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Past Issues January 2006 Letters
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CTU leaders hide huge pay and bonuses from members December 19, 2005 The New Year is here and we still have no accounting from the CTU officers of the salaries and benefits of those employed by OUR UNION. Was Santa good again and provide them with another two weeks bonus? (By my calculations that equals a 3.8 percent bonus. Add that to the 4 percent raise they got in September with the regular members that’s almost double the raise of the career service and teachers.) Now, this bonus has never been denied nor explained to the members. In addition to being paid 54 weeks for 52 weeks of work, a number of employees are also reportedly receiving VALIC contributions of 10 percent to 20 percent on top of their salaries. So, these individuals salaries, actually, are anywhere from 114 percent to 124 percent of the salaries of union members increases negotiated in the last contract. Maybe they needed the additional added benefits to make up for the miserable raises which preceded them when working from 1990-2002 when they were only receiving 2 percent raises as teachers in the public school system. A large amount of money was spent to defeat the last administration. These individuals feel that they are entitled to be repaid for their efforts. Now, they use the Union newspaper, letters to the members, school visits, and the podium at meetings of the House of Delegates to continue to blame all the problems they are having on the “Lynch contract.” The contract negotiated by Lynch is more than 90 percent the same as the previous contracts, but the present leadership is too busy blaming any problems they incur on Lynch rather than fighting to protect the membership who may or may not have elected them. They invite members to come to the office and look over the contracts. Then they deny access to critical parts of the language so members whose salaries are public record know exactly how much money is being spent on salaries and benefits. They have employed individuals who were voted out of office five years ago at a cost of over $1 million dollars with the legal expenses included. We are told of contract changes yet are still paying health insurance premiums, which they vowed to lower. If they have reopened the contract, why hasn’t the health care costs been revisited. Is it because every other city employee has been placed in basically the same position with regards to health care? Is it because health care costs have soared far above inflation and almost every union in the country has cooperated to try to curb health care costs? Our annual 4 percent raise allows us to retire with higher pension benefits (imagine if we got paid for 54 weeks a year), more options for health care. We are not locked into any plan but are able to choose what is best for our family or us. We have to start hearing from our leadership about what they have done for us — not what the four year contract prevents them from doing. They blame Lynch if they think something is bad and put it on the front page of the paper. They don’t mention the improved retirement benefits — the early retirement option (ERO). They refuse to force the board to work for the pensionability of work done outside the normal workday and countless other improvements for members in our contract. Under the UPC and Paul Vallas, they added five days to the school year and called it a “raise.” Deborah Lynch’s first contract subtracted five days so all students and staff have one less week of hot June classes to endure. How anyone can try to spin this into a bad thing is beyond me. For the first time in history Chicago high school students are getting out in June early enough to compete for jobs or to take advantage of summer programs that otherwise were barred to them because of that crazy late ending to the school year. UPC would probably have us working into July on one end and beginning in mid-August (as they just about did) on the other and telling us it was for our own good! They continue to spend our money in letters, newspapers and flyers to castigate Lynch because she fought them and won. They do not want to lose the cash cow that they live off of from the dues we pay every month. We have shorter school year but, hopefully, not a short memory when the 2007 elections come around. We also have a chance to choose new delegates from our ranks who will ask the questions and seek the answers that need to be answered in the next year and a half. The present leadership has to lead us into the future or fail by their past mistakes. Sincerely, Brian Sullivan (Fernwood School, Chicago) Holding a fair CTU election December 17, 2005 The most specious argument by the CTU leadership in its opposition to a mailed ballot for officers elections is that it would reveal those members of our bargaining unit living outside the city in violation of the CPS residency requirement. This in turn might cause the CTU members to be fired. The scenario for this is as follows. When the mailed ballot proves undeliverable at the Chicago address indicated, this would reveal a violation of the CPS residency requirement. We then are expected to believe that the CTU would voluntarily turn over these undeliverable letters for action by the CPS. We are expected to believe that the CTU is so embedded with the CPS they would turn over these names and play Pinkerton — the hated union-busting detective agency — for the Board of Education. There is a much easier way for the Board to ascertain information without intruding on the CTU’s election and frankly without subpoena power to get those undeliverable letters or to get an injunction impounding them. Why would any judge do this when CPS has other means available which I will describe below. Let the CPS send out its own, First Class, mailing to all of its employees at their last known city address. The letter could even include the language of the residency requirement though the contents could include any subject. If that mail proves undeliverable, then let CPS do its own detective work. They do not need CTU as their “stool pigeons.” CTU leaders are now stonewalling setting a date for a referendum for a mailed ballot with the petition signatures for it fully certified. Their excuse is the unfounded fears state above, and this is an alibi for delay until they foist a second referendum petition for sending some ballots to the school for delivery by an overworked delegate through school mail boxes which lacks the security of a home mailing. Let the CPS leaders set a date now on the first petition and if they have fears, have the courage to advocate a No vote on a straight home mailed ballot. They have none, but are confusing the issue. The proper forum for these issues is not merely a letter to Substance, but a demand at the House to fix a date at that meeting and to challenge any out-of-order ruling from the chair by having that ruling sustained immediately. The House must begin to raise it voice, and not take its $45 stipend and “cut and run”.
