Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/09/15/end-to-chicago-teachers-strike-is-not-assured/#ixzz26YRPjD3z

The article suggests that the strike may not end on Monday. While this could be  Fox’s handwringing, the article does do a good job of portraying the nature of the conflict.

On the one hand Rahm Emanuel describes the strike as “a strike of choice.” Emanuel is suggesting that this is a ill-timed preemptive effort, comparable to the war on Iraq.  presumably, the choice of this time has to do with the union’s belief that the presidential election will give them a bargaining chip.

According to Fox as well as more reliable sources, the central issue for the union is how teachers should be evaluated. The union, seeing teachers much like workers on an assembly line, believes that union work rules should be able to determine how the workers are evaluated.  The union argues that a large portion of public school children cannot do well on standardized tests, not because of defective teaching but because of extraneous problems in our society.

The saddest part of all this, it seems to me, is the loss of recognition of teaching as a professional activity.  While a union emphasis on work rules for its members certainly makes sense at an assembly line in Detroit or at Foxcon, I have a great deal of difficulty imagining how any sort of work rules-based evaluation can work in the professional atmosphere of a classroom.  Frankly my concern also applies to the ability of standardized tests to provide that kind of evaluation.

Unfortunately this issue over the word evaluation, has become conflated with the union’s opposition to charter schools. One of the important principles of the charter concept  is that the local management of the charter schools is responsible for evaluating teachers in that school.  In at least some charter schools, “management” is very similar to the way the faculty runs a university.

While “evaluation” may appear to be the crucial issue in the Fox article, I suspect that the central issue for the unions is actually their opposition to the existence of charter schools. The unions oppose charters because  those alternative schools drain students and, therefore, funds from the “regular” schools.

The Union is saying, in effect, that parents should not be able to choose where their kids go to school because that choice would deprive other kids of the funds needed to serve their needs. The union claims, perhaps correctly, that teachers in the non-selective public schools are at a disadvantage because overwhelming social problems mean that the students in the schools will show poor results.  Moreover, the union claims that these results will be even poorer because the better students are being drawn off by Chicago’s increasing number of charter schools.

Unfortunately the victim of this union argument is the parent who wants to send her child to the best possible school for that child. An extremely good, and in my opinion mostly balanced, presentation of this dilemma is offered in an article in the Huffington Post by Peter Goodman.  Using personal anecdotes, Mr. Goodman describes the frustration of teachers who feel they are being unfairly evaluated and the intensity of pride of parents who have remove their children from the schools and put them in public charters.