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Should teachers sacrifice raises?
Teachers have been asked to accept a pay freeze to help balance the CPS budget. Should teachers accept? Where else can the district make cuts that have less impact on students?
It seems as if all the weight is dumped on educators. Does anyone value the daily challenges educators face in their overcrowded classrooms with few resources? Now, somehow, all will be taken care of if we ALSO reduce their pay? Will CPS superiors also be willing to take pay cuts and eliminate any perks they get, such as air conditioned offices, etc.? If only people making these decisions would walk in educator's shoes, they might have a different perspective on things. I think they need to go back to the drawing board and brainstorm on other creative ways that funding can be generated, so that it falls on everyone, not just educators. Paying back the deficit is not the solution. There needs to be closer attention paid to how current and future expenditures are made. Children's lives are at stake here AND educators MUST be treated like professionals and offered competitive wages. Educators have so many demands and on top of this they are now being asked to consider taking a pay freeze. This thought is outrageous.
If Huberman agrees to give up his dental plan and superfluous vehicles, then i might consider furlough days, pension cuts, and all of the other draconian measures being hatched to balance the CPS budget on teachers' backs.
On a serious note, how come we don't hear anything about CPS reinvesting the more than $1 billion in TIF surpluses back into the schools or eliminating the Office of New Schools, Office of School Turnarounds, Performance Management and other unproven entities of school reform that spend more time and resources closing schools and shuffling students around than helping disadvantaged youth.
Instead we get proposals on how to raise class sizes to 31 pupils and cut away the little professional development that teachers receive during the school year. I thought Huberman was closing schools because it is unacceptable to promote failure? However, research shows that student mobility, staff turnover and large class sizes all promote failure. What is he really doing?
As the famous African American historian W.E.B. Dubois once said, "Education....is dealing with Souls and not with Dollars." Unfortunately, the stewards of our very school system, the Mayor and his CEO are willing to sacrifice our students for money that can be found elsewhere.
The current budget cuts are causing a crisis in public education across the country and particularly in Illinois where school funding formulas are among the worst. The cuts have in turn, produced massive protests by students and families on March 4th.
Given the depths of the crisis, teachers may have to share some of the burden. But it will be a hard sell given $300K salaries of state superintendents including some getting 90%+ raises this year. Case in point: In an Illinois district with 4.000 kids. Supt. Gmitro makes $369K/yr. Got a 98% raise last year. http://bit.ly/c29vr5.
Then there's Huberman's mass firings of teachers and school staff while spending millions on unnecessary outside consultants. Some were shifted over from the mayor's City Hall payroll. Others were brought over from his old CTA staff. And then there's that "Culture of Calm" coordinator Huberman wants to hire to run his silly multi-million-dollar COC program. Let's not even rehash the CEO's multiple limos and drivers or school board credit cards.
If sacrifices need to be made, let's share them equitably and not put them solely on the backs of the teachers.
I sympathize with the sentiments above. Teachers deserve good pay for their hard work; that's especially important as policymakers look for ways to lour the best young minds into the profession. And, no doubt, pay cuts will be a tough pill for teachers to swallow if Chicago's top administrators--besieged by spending scandals--don't put something on the table, too.
But when the union sits down with Mr. Huberman to talk about budget solutions it will have to take into account a public that is both frustrated and scared, lest teachers appear greedy at a time of want. That kind of sentiment can undermine political support for teachers at the highest levels, fueling a variety of get-tough policies on schools and educators.
It strikes me as a rather delicate political dance.
Mr. Huberman will continue to emphasize the administrative cuts he's already made when publically asking teachers to sacrifice. He's sure to dig up a host of statistics to support his case, too. Readily available in the State Report Card:
* CPS spends just 1.2 percent on general administration compared to a statewide average of 2.4 percent
* CPS teachers make an average of $67,589 per year, roughly 10 percent more than the statewide average. CPS administrators make an average of $109,826 per year, about 3 percent more than the statewide average.
* The district faces a massive budget hole and teacher salaries are, simply put, a huge chunk of the budget. About two-thirds of the total operating budget goes into salaries and benefits for teachers and education support staff.
Union advocates will arm themselves with a different interpretation of the data, of course.
Perhaps the biggest question is whether or not teachers will have the political muscle to stop any controversial reform initiatives.
It costs money to turnaround schools or to start schools from scratch. It costs money to train staff and build up a performance management system.
Many teachers are frustrated with such initiatives. Will Huberman's team have to give up something in exchange for concessions on pay or the pension?
I don't think that teachers should be asked to accept a freeze in salary until all other avenues have been exhausted. This means doing away with some of these newly created executive positions for his friends from CTA, giving up some of the benefits so that they don't get the elaborate expense accounts that teachers don't get, taking a cut in Ron's salary and freezing their salaries. Reducing benefits to no more than what teachers get. Then you can ask teachers to share the load and they will probably cooperate. Teachers have always sacrificed--remember when we went a month without pay (Christmas vacation to the beginning of Feb. before voting to strke).
I don't want to overreact to the sabre-rattling going on, but to me this seems like much more than an attempt at shared sacrifice to address statewide budget woes. There is a wave of anti-teacher, anti-union propaganda building. Whether it be the president's support for the wholesale firings in Rhode Island, or the Newsweek cover article belittling and denigrating the teaching profession, or the NY Times magazine piece on building a better teacher, or the New Yorker piece exalting Arne Duncan and his turnaround reform efforts, there seems to be little respect or understanding of the jobs teachers do everyday. Some days I am a nurse, others days a counselor, other days I am a friend, other days I act in loco parentis, some days I provide guidance, other days I provide structure, there are days when I crack jokes, and some times I actually teach my students about reading and writing and making calculations and estimations and we solve problems together and engage in a shared practice of learning. There is much more afoot here than balancing a budget. The systematic deconstruction of public education and the privatization of our schools is occurring during this perfect storm, which to some is more correctly viewed as a perfect opportunity. I sacrifice everyday for my students and will continue to do so. Just stop scapegoating and denigrating me, please.
Historically, teachers have always sacrificed raises. Whether in good times or bad, teacher salaries have never kept pace with comparable salaries in the private sector.
Along with the threat of over 13,000 education jobs being lost in the next year, contracts are now being settled ranging from zero to less than 1% cola increases. In our neighboring District 207 for example, over 100 jobs are being cut along with a demand to re-open the contract settled a year ago. The board is demanding give-backs. Smartly, the membership has voted no.
The short term answer to the school funding crisis is for the legislature to spine up and pass a 1% income tax increase.
The longer term solution is to pass HB 174 which would lower the reliance on local property taxes in exchange for a larger increase in income taxes. The reliance on local property taxes has created a situation in which the funding and quality of a school district depends on the students' home address and income. It negatively impacts poor and minority students the most.