School Days in the Windy City

“I think we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious. — Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Ludlow — 1824

"Labor Day may have passed, but in Chicago school is still out for the summer. That's because, for the first time in more than 25 years, the brothers and sisters of the Chicago Teachers Union are striking. Though they are already among the best-paid educators in the country, making an average of $76,000 per year in salary — plus benefits — the union is unsatisfied with an offer from the city's board of education that provides them a 16 percent raise over four years, worth a total of $400 million. (The CTU's original offer was for a 30 percent raise over two years.) Accounts from both sides indicate that the sticking points are the maintenance of the union's lavish benefits structure and a teacher-evaluation system that labor officials worry could — horror — result in the firing of large numbers of its most ineffective members.

On the merits, the case isn't close. Chicago teachers currently pay just 3 percent of their own health-care costs, and nearly three-quarters of new education spending over the last five years has been gobbled up by their retirement costs. The proximate consequence of the union's intransigence is that a mass of youths won't be in classrooms, but on Chicago's increasingly murderous streets. The contrast with the city's 45,000 charter-school students, along with its parochial — and private-school enrollees — all of whom remain in their classrooms — is stark. The benefits of school choice are manifold, but not least among them is that your child's education needn't be held hostage by the whims of public employees who finance and staff the campaigns of their putative bargaining “adversaries.” That sort of thing doesn't happen in competitive markets.

Political reality alone ought to force the Democrats to push labor for a quick agreement that maintains most of the cost-saving concessions at least cosmetically preserves the teacher-evaluation model, and, most important, gets Chicago kids back to school. Whether this happens will say much about who wears the pants in the liberal coalition.

Columnist Michelle Malkin states:

"Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis walks, talks and barks like a rootsy Occupy Wall Street activist.

When she's not urging other teachers to ditch the classroom or organizing traffic blockades to impede everyone else in Chicago from getting to and from their jobs, Lewis spends her time trashing public charter schools and business leaders trying to reform our Soviet-style monopoly in education. The results speak for themselves: While CTU members earn an average of $74,000 a year and are now spurning 16 percent pay hikes, 71 percent of the third-largest school district's 8th-grade students can't attain the most basic level of science proficiency, and nearly 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in reading.

It bears repeating often: The goals of the teachers union radicals are not academic excellence, professional development and fairness. The goals are student indoctrination, social upheaval and perpetual grievance-mongering in pursuit of bigger government and spending without restraint: 2, 4, 6, 8! One agenda: Agitate!"

The Chicago teachers’ unions, by some accounts, believe themselves to be the last gasp of unionized education – a political fighting force that, if defeated on their turf, will mark the end of teachers’ unions.

If so, it may be surprising that teachers’ unions have managed to stay alive this long. Why? Because the Chicago teachers’ unions appear to have completely missed every lesson in optics one would get from even basic political campaigning.

You see, as part of their attempt to intimidate the city of Chicago, the unions are picketing every public event where powerful officials will be present. And we do mean every event. WLS 980AM in Chicago reports that, in what appears to be an effort to intimidate Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, the unions have started protesting at a 9/11 memorial:

“Dozens of striking Chicago teachers are protesting outside a Sept. 11 memorial event where Gov. Pat Quinn is speaking.

The Chicago Democrat hasn't weighed in on the walkout, which entered its second day on Tuesday.

As he headed into the event, Quinn walked through the crowd, which sang "Amazing Grace" and held American flags. He said "Good luck."

The teachers marched over from nearby Curie Metro High School on the city's southwest side.

Several protesting teacher groups citywide have been marching as well. They included science teacher Joe Wasik, who says teacher evaluations need to be fair, which is an issue under negotiation.”

One can only imagine what these people would have done if Rahm Emanuel had arrived.

Needless to say, acts like this are unlikely to do much to endear the unions to voters. This is a problem for them, considering their actions have already induced a high level of bipartisan consensus on the side of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

Greg Lewis writes in American Thinker about The results of radicalism in Chicago's education system:

“You've got a mouthful of gimme, a hand full of much obliged."

-Clarence Williams, "Gulf Coast Blues"

The difference between the lowdown character in Clarence Williams' "Gulf Coast Blues" and the striking Chicago Teachers Union is that the teachers don't bother to offer a "much obliged." For the past three decades, Chicago's mouthful-of-gimme education elite has singlehandedly done more than any other school system in America to insure that the city's students will never rise out of poverty through gaining a meaningful education.

There's something like karmic justice involved here. Illegally elected Mayor Rahm Emanuel, along with Barack Obama and former Chicago education czar and now U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is faced with the perverse clash between the leftist teachers' union all of these characters blindly love and Emanuel's, Obama's, and Duncan's leftist "philosophy" of education. Both are purposely committed with malice aforethought to do exactly the opposite of what a true education philosophy should — which is to say that they're designed to reduce students to placeholders in the classroom with no hope of receiving the skills they need to succeed in a real-world capitalist economy while making sure that the professionals who keep them in this position continue to do so.

Imposition of the left's education philosophy has a long history in the U.S., in Chicago and elsewhere. It involves the application of many of the principles of behavior modification which Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov pioneered to the classroom, which in turn has evolved during the past century into a place where changing behaviors and attitudes of students have replaced learning, and where trying to ensure equal "outcomes" for all students has replaced encouraging students to achieve at as high a level as possible. The classroom has become the bastion of groupthink and the enemy of intellectual freedom. We have the left, and its champions of intellectual tyranny, to thank for that.

