

The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

Good lord man, you realize this line of thinking makes all raises impossible or very short-lived - just like in the private sector.  Anyone who gets a raise over time will inevitably be fired and replaced by someone cheaper.  Can't you see that this destroys any possibility of well-being, progress, or a decent life for ALL workers?

Your statement is predicated on the false premise that the amount of any raise would outweigh the added productivity of the person given the raise. While that may very well be true of seniority-based raises, a person given a merit-based pay raise could more than justify the additional salary.

[後援会]

A good teacher is much much better than a bad teacher. I mean, if you're shoveling sh**t, the best sh**t-shoveller isn't going to be 10x better than the worst (lol Alexey Stakhanov).

But teachers? Absolutely. I think the best teacher I've had did 100x more for me than the worst teacher I've had. So I think merit pay makes sense. Everyone agrees on the concept of merit pay. It's the concept of how we measure merit that people debate on. And while I do think standardized tests are not a great way to measure merit, it's non-subjective and should be at the very least one of the factors in a holistic evaluation.

That being said, the CTU is run by scumbags.

[anvi]

Depending on how well they are crafted, standardized tests are designed to be and often can be effective measures of student aptitudes for certain subjects, which is why they can be used to determine areas where students are more or less likely to excel in either their work or further instruction.  But standardized tests are not objective measures of teacher effectiveness; they are not designed for that purpose, and they are fundamentally unsound indicators of it.

First of all, in current circumstances, state education boards may variously assess, and school districts, schools or individual teachers may use, textbooks for their courses that may or may not have significant overlap with materials chosen by national standardized test designers to assess.  Students who perform well in classes using the instructional materials assigned in them may easily perform poorly on a highly generalized standardized test that measures different competencies than were covered in a class.  Inferring that teachers performed poorly under these circumstances would just be wrong.  If you had national standards that controlled curricula in all states and national boards that determined textbook usage everywhere that corresponded to standardized test assessments, some of this problem could be mitigated, but advocates for measuring teacher performance based on standardized test scores don't, as far as I'm aware, also advocate for this.  (EDIT: There is however a movement afoot in lots of schools to centralize curricular decisions away from departments to supervising college administrators, so while not much may be heard of this option openly, something portending it is going on in institutions at all levels.)

Standardized tests that are well-crafted to measure student aptitude in specific subject-areas are constructed with problems that are at least moderately difficult in that subject area.  That is so because the tests are constructed precisely to effectively differentiate student performance in their specific areas.  As a rule, only somewhere around half of the students who take such a standardized test on a well-defined content area will perform well.  Problems that will likely be answered correctly by a large majority of students will more often than not be excluded from a standardized test altogether.  By contrast, school classes are often designed to ensure that most of the students who take the class will become proficient at a defined and minimum set of skills that correspond to the level of the class being taught.  Therefore, student performance that could in every fair respect be judged above-average in classes available in a particular school's curriculum might only be middling on a standardized test.  That result does not lend itself to an accurate assessment of teacher effectiveness either.  Once again, I don't hear advocates of merit-pay or hiring and firing decisions based on the standardized test performance of students advocating for a nationalized student curriculum that would mitigate the effects of this situation either.

Finally, students have aptitudes for different subjects that have nothing to do with teacher performance.  Students with extraordinary verbal skills may simply not be very talented when it comes to math, and vice-versa.  Students who have extraordinary musical skills simply may not be able to figure out chemistry, and vice-versa.  Students who have native intellectual talents for history may struggle terribly with logic puzzles.  Should teachers be penalized because of variations in student aptitude?  

There are also areas that are more controversial, having to do with economic or socio-cultural disparities, that I won't emphasize here.  What I've already written should be enough to show that standardized tests ought to be employed as more or less "non-subjective" measures of student aptitude for different areas of study, which is precisely what they are designed to predict.  They are not objective measures of things they were never designed to measure.  Using a standardized test to assess teacher effectiveness in our educational framework will work about as well as using a lawnmower to fly to Japan.

[Badger]

This guy wearing communist red gets $75k.

Reminds me of this shade of red, no? Which major party is typically symbolized by (in most contexts) the color red...

Krazy, if you're going to try to represent blue avatars in these debates, please quit chronically walking into obvious walls and troll-traps.

[opebo]

Not at all. One merely needs to display added value with something more than grey hairs.

...a person given a merit-based pay raise could more than justify the additional salary.

You poor young lad's misunderstanding of growing older is breathtaking!

You see, as you get older, you get worse, and life gets worse, and this will happen to you as well, inevitably.

