“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”  Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

There are battles raging between two large organizations and the unions that represent in one case, teachers, and in the other, referees.  For teachers, it seems as if there is a global assault on its profession and unions that they formed.  For referees, it’s a typical battle against a large corporation.

It’s a tale of two cities,  Chicago and New York.   Although the Chicago Teachers Union has agreed to suspend their walkout, it will still take weeks to reach agreement on the new contract.  In New York, the National Football League has kept the 121 game referees locked out, and put “replacement officials” on the field to make sure the games would continue. Chicago would need 29,000 replacement teachers and staff if they were locked out, and students returned to classes.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) walked over compensation, evaluation rules and working conditions in schools and classrooms.

The National Football League Referees Association (NFLRA) is on strike over compensation, evaluation or grading, retirement benefits, and working conditions.

The Chicago Teachers Union, with five union affiliations including the Illinois Federation of Teachers ((IFT), and  the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is a new union of teachers. There are 25,000 teachers in its union, 700 of whom are union delegates.  The President of the union, Karen Lewis, is a teacher. The Chicago school system enrolls 350,000 students.  Not counting professional development during the summer and weekends, teachers are employed between 170 – 190 days per year.

The NFLRA has 121 highly skilled professional officials (according to Tim Millis, the first full-time executive director and former former NFL official) who work one day a week from July to February.  However, one report indicated that most of these officials have second jobs, and the amount of work required by the NFL takes up time from Monday – Thursday following a Sunday game.  Certainly the referees lock out has been in the spotlight because of the NFL’s insistence of hiring non-union refs, and making sure that their revenue stream continues each week.

Teachers Stand Up by Walking Out

But there is something deeper going on, especially in Chicago.  For the first time in years, a union of teachers has stood up to school officials, the board of education, and the mayor, and pushed back on what Eugene Robinson called the brie-and-chablis reform movement of teaching.  Robinson’s Washington Post Opinion article, Standing up for Teachers, comes at a time when teachers in Chicago stood up for themselves, and focused attention of reforms that have been a failure throughout the nation.  Unions, especially teacher unions, have been vilified as the cause of failing schools, and the supposed low performance on international tests.

In one way, the brie-and-chablis reformers are akin to the aristocrats described in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, the same year that Darwin published On the Origin of Species.  Although the union members are not obsessed with being revolutionaries, they are willing to risk their livelihoods to oppose what they feel are injustices in their workplaces.  Teachers have suffered uncalled for attacks on their professional abilities by wealthy boys clubs, departments of education, and the media.

The teachers in Chicago, by their willingness to walk, are not only standing up for themselves, but teachers throughout the nation. Teachers in the third-largest U.S. school system were willing to challenge the school system, and this in itself should register some awareness that something is a foot in U.S. education.  To add to the credibility in Chicago, hundreds of school districts in Texas have passed a resolution against the use of high-stakes testing.  Parents, teachers, and administrators in Florida, New York, Indiana and other states are organizing petitions against standards-based and high-stakes test reform.  Valerie Strauss, on her The Answer Sheet blog, documents these events, and provides a primer on this push back against these kinds of reforms.

The battle that is raging in the fields of education about the use of high-stakes testing, the common core standards, teacher evaluation tied to student performance, the dismissal of poverty as a cause of academic and life performance, and teacher education are explored in-depth by Anthony Cody over on his blog, Living in Dialog.   Anthony recently highlighted these issues in a series of ten exchanges between the Gates Foundation and himself.  A brave undertaking, Cody exposed how the Gates Foundation defends the “brie-and-chablis” reformers.  Time and again, the Gates’ writers put all student learning squarely on teachers, and continued to ignore the social menace of poverty.  The Gates Foundation subscribes and funds the “Great Teacher Hypothesis” that if we give teachers the “tools and tactics” they can make a huge difference, in spite of poverty.

Teacher’s in Chicago, and across the U.S. don’t agree with the Gates formula.  The strike in Chicago didn’t change the fundamentals of high-stakes testing, or standards-based teaching, but the work has begun to push back against some reforms.

According to some reports, teachers claimed victory and in some areas:

Teachers claimed victory in several key areas, including blocking the use of high stakes testing to evaluate teachers, and getting at least 50 percent of all new hires to be from the pool of laid off teachers. Then, there was the issue of respect.  “The biggest round of applause we got, we actually got a standing ovation today for the new lesson plans, the teachers can control lesson plans 51  professional teachers actually get to make the professional decision about their lesson plans,” said CTU Financial Secretary Kristine Mayle.

The walkout was the first for a major American city in at least six years. It drew national attention because it posed a high-profile test for teachers unions, which have seen their political influence threatened by a growing reform movement. Unions have pushed back against efforts to expand charter schools, bring in private companies to help with failing schools and link teacher evaluations to student test scores.Read more.

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