Gerald R. Adler Senn support questioned December 16, 2005 Jesse Sharkey’s wrote an interesting article about the woes of Senn High School in “Duncanian duplicity.” But I have one question. He writes that the community was against the naval academy. One Senn teacher told me the opposite, that the community overall was actually against the school. Senn is not entirely a neighborhood school. Many of the students come from different parts of the city. Many residents — under a tint of racism — do not welcome the minority students (perhaps seen as invading their ‘property values’ or whatever). That’s not to say the fight was not well worth it to save a great school that serves many immigrant students and stop the militarization of our schools. In Logan Square a few years ago, a Daley machine alderwoman was defeated after going against the wishes of the community in support of building a Home Depot (but also flaunting it in their faces). Despite Congressman Schakowsky’s strong anti-war stance, her support of the naval academy means either she’s a hypocrite, afraid to cross Daley or a true politician who knows her voters or all of the above. Which do you choose? Sincerely, Good night and good luck in 2005 December 19, 2005 GOOD NIGHT 2005, AND GOOD LUCK TO ALL IN 2006 While my spouse Fatima, and son Dean nearly dosed off watching the old black and white shots of Edward R. Morrow, who along with his staff stood up to the extremist Wisconsin senator and his witch hunting antics that ruined many a dear soul’s life, and even led a CBS staff member to suicide, I nonetheless tried to share some thoughts with my son, and compare those times to modern times now upon us. As a little grade schooler in south suburban Alsip, I remember how some referred to a neighbor family down the block as being “dirty commies.” But my father — a purple heart recipient, long since deceased, shot in the leg in World War II, jumping into a fox hole, who wore a brace from his knee to his ankle — was friends with the father of this family (also a vet) who was being slandered. Why my brothers and I fought our way to the bus stop, when we past that families house, has remained a childhood mystery And after all, Communism is dead. But what is the new fear that has replaced the commie menace? If you are dark complexioned or have Arab features, will you be stereotyped? Remember the President said, “You are either with us, or against us.” Does he still feel that way now that his public support has waned considerably? Do the mayor and his likes feel the same (you’re either for it, or else) about Renaissance 2010, even though much of it reeks of union busting? A good chant here: “WHATS DISGUSTING? UNION BUSTING!” Where have you gone Jackie Vaughn? I only asked her one question in the mid 80’s, while visiting Carpenter school, and it was about apartheid, pension investments in that racist system, and if we were going to divest. She didn’t suffocate my question, but encouraged me to keep speaking up about the matter. I wasn’t by any means the first, needless to say, nor the last to do so. And by the way. Why are we under the spell of test scores. How is it that those of us that know that it is wrong to sort students, teachers, and schools solely on the basis of test scores, continue to be suckered into playing the game of “Good schools - Bad schools” using the aforementioned criteria as the basis of how good an institution is. Please join the resistance to this injustice, that is, what I call the “gun to the head syndrome” Da mayor, to da board, the bored of ed. to the school, the school to the teacher, and last but not least teachers are forced to place paramount importance on the almighty testing instrument, thereby stifling the creativity of both instructor and student, debate it as we may. Or may we Mr. Mayor? Unfortunately high stakes testing has spread throughout America like crack cocaine did in the eighties both abusive to the human psyche in their own way. Why, by the way, Mr. mayor did you have the Board of Education Under Paul Vallas fire a teacher for exposing one of these ”made in Chicago” instruments as the editor of a teacher monthly. The now defunct CASE exam had flaws, and the editor of this publication exposed those flaws. I followed this scenario closely because I had teens of my own in the high schools at the time. Is it true that Gestapo like antics sent crews of cronies out to confiscate those publications? That is, when portions of the CASE exam were published in substance. True this went to the Supreme Court — but so did the Bush / Gore election in 2000. And now look at the mess that W. has made. From neglect in New Orleans since the aftermath of Katrina to the quagmire in Iraq, we have been Bushwhacked. If they really believe in No Child Left Behind then how come my Spanish classes don’t have the books they need? Has the $ been spent for bombs? Three of five classes have books. Please! Another