People who devised these seniority systems recognized the basic despair of human life and tried to assuage the horror of it with a small palliative.  Seniority is a precious gift for all of us!  Your wanton disregard of this reality implies you are either millionaires or are entirely ignorant of the nature of human life and mortality.

[Badger]

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041


In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.


The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

You're quoting 'facts' from a decidedly anti-union 'think tank'. I'll seek a more unbiased source personally.

BTW: would you be upset krazen to discover the average member of the IL Policy Institute-yeducators, if you will--earn notably more than $75k per annium? It's a tax-exempt non-profit, and undoubtedly it's well-healed contribtors and sugar daddies would have more money in taxes to pay if they didn't have to support such over-paid educators, right?

[muon2]

Despite a tentative deal reached yesterday, the teachers don't trust the administration without time to digest an actual contract in writing. So the strike will continue.

[krazen1211]

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041


In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.


The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

You're quoting 'facts' from a decidedly anti-union 'think tank'. I'll seek a more unbiased source personally.

BTW: would you be upset krazen to discover the average member of the IL Policy Institute-yeducators, if you will--earn notably more than $75k per annium? It's a tax-exempt non-profit, and undoubtedly it's well-healed contribtors and sugar daddies would have more money in taxes to pay if they didn't have to support such over-paid educators, right?

You are quite a confused fellow. The Chicago teachers themselves claim that you can hire three young teachers for the price of a lavishly overpaid dinosaur.

But i suppose your post would be mildly upsetting if the IL Policy institute employed 30000, comparable to the size of the public sector legions attacking the treasury.

[muon2]

Despite a tentative deal reached yesterday, the teachers don't trust the administration without time to digest an actual contract in writing. So the strike will continue.

Now the word is that Emanuel will file an injunction against the union to force them to the classroom (scrolling across the bottom of the football game).

[anvi]

Good grief.

[opebo]

...you can hire three young teachers for the price of a lavishly overpaid dinosaur.

krazen advocates a Logan's Run America.

[krazen1211]

I don't know what that is, but I find it funny that you think the collapsing student population of Chicago deserves 1 teacher rather than 3.

[© tweed]

can anyone who knows this stuff tell us whether or not the injunction move will be successful?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I don't know what that is, but I find it funny that you think the collapsing student population of Chicago deserves 1 teacher rather than 3.

Logan's Run was a dystopian 1967 novel, 1976 film, and 1977 TV series.  The three all had different takes on the central premise of a future society in which once you reached a certain age (30 in the film and TV series) you were killed off to make way for the young.

[Free Palestine]

Isn't strike-buster Rahm Emmanuel supposed to be a "progressive"?

[Vosem]

Isn't strike-buster Rahm Emmanuel supposed to be a "progressive"?

This is America, my friend. Strike-busting Rahm Emanuel isn't just supposed to be a progressive -- he is, by our standards, a progressive.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Isn't strike-buster Rahm Emmanuel supposed to be a "progressive"?

This is America, my friend. Strike-busting Rahm Emanuel isn't just supposed to be a progressive -- he is, by our standards, a progressive.

Sadly, Vosem is entirely right.

[BigSkyBob]

Isn't strike-buster Rahm Emmanuel supposed to be a "progressive"?

At some point you reach the Thatcher endpoint. At that point, some "progressive" has to step forward and a prioritize which options are more "progressive," and which are least.

[Associate Justice PiT]

     Chicago teachers are massively overpaid. Some folks have business asking for a raise, but they're not among them.

[Napoleon]

     Chicago teachers are massively overpaid. Some folks have business asking for a raise, but they're not among them.

Yeah, joke strike.

[Badger]

Why?

If they need to reduce the work force it can be accomplished easily through attrition.

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Their compensation structure makes it far more logical to get rid of the worst dinosaur tenured teachers.

See charts.

http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=5041


In their own words, you can get 3 new teachers for the price of 1 old one.


The unions of course went to court to keep the high paid dinosaurs and Karen Lewis is making a fuss about school closures.

You're quoting 'facts' from a decidedly anti-union 'think tank'. I'll seek a more unbiased source personally.

BTW: would you be upset krazen to discover the average member of the IL Policy Institute-yeducators, if you will--earn notably more than $75k per annium? It's a tax-exempt non-profit, and undoubtedly it's well-healed contribtors and sugar daddies would have more money in taxes to pay if they didn't have to support such over-paid educators, right?

You are quite a confused fellow. The Chicago teachers themselves claim that you can hire three young teachers for the price of a lavishly overpaid dinosaur.

But i suppose your post would be mildly upsetting if the IL Policy institute employed 30000, comparable to the size of the public sector legions attacking the treasury.

Good job at ducking the question.

Are you going to revert all your posts to merely sneering?