Does the USA have a learning disability?

When I heard that the teachers in Chicago were going on strike, I was worried. "They damn well better have the moral high ground." I said. The mood abroad in the country is growing more anti-teacher and anti-union. "If they're striking for better pay, " I said, "they're idiots!"

So I watched the NBC Evening News that night and discovered only two facts: Teachers in Chicago average about $76,000/year and parents are upset that their kids have no place to go during the day while the parents are working. Not much detail about the causes of the strike were given.

Now, to someone who lives in Chautauqua County, $76,000 sounds like real fine pay. Certainly nothing to strike about. But, Chicago is probably a lot like New York City. Rents in NYC average north of $3,000/month. At that rate, $76,000 (before taxes) doesn't seem so magnificent.

Still, I figured, there must be more to it than money. So I started digging. Here's what I have found:

1) When Rahm Emanuel became Chicago's mayor, he hired Jean-Claude Brizard to run the Chicago schools. Brizard came from the superintendent's job in Rochester, NY where his teaching staff gave him an overwhelming (95%) vote of "no confidence."

2) Upon taking office, Emanuel unilaterally cancelled the 4% pay raise scheduled for teachers and, again with no consultation with teachers or their union, increased the length of the school day by 20% with no additional compensation for teachers.

3) Not wanting to be left out of the "stick it to teachers" derby, the Illinois state legislature passed a law requiring that a teacher strike must be approved by 75% of the union membership. Note that this law applies ONLY to teachers. Strike authorization for any other group still requires a simple majority. (The Taylor law is a NY law. While teacher strikes are illegal in NY, they are not in Illinois.)

As Harold Meyerson points out in the Washington Post: "Disrespect and derision generally engender a backlash, and Chicago was no exception to that rule: The local elected more militant leadership, and when it came time for a strike vote, more than 90 percent of the city’s teachers voted to walk."

Now Emanuel is a strong advocate for the current "school reform" movement, as is Education Secretary Arne Duncan who used to run the Chicago school system. You may recall this is the movement--created by the great minds of the business world--which would like to weed out the lousy teachers via standardized tests for students and eventually privatize the whole system through charter and online schools, making a nice profit along the way.

Matt Farmer, at the Huffington Post, gives an example of the kind of thing happening in Chicago:

"February was an interesting month for sixth-grade math teacher Octavia Sansing-Rhodes. On February 28, WGN-TV and St. Xavier University named Sansing-Rhodes their "Teacher of the Month" and awarded her a $1000 check for her fine work at Chicago's Herzl Elementary School."

"That honor, however, was bittersweet because it came just six days after Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard effectively fired Sansing-Rhodes, along with everybody else who works at Herzl.The purge was announced at the February 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. Late that afternoon, the mayor's hand-picked board voted (unanimously, of course) to "turnaround" Herzl in 2012-13 by handing the school over to the mayor's friends at the Academy for Urban School Leadership."

"Bottom line -- everyone in the building gets fired, and AUSL gets to hire its own teachers, principals, custodians and cafeteria workers.Oh, yeah -- and as an added bonus, the Board of Ed (headed by former AUSL chairman David Vitale) will provide the new AUSL management with roughly $9 million for upgrades to the building."

"After all, what would have been the point in wasting a fresh coat of paint, a new elevator, or a roof that didn't leak on Sansing-Rhodes and her colleagues?"

"Funny how those dollars always seem to follow the connected folks at AUSL."

Meyerson points out the fallacy in the reformers' reasoning: "If there were a strong case for the kind of school reforms that Emanuel and his many allies are promoting, then this move to roll over the teacher unions might have some heft to it. To be sure, there are some unimprovably crummy teachers who shouldn’t be kept in their jobs by virtue of a contract. But there is no evidence that teaching and educational outcomes in nonunion charter schools or in states where teachers can’t bargain collectively are any better than they are in bastions of union strength. In California, charter middle and high schools have a mind-boggling 50 percent teacher turnover rate — a crude indicator, admittedly, but one that suggests all is not well in the very schools that so many educational reformers insist are the solutions to our problems."

If you are a maker of widgets and your competitors are making widgets of higher quality at lower cost, you'd be well advised to take a good hard look at just how those competitors are doing it.

The widget analogy fits the USA in both health care and education. Yet we refuse to look around the world to see just what are the characteristics of our successful competitors. Teachers and their unions are not the problem. All the nations with high-performing educational systems have unionized teachers.

Maybe, just maybe, the problem is not with the basic cog in our educational system (teachers). Could it be that denigrating, humiliating and evaluating them is much easier than taking a long hard look at the entire educational system?

Oh, and if we ever do get around to that long hard look, let's start by bringing together the best teachers from across the country to rework the system, not business people who have never spent a day in front of a classroom.