By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org
    
CHICAGO – As the Chicago teachers’ strike enters Day 2, reviews of the unions’ self-serving performance are starting to roll in from across the nation.
 
Suffice to say, they aren’t good.
 
One of the most scathing write-ups comes from Washington Post editorial writer Charles Lane, who begins his column by noting that 85 percent of Chicago Public Schools students come from homes that are “at or near the poverty line: $27,214 for a family of three, in a typical case.”
 
By comparison, the average Chicago Teachers Union member earns “almost triple that amount — $76,000 per year,” Lane notes.
 
“I cannot describe the moral repugnance of this strike by aggrieved middle-class ‘professionals’ against the aspiring poor,” Lane writes. “Well, I could describe it, but only by plagiarizing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s unprintable vocabulary.”
 
While the strike is supposedly about pay and benefits, Lane says it’s also about “the all-important question of linking teacher job security to student test scores.”
 
Lane believes the teachers union is desperate to prevent Emanuel from establishing “a pay-for-performance beachhead in the nation’s third-largest school district,” which “would send a message across the country.”
 
If the CTU can stop merit pay in Chicago, that “would reverberate well beyond Chicago, too,” he writes.
 
(Many education reformers support paying effective classroom teachers more than their so-so peers. Teacher unions reject any merit-based pay plans because they undercut union orthodoxy that all teachers are equal and interchangeable.)
 
Lane concludes his editorial by wondering aloud whether the CTU should have any power over how the school district operates.
 
“Some wonder why Emanuel doesn’t just give the teachers half a loaf, so the kids can go back to class,” Lane writes.
 
“The real question is how things got to the point where the mayor isn’t legally free to drop one of his F-bombs on the Chicago Teachers Union and hang out a Help Wanted sign for new teachers – pay, benefits and work rules to be set by elected officials, in accordance with the public interest, period.” 
 
Nobody knows which side will prevail in the Chicago teachers strike, but one thing seems clear: By behaving like a group of whiny, self-centered children, the CTU is turning a large number of Americans against teacher unions.
 
And remember, this is only the second day of the strike.