chant: “BOOKS NOT BOMBS” And how we continue to be opiated with the almighty test score, though some schools are magnet schools, the neglected school in the poorest neighborhood, segregated and all, has their scores compared to Whitney Young’s etc. Standardized tests weren’t meant to be used in this way. They were meant to be used in a natural way to measure the natural growth of a student’s test taking ability. The results measure more than anything else, how good a test taker you are. Some students who are doing poor in class are great test takers, while others who are doing well in class do dismally poor at taking these exams. Recently while a Coach at my school was looking through Substance in the teacher lunchroom, he read out loud, “Martial Law at Senn “. A middle age security guard commented, “Oh that communist teacher paper.” I couldn’t help quipping that “the editor of substance would take issue with your comment.” A short while later, he said, “Don’t take it personally.” I then explained to him that the editor had come to help us with our school violence problems, spoke to the staff, and was head of security for CTU. He still has contractual rights, and should still be in that position. Jack Anderson and Gary Webb passed on this year. The former reported on the unreportable, like what the right wing Somoza dictatorship was up to in Nicaragua right up to his downfall in 1979, when he fled Managua to his back yard in Miami. “He was a son of a bitch” as FDR described the Somozas, “but he was our son of a bitch.” My we say the same of “the son of the Bush” administration, and Saddam, that is, he was “our man in Baghdad” (on the CIA pay roll) until Bush Sr. decided to drive Saddam out of Kuwait? Why do I feel that the real reason Bush went to war in Iraq, instead of pursuing Bin Laden in Afghanistan, was that Saddam tried to have Bush, Sr. bumped off in the aftermath of the first Gulf War. Now we must ask again, “where have all the soldiers gone?” Gary Webb exposed the origins of “crack” cocaine, and how it got it start in Los Angeles. But Webb was fired from the San Jose Mercury News for pursuing the story, since it led to higher ups in the CIA involved in drug trafficking. Webb nonetheless put out a book, “Dark Alliance” that told the story of how Cocaine was transported via Central America, and arms shipments to the contras were sent back to the “contras” trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan Revolution. Webb was found dead, and it was said that it was suicide. Californian U. S. Rep. Maxine Waters attempted having Congress investigate this, but was hushed up by the Senate Establishment etc. See “cover Up, Behind the Iran-Contra affair,” or take a look at Judge Walsh’s book. There was more “fear & loathing” in 2005, and in these modern times of course. Nonetheless, “Good night 2005, and good luck to all in 2006.” John Whitfield Fair Test Needs Help December 20, 2005 Twenty years ago, the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest) was created to advance quality education and equal opportunity by promoting fair, open, valid and educationally beneficial evaluation of students, teachers and schools. For two decades, FairTest has been incredibly busy and productive. Our mission is far from complete. As 2005 draws to a close FairTest’s leadership of the assessment reform movement is needed more than ever. Unfortunately, we are facing the most serious financial crisis in our history: We have already laid off some staff and consolidated some work. We plan to continue strong program work in the coming year, but we need your help. Why contribute to FairTest? Today, test mania is hurting good schools and blocking needed progress in lower-performing ones. The over-reliance on narrow standardized exams, as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and many state laws require, diverts time from social studies, science, art, and music to focus on test prep for math and reading exams. The results are very troubling . . . Promising reforms are subverted . . . Professional development has become little more than training teachers to analyze test scores . . . “Tutoring” is the new code word for drill-and-kill test prep. NCLB and state-mandated high-stakes tests are undermining educational quality and equity. In response, FairTest has organized a national network of civil rights, education and child advocacy organizations to fight back. This alliance has grown from a dozen groups only a year ago to 67 this month! Together they have endorsed a Joint Statement calling for the overhaul of NCLB and have begun collaborating on concrete recommendations on assessment, accountability and improving schools. FairTest brings ideas and knowledge from diverse activists around the nation to the alliance discussions. FairTest also assists advocates in states across the nation to combat misguided educational policies by promoting the