Good day, CharterFolk.
Last month, I wrote about the challenges befalling public education in the cities that are hosting party conventions this year.
The struggles of the city that hosted the Republicans last month, as Colleston described for us last week …
… continue to unfold, leaving schools mired in chaos.
As I wrote in July, education policy priorities feature prominently in the Republican Party Platform.
They’re nowhere to be seen in the Democrat’s.
A couple weeks before the RNC, a great deal of attention had focused on the fact that the NEA’s staff were on strike against the union and had set up picket lines outside the NEA’s national convention. It led Biden to refuse to cross the picket line, contributing to the vacuum of information coming from Dems on education matters.
It led me to wonder:
If NEA staff decide to protest at the Democratic Party’s national convention next month, will Biden not be willing to cross that picket line either?
Well, Biden spoke last night, as did Chicago Mayor and former Chicago Teacher Union staffer Brandon Johnson, along with many others who would never cross a picket line.
Their appearances were enabled by a little-reported but oh-so-predictable development:
Realizing that they were over the barrel, the NEA reached an agreement with less than 72 hours to spare.
Maybe excoriating letters to NEA President Becky Pringle being publicly posted as the deadline loomed …
… did the trick.
The stridency of language in those letters coming from Pringle’s own members is stunning to behold.
So too is the economic information contained within those letters.
Got that, CharterFolk?
NEA staff rejected an average salary level of over $131,000.
The NEA reports that the average teacher salary across the United States is around $69,500 …
… meaning whatever deal was struck, average NEA staff salaries will be about double an average teaching salary.
What exactly the number is, we don’t know, of course, because, unlike the management practices that the NEA seeks to impose on all others in public education, the NEA’s inner workings are shrouded in secrecy.
Yesterday, Brandon Johnson opened up the conference to a mostly empty United Center.
Perhaps his low-profile speaking slot was a function of his dreadful polling numbers.
Though he spent his whole career working in public education, he chose not to say much of anything about what is happening in Chicago Public Schools.
Apparently, he preferred that it remain subtext.
Under the national radar screen.
If not swept under the national rug.
Just three days before the convention opened, what did Johnson do?
He made it clear he wants Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez out.
It was a move that coincided in lock-step with his former employer.
Martinez’s sin is opposing CTU’s contract demands which would send the school district reeling into insolvency.
That impertinence comes on top of his refusal earlier this summer to enter into an emergency loan that the union was demanding.
Johnson said he wants a CEO at CPS who will more forcefully work to secure additional resources for the district. That includes, of course, eliminating school choice …
… and recapturing enrollment from charter schools, forcing CharterFolk to make our voices heard.
Meanwhile, CTU continues working to erase from the landscape any data about how public schools are performing.
CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, of course, doesn’t need access to such information.
She enrolls her kid in private school.
So now Chicago goes careening toward the same chaos we saw in Milwaukee …
… and we see in so many other places across the United States …
… where policy makers’ vacuous ideas about public education lead to school systems that are so mired in chaos …
… that thousands of kids end up being deprived of even competent public educations, never mind the excellent ones they deserve.
This, CharterFolk, is the education subtext happening as the Dems hold their national conference this year.
Many would prefer that it remain subtext.
Under the national radar screen.
If not swept under the national rug.
Our task, of course, is to make subtext the supertext.