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发帖数: 10345 | 1 闽猪党棍Rham Emanuel是搬起石头砸了自己的脚。
Chicago braces for first teacher strike in a generation
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A bitter dispute between unionized public school
teachers and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has residents of the third-largest U
.S. city bracing for a possible teachers' strike on Monday in a showdown
over education reform that has national implications.
Nearly 30,000 public school teachers and support staff represented by the
Chicago Teachers Union have vowed to walk off the job starting at 12:01 a.m.
(0401 GMT) on Monday if an impasse in contract talks is not broken. It
would be the first teachers' strike in Chicago in 25 years.
Emanuel, a former White House chief of staff to President Barack Obama and a
speaker at this week's Democratic National Convention, has made reform of
Chicago's troubled public schools a top priority. Emanuel cut short his trip
to the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, to deal with the teacher
crisis.
Earlier this year, he pushed through a longer school day, but the union is
opposed to other proposed reforms, including tougher teacher evaluations
tied to student test scores and giving principals wide latitude in hiring.
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said negotiators made little
progress on Friday and talks would resume at midday on Saturday.
"We were told that we were going to get a proposal that would answer some of
our biggest issues, and it did not," Lewis told reporters after talks ended
for the day.
Chicago School Board President David Vitale issued a one-sentence statement
saying negotiators had a "good meeting" on Friday. Neither side gave details
of the remaining differences.
The union has said it wants more than the 8 percent pay raise over four
years that Chicago offered. The school district says it cannot afford
concessions as it is running a large budget deficit and major credit rating
agencies have downgraded its debt rating.
The threatened walkout, which would be one of the largest labor actions
nationwide in recent years, comes at an awkward time for Emanuel's former
boss, Obama, who spent much of his adult life in Chicago and owns a house in
the city.
Obama and his fellow Democrats facing voters on November 6 are counting on
unions such as teachers to get out the vote across the country in a close
election.
Chicago's public school system, the third largest in the country behind
those of New York and Los Angeles, has more than 400,000 students enrolled.
Both sides in Chicago agree the city's public schools need fixing. The city'
s fourth-grade and eighth-grade students lag national averages in a key test
of reading ability, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Until Emanuel forced through a longer school day, which began last week,
Chicago elementary and middle-school students received instruction for fewer
hours a year than any of 30 major cities studied by the National Center on
Time and Learning, an education reform group.
TOUGH NEGOTIATOR OR BULLY?
Emanuel, a tough negotiator called a bully by the teachers' union, wants to
close schools, expand non-union charter schools, and let corporations and
philanthropies run some schools. He also wants principals to be able to hire
whom they want, and wants to use standardized test results to evaluate
teachers.
The union wants to shrink class sizes and increase education funding. It is
suspicious of efforts to erode job protections such as tenure, teacher
autonomy and seniority. It believes charter schools - which are taxpayer-
funded but not subject to all public school regulations - undermine public
education.
"What Emanuel represents is a new breed of urban mayors, pushing for a whole
system of school improvements ... responding to public demand," said
Kenneth Wong, director of the Urban Education Policy Program at Brown
University.
The city of Chicago has allocated $25 million for a strike contingency fund.
It would be used to provide breakfast and lunch to students in the district
- 84 percent of whom qualify for free and reduced-price meals at school -
and to pay for four hours of supervision at some schools, other public
facilities and churches.
The plan has prompted concern from some parents and the union about the well
-being of the children and how low-income youths would be supervised in
neighborhoods that have seen a sharp rise in gang-related murders in recent
months.
"It (the contingency plan) sounds like a train wreck," the union statement
said, adding that those supervising children had received little training. (
Additional reporting by Mary Wisniewski and Karen Pierog; Editing by Greg
McCune, Lisa Shumaker and Peter Cooney) | P*********0
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