Job security at heart of 2 stumbling blocks
by Bill Ruthhart and Diane Rado, Chicago Tribune reporters
Chicago Tribune
September 11, 2012
Two issues being cited as primary stumbling blocks to a Chicago teachers contract are a recall policy for teachers and a teacher evaluation system. Both affect job security for teachers and are part of larger efforts to overhaul schools in the city and nationally.
TEACHER RECALL POLICY
The Chicago Teachers Union is pushing hard for a procedure to recall teachers who have been laid off because of school closings, consolidations and turnarounds. The issue is of critical importance, the union has said, because of rumors that the district plans to close as many as 100 schools in coming years.
Earlier this year, CPS and the union struck a deal over the longer school day that temporarily allowed for such a recall. In exchange for the union agreeing to an extra 30 minutes in high schools and 75 minutes in elementary schools, CPS agreed to rehire nearly 500 teachers in noncore subjects from a pool of teachers who had been laid off.
The district, however, has resisted making such a recall policy the permanent method for filling vacancies in Chicago schools.
“Teachers in this city agreed to a longer day … and what our union got in return for that was a promise there would be a recall procedure for those teachers who are going to be hired,” said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of CTU. “Now we see that offer is being taken away from the table, and there is no sign of respect there. That’s important for our members.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel has framed the issue as one of accountability, saying he doesn’t want to place the district’s hiring control in the hands of the union through such a recall process.
“I don’t believe I should pick ’em. I don’t believe CPS should pick ’em. I don’t believe the CTU leadership should pick ’em,” Emanuel said Monday of hiring teachers. “If we’re going to hold our local principals in the school accountable for getting the results we need, they need to pick the best qualified.”
In the district’s latest proposal, CPS teachers whose schools are closed would be eligible for vacancies at the school that takes in the transferred students. If there are no vacancies, the teachers would have three options: a three-month lump-sum severance, five months in a “reassigned teacher pool” or a spot in a “quality teacher force pool,” which would entitle those teachers to an interview and an explanation if they are not hired.
The CPS offer also provides options for teachers displaced for other reasons, including turnarounds or phaseouts.
Jeanne Allen, president of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform, said recall policies do not encourage improvement or change within school districts but rather a status quo that has never led to improvement in educating children.
But the teachers union has countered that its members deserve as much job security as possible, especially with school closings becoming increasingly common.
“In Chicago, there are many good teachers who work in some of the toughest schools in the city, who saw their schools close through no fault of their own,” Sharkey said.
TEACHER RATINGS
Teacher contract negotiations often come down to money and benefits, so parents might be wondering how employee evaluations became a stumbling block in the Chicago Public Schools teacher strike.
The wrangling has to do with a new teacher rating system pushed by the Obama administration, which has sparked new laws and controversy in Illinois and around the country.
The new evaluations judge teachers in part on how their students perform, with a focus on academic gains. Teachers say that isn’t fair for a lot of reasons and that bad ratings resulting from the new system could threaten teachers’ livelihoods.
CTU President Karen Lewis estimates that almost 6,000 teachers could be discharged in the coming years — nearly 30 percent of union membership. “That is unacceptable and leads to instability for our students,” she said.
But supporters of the new system — created under a 2010 Illinois law — say it’s good for students and a way to ensure that the best teachers are in America’s schools.
“I think there is unbelievably strong momentum not only locally but nationally that the time has come to have more substantive evaluations,” said Robin Steans, executive director of the policy group Advance Illinois, which has been instrumental in pushing education reforms.
Steans said a great deal of effort went into negotiating the 2010 law and that the CTU was at the table — though not Lewis, because she wasn’t union president at the time.
The law required CPS to jump-start the new evaluation system this fall in at least 300 schools, though most suburban school districts were not required to put the program in place until 2016-17.
During the first two years of the new system, at least 25 percent of a teacher’s evaluation must stem from how students perform on various assessments and how much they grow in knowledge and skills during the school year. From the third year on, the figure would be at least 30 percent.
CPS had planned to increase the figure to 40 percent in the coming years, but that could change in negotiations with the union, as could other parts of the new evaluation system.
The union wants to alter the scores that determine a teacher’s rating and the timing of tests used to measure student academic gains, among other changes. CPS officials say they’re open to working with the union and making adjustments as needed.
The new system also has been a point of contention between Illinois and the federal government, which wants Illinois to speed up use of the new evaluations. Illinois has refused, creating a standoff that has affected state education reforms.
At a downtown rally Monday, Rick Sawicki, a seventh- grade teacher at Evergreen Middle School, said it’s unfair to tie a teacher’s evaluation to student performance. He compared it to a coach not being able to pick the members of his team but still being evaluated on how they do on the field.
“There are a lot of factors that go into a child’s education that is not reflected in test scores,” he said. “Children are more to me than their test scores.”
