Category Archives: Writing

The CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] wants a proportional pay raise for the longer work day. The union is also calling for smaller class sizes, an increase in wraparound services like school nurses and social workers, and arts and music in all Chicago schools.

The board, however, has refused to engage on quality of education issues. The city says it lacks money to fairly compensate teachers for increased hours. Instead, the board has offered only 2 percent raises for the first two years of the contract. After that, it wants merit pay with evaluations based on student test scores. The city is also trying to get rid of contractual increases for education and experience.

CTU has noted that the city gives nearly $250 million every year in tax abatements to well-connected developers.

“Saying It’s Not about the Money, Chicago Teachers Inch Closer to Strike,” Theresa Moran, July 18, 2012

Labor Day signals the start of the (really) silly season, as the  presidential campaigns swing into high gear. Meanwhile, in the land of reality can expect party hi-jinks to generate yet another wave of both parties are equally terrible laments. The CTU’s ongoing struggles with Mayor Emmanuel, shows why this is such a tempting position. This piece, by Ben Joravsky, where I stole my title, shows that on key public school issues, there’s just not much difference between Democratic and Republican policy.

Some liberals seem to love charter schools– it’s their own version of the broader market/competition religion/delusion– and too often they grow myopic when they get their hands on the newest reform idea. (Here’s a nice piece on how the charter schools, which are in fact no better in general than pubic schools, play the numbers game to make their programs seem more effective than they are.) They decide that a longer school day is a good idea but then forget that this puts a burden on teachers.

The CTU, meanwhile, seems to be making a lot of sense. Given the “hard times” it seems smart to shut down some of those business subsidies– to cite one example–and use the money to get back to basics, as it were, by making sure that all schools have good arts programs and services like nurses. If you increase the amount of work someone does– say, by lengthening the work day– then you should pay for it. This would be investing in the local economy in the best possible fashion.

These similarities are a problem mostly because presidential elections are almost always so close. The entire fight, in the next several weeks, will be over the 3 or 5% of people whose minds might be changed.  If those “both parties are equally bad” messages dampen down the Democratic vote,  even if by only a few percentage points, we might end up with those House Republicans setting public policy back decades.  So we have to ask ourselves if it matters that there’s so much overlap.

There’s still a lot of difference.  Democrats are comfortable with birth control and the Roe v. Wade compromise and Planned Parenthood. I’m going to vote Democrat, though, mostly because if people start getting organized and fighting back, I would rather have Rahm Emanuell, who wants to curb union power, across the table, than Scott Walker, who wants to wipe them off the face of the earth. We can push the Democrats into reality; the Republicans are likely to just shoot everyone and let God sort it out.

It’s been an embarrassing pull-back-the-curtain week for stereotypical white man rhetoric. First the news that the Sears Catalog Model/ Republican, Mitt Romney, got a 0% in a NBC/ Wall Street Journal poll of African Americans. Earlier in the week Bishop Stephen Blair had declared Creepy Catalog Model/ Republican Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives budget immoral, due to its inadequate concern for “the care of the poor and the vulnerable.”

There’s the weird ambition to push birth control back to pre-Margaret Sanger via so-called “person-hood” laws.  When will they begin to try to prosecute people who talk about contraceptives under obscenity laws, just as they did Sanger? Not too long it seems. One Congresswoman, Lisa Brown, has already been slapped on the wrist for mentioning her vagina in a public debate about restrictive abortion laws.

As if the great shout out to the stereotypical white man weren’t enough, built on the racial trope that Obama “isn’t one of us,” now we toss in the return of the Welfare Queen in Romney’s claim– deemed false by anyone who looks at it– that Obama is eliminating the work requirement in welfare. What welfare? I’ve been unemployed for six months, in Obama’s liberal home state, and all I have gotten is minimal unemployment insurance.

The Sears Catalog Model lies, ignores the poor, and seems to need to control women.  He’s also out of touch with reality, as the “We Built This” night at the Republican convention rattles in the background on as I write , ridiculed by Rachael Maddow, and rightly so. The convention is happening in a publicly financed building and every speaker, despite their denials– like every American–has been helped by government programs.

…the consultants called for a narrow set of career-oriented majors, large teaching loads for faculty members and more hybrid (mixed online and in-person instruction) courses, and for recruitment to focus on traditional-aged, “driven” undergraduate students (the university’s current student body is composed largely of transfer students). Bain also recommended low tuition and increased enrollment.

“No Thanks, Bain” Kevin Kiley

“A significant number of these faculty members were part of a household that fell below the 2009 median household income in the United States: 21.6 percent reported a household income under $35,000, and 30.2 percent reported a household income under $45,000,” said the report. (According to the American Association of University Professors, an associate professor at a master’s-level public university had an average salary of $60,612 in 2010-11.)

“Non-Tenure-Track Economics,” Kaustuv Basu

In all the Republican convention hoopla in the next week, I have a feeling that the steady dissolution of U.S. higher education is not going to come up at all. The same bizarre logic that dismantled the old system– the idea that a business or profit model and not a public service model should be central to education– continues to be presented, again and again, as if it were a new idea, and as if we had no idea what the results would be. The definition of insanity, according to Einstein, is doing the same thing again and again and expecting the results to be different.  The sweater-vest make over shouldn’t fool anyone. In the Republican future, everyone’s an adjunct.