use of multiple forms of assessment for making high-stakes decisions. FairTest has had major success promoting alternatives to the misuse of admissions exams. This year alone, seven more colleges have become “test score optional,” boosting the total to 730. Growing numbers of schools now recognize that SAT and ACT scores have little value in predicting how well a student performs in college while reducing admissions and financial aid opportunities for qualified applicants from minority-group and low-income families. FairTest remains the only national organization regularly exposing the flaws of the alphabet soup of admissions exams. Whether it is the “new” SAT, a revised GRE or a different company hired to administer the GMAT, journalists, educators, researchers, test-takers and the general public know that FairTest is the source for accurate, independent information about the exams’ fundamental fairness and accuracy. FairTest also leads campaigns against so-called “merit” scholarships that rely on test results to determine eligibility for college tuition aid. The use of minimum score requirements results in financial resources being disproportionately awarded to upper-income, white students rather than their lower-income peers and students of color who most need the money to afford higher education. FairTest remains crucial in K-12 and admissions testing reform. Your support is crucial to the future of FairTest. Please help FairTest continue its important work by making a year’s-end contribution today! How much we are able to do to halt the testing mania and promote educationally beneficial practices largely depends on our resources. Your support will make a difference. A donation to FairTest is an investment in quality education and equal opportunity for all students. Please give as generously as you can. Also consider asking your friends and colleagues to make a gift to FairTest. All contributions are fully tax-deductible. More than ever, we appreciate your support for fair and open assessment. Sincerely, Deborah Meier (FairTest Board Member) Struggle over new Albany Park school December 26, 2005 There is a struggle taking place over the future of a new school being constructed at Kedzie and Ainslie, in Chicago, only a few miles from where the Board of Education handed over the brand new Haugan School to private interests. The story has not yet fully unfolded, but there is a general lesson, from what happened with the theft of the Haugan School and the partially successful struggle so far to keep Senn High School from being completely divided up or eliminated. The lesson is that teachers, parents, and the community must get organized and struggle for public education. There is still time to get organized to save the school at Kedzie and Ainslie as a community school. Here’s the background of the situation. The Board of Education is building a new school at Kedzie and Ainslie with signs out front that say “Albany Park Middle School.” The community had been told that the school was to be open for all 7th and 8th graders. However, in the fall, the Board of Education suddenly reversed course and said it had no plans for how the school was to be used. On November 21, Dr. Taylor, principal of the Albany Park Multicultural Academy (APMA), at a meeting of a committee she hand picked, proposed a plan to make the school only for students admitted by a selection process, and for it to be a Renaissance 2010 school. She said publicly that CEO of Schools Arne Duncan loved her proposal. (The Renaissance 2010 Plan of Mayor Daley and the Commercial Club of Chicago, an elite group of businessmen, is to create schools that may have no input or decisions made by parents, no Local School Councils, and no say by teachers. They can even be given away to a private group the way the Haugan School was.) Dr. Taylor’s proposal and committee and target dates smelled like the development of a TAC, or Transitional Advisory Committee, to hand over the building to a private group as a charter school or some other form of privatized school. Many parents, teachers, and other community people opposed this, and hundreds came to the committee meetings and raised a fuss. Many of these people are now happy that the Dr. Taylor committee, on December 20, in a letter to parents and the community, said they are for a school that will be open to all students and not be under Renaissance 2010 — they did not explain why the original proposal by Dr. Taylor was changed. Now the issue is whether the people should now just sit back and be happy. The answer is no. Experience says they had better stay active and stay on guard. They have to watch out for tricks from the Board of Education or this committee, especially since in Chicago there is a history of people in power saying one thing and then suddenly doing another thing. (The Dr. Taylor committee is scheduled to meet again in the open on January 18 at 