Although the National Education Association (NEA), the fountainhead of that educational tyranny, has been in existence since the middle of the 19th century, it was not until it came under the influence of the American educator John Dewey, a professed communist, in the early part of the twentieth century that it found its true purpose: the perpetuation of Marxist educational philosophy in American schools.

An early statement of Dewey's educational goals can be found in his essay "New Schools for a New Era," first published in 1928. There are two fundamental things needed to shape a school system into such an agency: the need for "the development of public economy with reference to Socialist reconstruction in general" and "the development of the population in the spirit of communism." The latter Dewey calls "the cooperative principle," and it is the core idea in Dewey's stated aim to convert the American education system to one similar to that which he helped to develop in Russia. Dewey's communist educational manifesto for establishing "the identification between cultural and industrial education" in the United States is based on goals that have been integrated into the general educational philosophy of our school systems, thanks to such organizations as the NEA, which has carried out Dewey's assault on educational freedom relentlessly.

The NEA found the champion it needed in the person of another leftist educator, Benjamin S. Bloom. Bloom is called "the father of Outcome Based Education" (OBE). OBE, which began as what Bloom labeled "mastery learning," would become the single most destructive educational philosophy in the history of the discipline.

Bloom's Mastery Learning/OBE master plan was based on his examination of the reasons students learned at different rates and achieved different educational "outcomes." Under a system in which teachers tended to give the same instruction to all students and to grade them on how well they were able to absorb and demonstrate their knowledge, student results tended to conform to the familiar Bell Curve, which meant that a small group of students performed exceptionally well, while a majority of student performances clustered near the middle, and another minority performed badly.

Bloom's 1956 book, Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, proposed a method of teaching that tested students more frequently as to their mastery of a given set of educational objectives and offered remediation for those who had not achieved the desired mastery. The catch was that until all students had mastered a given unit, no students were able to advance to the next one. Remediation was given to those whose performance lagged behind, while those who had already mastered the unit's objectives on the first pass were given supplemental work to do while their less gifted fellow students tried to catch up. In this way, Bloom reasoned, the differences between high achievers and low achievers would eventually be wiped out, and every student would achieve the same outcome.

So devastating were the results of "Mastery Learning" in Chicago that, after the particularly disastrous failure of the implementation of the methodology in the late 1970s and early '80s, nearly half of Chicago's high school students dropped out of school. The approach was subsequently renamed Outcome Based Education and has insinuated itself as the pedagogical method of choice in America's public schools since then.

The results? One of the headlines accompanying the current Chicago teacher walkout has focused on Chicago students' inability to read at their grade level. Chicago's school system has brought the level of reading proficiency among its 8^th-graders down to 21 percent. There's only one parallel to the OBE results in Chicago: slavery.

One of the most egregious laws passed during the time of slavery in the United States was the law that forbade slaves to learn how to read and which punished anyone who taught a slave to read. The reason this law had to be passed was twofold. First, being able to read is, in an important sense, liberating. That single skill gives the person who possesses it access to virtually limitless information, and that was something slaveholders could not risk.

But the second reason is equally important: it is very difficult -- nay, almost impossible -- to keep a person from learning to read. In colonial Boston, for instance, the literacy rate was nearly 100 percent. Virtually everyone knew how to read, and anyone who didn't could easily find someone to teach him. Girls, boys, women, men — everybody could read. So easy is it to learn to read that it was necessary to forbid teaching slaves. You can sit down with a book and someone who knows how to read, and that person, even if he or she is not a licensed teacher — or, as is more appropriate today, especially if he or she is not a licensed teacher — can very likely teach you to read.

What the Chicago school system has done to its students ranks among the most egregious crimes against a people — in this case, the largely African-American population of the city of Chicago — that I can imagine. And the idea that the teachers who perpetrate this criminality on their charges are holding out for higher pay and benefits serves only to highlight the reasons we've got to give the Obama administration and his radical Chicago cronies the boot in November.”

While I have inserted a rather long article by Mr. Lewis I thought it worth it as he does a good job of detailing the progressive ideology that infiltrated our academic system from the university level all the way down to kindergarten. His is the root of the problem today. Children and even college students are indoctrinated not educated. Education means the ability to learn, not the blind allegiance to ever changing text books that continually downplay our history, culture, and values. This one of the reason home schooling is becoming more and more popular. Parents, especially Christian and conservative, do not want their children exposed to Outcome Based Education and the critical theory and cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School. It is the cultural Marxism (AKA political correctness) that permeated our society today. If you doubt me just pick up a third, fourth, fifth, or sixth grade text book and see what is said about our founding, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. You will be surprised at what you find. You will see quite a bit about slavery, civil rights, tolerance to the LGBT people, how to be green, and a plethora of progressive thinking. I know this from my sister-in-law, who is a 5^th grade public school teacher. She has a Master’s degree in education and a few weeks I quizzed her about the Declaration and Constitution and she knew virtually nothing. She even went so far as to tell me that the Constitution states that everyone has a right to a government funded education. When I asked her where she heard this her response was that her union representative had told her.

Perhaps it is best if the Chicago teachers remain on strike for the remainder of the school year. At least in this way the children will not be subject to further progressive indoctrination and it won’t really matter it they return as the reading, math, science, and history scores will not be any better if the get what they are demanding. It’s a lost cause.