CTU Holds Kids Hostage

Too bad for you. CTU KarenLewis sez no school until #endpoverty AP VIDEO: Chicago parents anxious for end to #ctustrike apne.ws/SlTtby
— Anne Leary (@backyardconserv) September 14, 2012

How is this a good thing.

Most parents are afraid to speak up. Aren't you.

Via Hillbuzz, Top Ten Things You’ll Learn About Teachers’ Unions from new movie “Won’t Back Down” — Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal The real little guy here is the little guy. Or little girl.

Remember this when you hear fiery fighting rhetoric at the CTU/Occupy Big Boss Labor rally in the park today in Chicago. Even there, kids can't just play today, a Saturday.

P.S. Oh yeah, this is radical. Chicago is broke, taxed to the max, drawn down reserves, pension unsustainably broke, bond rating downgrades, Ave teacher salary $74k plus rich bennies vs. ave Chicago parent salary in the $40's, near 50% failure graduation rate, only 4% of black high school freshman boys go on to graduate from college. And this is the CTU characterization:

More than one year ago, delegates prepared a background PowerPoint on the teacher's contract situation, alerting members that they were part of a "nationwide attack on public sector unions," highlighted by a manufactured fiscal crisis -- although in Chicago, huge school deficits will continue into the future.
Even a year ago, the House of Delegates predicted Mayor Rahm Emanuel will go after all Chicago unions, and stated that the mayor and schools president Jean-Claude Brizard wanted radical changes, including longer school days, merit pay, more charter schools and pension relief.

And if you want to know, Rahm's already getting rolled. More:

Foreshadowing what would happen a year later, this slide: unilateral action -- in August 2011-- listing a strike as the union's strongest action and preparing members, "everyone will need to...do their part."
This week their part has been to march in the streets.
ABC7 and the I-Team have been asked by some viewers why thousands of strikers have been permitted to block traffic and shut down large sections of the Loop.
A spokesperson for the Chicago Police Department told the I-Team: "They did not block traffic -- we redirected traffic in order to facilitate the expression of their 1st Amendment rights."

1st amendment. REALLY? 1st amendment for CTU but not for thee. Imagine if the Tea party did this.

More.  The Violence of Chicago’s Teachers:

From top to bottom, the educational system is based on coercion. It is based on minority groups coming to the majority in the name of the benefit to society of continued coercion. It is all done in the name of the children. But, you may have noticed, nobody ever asked the children what they want. Nobody asks the children who are victims of bullying in the schools if they would like an alternative. Nobody asked the children in inner city schools if they would like an alternative. The only people who are supposed to be asked what is good for the children are members of a monopolistic guild that has used government coercion to grant them high salaries and small classrooms.

There are teachers in Chicago who are being paid $100,000+ a year to teach for eight months. They are tenured, so they cannot be fired. They cannot be fired because the contracts that the teachers union negotiated with the Board of Education do not allow them to be fired. But if those teachers had to teach 33 children in every class, six classes a day, a lot of them would quit. As soon as one of them quits, he can be replaced by an entry-level teacher who works for $50,000 a year to teach 33 students in the classroom. That can be done if the school board establishes that the principals can expel juvenile delinquents and non-learners. It is time for parents to go back to the scene in Lean on Me where principal Joe Clark throws out the hoodlums. [snip]

I think the politicians in Chicago will capitulate to the union. That will mean that the inner-city students of Chicago will continue to be shortchanged by the system. What we need is not Joe Clark, as portrayed by Morgan Freeman, but Marva Collins’ husband, as portrayed by Morgan Freeman. In that magnificent 1981 movie, The Marva Collins Story, we learn of the gifted Chicago teacher, Marva Collins, who set up a private school in the middle of the ghetto, with her husband’s support. Her school began transforming the lives of a generation of students whose parents had the wisdom to pull them out of the Chicago public school system.