6 in the Von Steuben auditorium.) Along this line, there is a plan for parents, teachers, and other community people to get together at an independent meeting in early January (date to be finalized). The aim is have discussion and to make plans to stay on guard and ensure that there is a transparent process with full discussion and debate by the whole community. The goal is for the building at Kedzie and Ainslie to be a public school open to all neighborhood and other students, with no part of it privatized school under Renaissance 2010. For more information on this meeting, contact the Albany Park, North Park, Mayfair Neighbors for Peace and Justice at (773) 250.3335 or write to justice. This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it Neal Resnikoff, Chicago Teachers harassed for illness? December 9, 2005 In solidarity I am sending this to you and I hope to God you are able to include this letter in the next issue of Substance. It is truly important. If you teach for CPS, expect to be treated unprofessionally, unethically, and without empathy — some of the reasons veteran teachers and other CPS personnel not only retire as soon as they can, but enjoy retirement more than any one can imagine. “Free at last, thank God, almighty, free at last!”, says it all. There was a time when a teacher was expected to be physically able to teach, and keep up with students, and, if unable to do so, then one was not allowed to teach. I am not, in any way, disparaging teachers, or service personnel, who may be physically challenged, but who come to work everyday with their students’ best interests at heart and perform their job related duties well. Rather I am speaking to the issue of chronically ill teachers who, according to CPS doctors, are considered employable and able to teach full time no matter how serious the involved illness or illnesses. Not only is this type of situation ludicrous, it would, seemingly, reaffirm, once again, if non-educational personnel are truly worth their weight in salt as doctors, lawyers, and so on, despite excessive salaries and other benefits, they do not work for the “the Board”, nor do they care to. Despite thorough medical reports, diagnosis, prognosis, and so on, from a teacher’s own primary care doctor, as well as specialists (all on staff at credited, if not world renowned, hospitals), which indicate that a dedicated, veteran teacher, is both extremely ill, and unable to work any longer — CPS doctors are allowed to cruelly throw all of this evidence “out the window” in order to insist a teacher, no matter how critically ill, return to work and resume his or her same job duties. You or I could do better based on observation alone. Another slap in the face is to have Board staff, seemingly, insist that a critically ill teacher, or any other CPS employee, resign rather than retire because of disability to do what(?) — save the Board money? Since Vallas’s regime (which continues) how many staff have been hired, or seen their salaries increased, to $100,000 or more? Yet those of us who have truly been in the trenches, often for decades, and have put our students’ welfare, needs and rights, always first and often, at great personal sacrifice, are thrown to the dogs (literally) again, and again. Seriously attempting to persecute, and discriminate against, chronically ill teachers, paid poorly to begin with, year after year working without sufficient supplies and resources, working, far too often, in undesirable conditions, teaching too large classes, and, eventually, receiving small pensions, is criminal, unethical, and violates ADA (the American Disability Act). Does any one care? Despite rhetoric to the contrary, is remains extremely apparent what CPS, and Mayor Daley, think of public school education and public schools, teachers and our union. If the Mayor had a magic wand, all schools would be charter entities, and teachers who are union members, tired, old and sick, would just bite the dust. Same is true of newer union members. Renaissance 2010 is the death knell for us all — mark my words. In true solidarity, Sharonjoy A. Jackson Fair Test Plea December 18, 2005 FairTest is the ONLY national group devoted to resisting the testing madness. They are in serious financial difficulty. Please send them a contribution before it is too late. I know them well, and I promise you, they don’t waste a penny. Please help! Send to FairTest
