The Chicago school teachers went on strike today. According to National Review, the average Chicago teacher’s salary is $76,000 per year and they turned down a 16% increase. This is not playing well in Peoria or anywhere else. Perhaps the Chicago teachers think they should get combat pay in exchange for working in a failed school district. Ultimately this has the potential to really hurt Obama because it will bring media focus on the Chicago Public School system. It is an ugly picture.
Barack Obama was appointed Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC)in 1995. CAC collected over $49.2 million in special funding to implement reform in Chicago schools. One of the three co-authors of the grant request was William Ayers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Annenberg_Challenge
What a coincidence. An organization that just happens to be the brain child of Williams Ayers miraculously chooses Barack Obama to be Chairman of the Board. By pure happenstance CAC then channeled money to the Chicago School Reform Collaborative, starring: William Ayers. The following article from the Wall Street Journal describes how the Chicago School Reform Collaborative functioned:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122212856075765367.html
Instead of measuring performance with outdated tools, like achievement tests, this program taught activism. Teachers would be “community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. To make this work, money wasn’t given directly to schools; it was given to community organizations like the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN). We are seeing the results of this failed experiment in the streets of Chicago today.
Chicago Public Schools currently rank 665th out of 772 school districts in Illinois. That is actually an improvement. It appears that when Arne Dunne, current Secretary of State, was CEO of the Chicago Public Schools he tried to change things. He pushed a return to relying on testing and basing teacher pay on actual results. He then closed failed neighborhood schools and turned them over to charter schools. (It actually looks a lot like “no child left behind” but no Democratic would ever admit that.) The teachers union responded with outrage.
So, under the brilliant leadership of William Ayers, with funding from Barack Obama, the Chicago Public School system became a hot bed of teachers who were more focused on: “provoking resistance to American racism and Oppression than actually teaching basic skills. It is these teachers who are now protesting in the streets of Chicago against the reforms championed by Obama’s own Secretary of Education. You can’t make things like this up.
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/9/10/chicago_teachers_strike_could_portend_referendum
I wonder if anyone in the main stream media will even attempt to connect the dots. Probably not! And we were worried about what he has done to the economy!
TDM