[dellinger63]

Just voted to strike. WTF? I missed all of the articles touting CPS’s recent success? How much have standardized test scores increased?

How many here would either be laughed at or fired if the same demand was made to your employer? Yet in an inmates take the asylum moment the Chicago teachers are.

How about this? Stop screwing taxpayers and especially property owners in Chicago. The 92% who still have jobs certainly haven’t received a 30% raise and the remainder is unemployed.

Instead of collectively paying everyone the same. Success needs to be rewarded and failure removed based on an individual’s performance. The current and proposed contracts are certainly unfair as it rewards teachers who are failing the same as those who are succeeding.

When an employer, private or public collectively pays their employees they take away a good deal of incentive and motivation for an employee to perform above the norm. The working too hard are deemed brown nosers or told to ‘not kill the job’. It also reduces quality of end product while simultaneously inflating its cost. Sadly in the case of most public school teachers, the end product is a student who has neither the language nor math skills to go any further than high school yet many (at least in Chicago, 50% of the students who don’t drop out) have a sheepskin falsely stating they do.

For the sake of future students let’s break the practice of unfair rewarding and instead pay the good teachers what they deserve and realize there are teachers who are failures and deserve to be fired and replaced. Giving in to the union’s demand and keeping the status quo of accepting failure is unfair to the taxpayer and damages students, many for life. Chicago could learn a lot from the recent success experienced by Wisconsin sans Milwaukee.