Susan Harman, Oakland, CA CTU Sellout foreshadowed in pension deal December 22, 2005 Wow, the team that brought you 2 percent raises in the 1998 contract has done it again! They let the Board talk them into giving $18 mil in those same1998 dollars to settle a long overdue provision of that same wonderful contract. The Lynch administration insisted that CPS honor the contract and pay in current dollars, which would have amounted to over $39 mil in 2006. However Marilyn Stewart, under the guidance of Pam Massarsky & Co., probably jumped at the first offer the Board made. Let’s see what we’ll get: $18 million divided by three years divided by 30,000 teachers equals about $200 per year for everyone, not the teachers who actually worked overtime. Under the Lynch plan it would have been close to $500! Good deal Marilyn. Can you imagine the contract they’re negotiating? It’s deja vu all over again, but this is what we have grown to expect. They do not enforce the current contract which raised all members salaries by over 16 percent in four years, gave two extra guaranteed prep periods to elementary teachers, provided the first and only pension enhancement, oops…sorry... I forgot…it’s a bad contract. The CTU wants to go back to the good old days of the 90’s. Remember… the contract that didn’t have any raise at all? … the contract that gave the Board over $165 mil of our pension money? … the contract that had members start paying for health insurance?…the contracts that changed the high school classes from 40 to 50 minutes and gave us Advisory? These are the same folks who will be (or are already) negotiating a new contract. The ramifications from the New York City Transit strike will undoubtedly create additional problems. I’m sure Pam would welcome ‘no strike’ legislation so they can cry as they did for decade, “It’s the best we can do!” It wasn’t good enough then and it still isn’t good enough. Sara Loftus Stop using ‘dropout’ to denigrate people who are pushed out out December 23, 2005 Recently on the Fair Test ListServe, we were referred to a generally good article on a major problem. The article was “Low Test Scores + High Retention Rates = More Dropouts” (by C. Thomas Holmes). Fair Test’s Monty Neill recommended the article as “an excellent review of testing, retention and dropouts; reports most developed nations don’t retain students.” http://www.kdp. org/pdf/ RW06%20 Holmes.pdf_ (http // www.kdp.org /pdf/RW06%20 Holmes.pdf) The article cited above is helpful for the cause and I appreciate Susan Ohanian and Monty Neil for recommending it. I hope that in 2006, Substance, ARN, student and education advocates will really reconsider using and promoting the pejorative term, “dropout” when we are really describing “pushouts.” I think that we would be more sensitive to an equation such as: “Racial profiling + Discrimination = Bums” All would object to such a statement, I hope. Well, the term “dropout” is equivalent to bum, slacker, quitter, and other negative descriptions which put the burden on students and children for not finishing school. Dropout indicates that the student/child quit or gave up. That’s rarely the case. Sit down with young people who have not completed their secondary education and you will find that they did not wake up one day and “dropout.” Unbearable pressures from school, standards and testing, difficulties at home and within the family, financial insecurity, hunger, and other inequities combined to PUSH a student out of school. At World of Opportunity (WOO), since 2000, we have worked with more than 2,600 young people who did not complete high school, and I have yet to meet the first “dropout.” I have met students who became pregnant, or were homeless, or were depressed, or stayed home to tend to sick members of their family so that wage-earners could hold down jobs; or who could not afford clean school uniforms. I have met students who found rare employment opportunities or had no reliable transportation to school during cold and wet weather. I have met young people who passed all of their classes but missed a section of the High School Exit Exam and knew they would not be able to graduate. I have met students who passed all of the High School Exit Exam yet were missing credits because their lives were tumultuous due to some or all of the conditions described above. I have sat and talked with many students (along with their parents) who passed all of their classes and the Exit Exam, but could not graduate because the school system LOST their transcript. And so on..... The mere fact that we would come into contact with 2,600 young people desiring to continue their education at World of Opportunity verifies that they are not “dropouts” at all. Rather, they are pushouts. What do fellow activists with ARN think about this term, “dropout?” Do you think that “dropout” is a valid description of a student victimized by a systemic problem? Do you think that “pushout” is a helpful description? What language do you think would be useful in describing the students who have not completed high school due to the pressures of standards, testing, and retention? An end of the year “THANK YOU” to all of you, near and far, who have encouraged and supported the students of the WOO for more than five years now. We are grateful to you, each and everyone. Warmest peacebuilding greetings to one and all,
Steve Orel
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