A tentative agreement between the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU) has been reached. Well, almost. Now the teachers are refusing to return to work until the mayor agrees to pay them for their time off to picket. Amazing! During this whole charade, why has no one mentioned the one most important purpose of a school system: teaching children? CPS and CTU are complicit in their abysmal failure to achieve this basic purpose yet no one is addressing the issue. You have CPS and CTU arguing over how much more of the taxpayers' money will be wasted. CPS has offered the teachers a 16% salary increase over the next five years. The mayor has proudly announced that most teachers will be making $100k or more at the end of the five year period. Would your boss reward you with any amount of pay increase if you failed to achieve a measly 25% success rate at work? Look at the statistics. In language arts, mathematics, and science, approximately 75% of CPS students are below standard. And only 25.9% of eighth-grade students are passing Algebra I. What I don't understand is how only about 25% of students are passing in three major measured areas, while 75% of students graduate. Wait, I do understand and so do you. Once graduated they are no longer the system's responsibility. Push them out the door unqualified to perform in the workplace or succeed in higher education.
No one is asking the taxpayers' if that is acceptable and if they are willing to pay even more to reward failure. Seems to me that there are some important groups under- or un-represented in the whole process: the students and the taxpayers. Who is listening to them? And do they even care to be heard? Talk about millions, even billions, of dollars spent on education goes right over the taxpayers' heads. Break it out into dollars spent per taxpayer, and a few might demand to be heard, to demand excellence. Afterall, it's "for the kids."
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