“Our brothers and sisters throughout the country have been told that corporate “school reform” was unstoppable, that merit pay had to be accepted and that the public would never support us if we decided to fight. Cities everywhere have been forced to adopt performance pay. Not here in Chicago! Months ago, CTU members won a strike authorization vote that our enemies thought would be impossible- now we have stopped the Board from imposing merit pay! We preserved our lanes and steps when the politicians and press predicted they were history. We held the line on healthcare costs. We have tremendous victories in this contract; however, it is by no means perfect. While we did not win on every front and will need to continue our struggle into the future; we soundly defended our profession from an aggressive and dishonest attack. We owe our victories to each and every member of this rank and file union. Our power comes from the bottom up.”

“[This chart] is a side by side comparison that demonstrates how far we’ve come in these tense, protracted negotiations with the Board.”

The great Chicago teacher strike of 2012 has ended, and it’s time for Ed Reformers to look back and decide what really happened.  We know kids didn’t go to school for 7 days.  We know the union extracted a 17.6% raise from Mayor Rahm Emanuel and succeeded in getting merit pay dropped from consideration.

The Chicago Sun-Times today said the Union President Karen Lewis won congratulatory messages from the likes of Gloria Steinem, as well as supporters in Australia, France, Italy & Canada.  It also says she basked yesterday in what some say is her new status as a union rock star.

With all this, how are prominent education reformers summing up the results of the Chicago strike?

Jeanne Allen is with the Center for Education Reform.

“Sure the Chicago unions won. They got even more that wasn’t on the table to begin with. They threw an additional time off for professional development days. There were some healthcare benefits they had. I mean they loaded this thing, and yet at the end of the day, Rahm Emanuel still declared victory. Strange how he can declare victory when 350,000 kids were out of school for more than a week and the unions won.”

“Yeah, I think one of the more interesting and quieter points that was covered in the media was when they reported that AFT President, Randi Weingarten, was on the phone with Secretary Duncan over the weekend, discussing how they could have an end to the strike, and yet at the same time she kept distancing herself and saying, ‘This is a local issue.’ So this was absolutely about politics. At the end of the day, just deal with it. Make it go away. ‘Make it go away Rahm,’ is I’m sure what happened. Plus, ‘Rahm, don’t you want to be something some day?’ It was political.”

There is a bright spot to the Chicago Teachers Union strike that ended Tuesday after keeping the city’s kids at home and its public-school teachers picketing the streets: People are actually talking about education.

They are saying things like this: “When you have two-thirds of our children not college- and/or career-ready and we spend more per student than any country in the world, that is a societal problem. What’s going on in Chicago is sort of a leading indicator of things to come.” That’s Florida’s former Republican Gov. Jeb Bush on MSNBC. Bush is an advocate of student assessments who occasionally clashes with teachers unions.

Or this: “The more difficult task is to make sure the right people are getting into the classroom. I think it is the wrong mental model to let anybody in and then make it easier to fire our hiring mistakes.” That’s National Education Association President Dennis Van Roekel on C-Span. NEA is not involved in the specifics of the strike, but it is supporting the Chicago union in principle.

Voters care greatly about education. In a Pew Research poll earlier this year, 72 percent of respondents rated education as “very important” to their vote. Yet both presidential candidates have largely ignored the concept in their campaigns. For whatever reason, education isn’t the kind of winner that moves the dial for a candidate in the electorate.

“People typically put education in their top three, or at worst, top six issues. But I believe they don’t know how to vote on education. They are so convinced that schools are local,” said Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, a group that is critical of teachers unions.

Allen says the Obama administration isn’t weighing in on the Chicago dispute because it is afraid of offending the unions. Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued a brief statement last week saying he hopes the parties can “settle this quickly.”

Union officials say it would be inappropriate for a president or a presidential candidate to weigh in. They say the national conversation with Obama is settled. The unions have by and large made peace with President Obama about his Race to the Top competitive grant program, which rewards states for teacher evaluations and turning around or closing failing schools. Both of those issues are at the heart of the Chicago dispute. Still, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is one of many union officials who say that the issues in Chicago are “very localized.”

Meanwhile, the presidential campaigns have not touched the thorniest of education issues that are also raised by the strike—student assessments, teacher evaluations, and failing schools. President Obama has chosen to focus on higher education, highlighting student loans and the high cost of college as part of his narrative on jobs. Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s few mentions about education have been about school choice, proposing vouchers and state-wide open enrollment for disadvantaged kids.

The advantage of the public attention raised by the Chicago strike is that it gives educators and policymakers the chance to publicly grapple with the genuine qualitative issues that affect all schools. How much do you hold teachers responsible for? What employment guarantees are teachers entitled to? Should the answers to those two questions impact teachers’ pay?

A poll conducted last week for the Chicago Sun-Times showed that 47 percent of Chicago’s registered voters support the teachers union, and less than 20 percent think that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is doing a “good” or “excellent” job in handling it. The approval of the union may slide as the strike drags on, however. No matter what happens in the talks, the union will be able to declare victory in the end if they win any concessions.

Pay attention now that it’s over. Center for Education Reform’s Allen thinks that a perceived victory on the part of the unions in Chicago will cause Democratic mayors in other cities to pause before pushing for anything that looks like merit pay or other teacher-employment decisions based on performance.

Timid Democrats in schools can only strengthen Republicans’ position with the public, at least the half who dislike unions. “It will bolster the case and cause of the accountability-minded reformers, who are often Republicans,” Allen predicted. Included on that list is Jeb Bush, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Idaho Superintendent Tom Luna, who wrote the Republican National Committee’s education platform.

Democrats who have pushed for accountability—Emanuel, Duncan, and House Education and the Workforce ranking member George Miller, D-Calif., to name a few—will need to recalibrate their approach. It will remind everyone of what the education-policy community has been saying all along: The only way to dramatically improve public education is through bipartisan collaboration. If that seems an anathema now, perhaps the Chicago negotiations can make it seem a possibility.

Unfortunately, the talk about the strike has degenerated quickly into accusatory statements like these from Weingarten and former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee—former adversaries in the scuffle over Washington public schools’ teacher layoffs in 2009.

Here’s Weingarten on Bloomberg TV: “What you’re seeing play itself out in Chicago is this fixation on accountability, top-down sanctions, and fear.”

Here’s Rhee’s statement on the second week of the strike: “If it were about the kids, 350,000 students would be in class tomorrow morning instead of at home or on the streets.”

The blame game continues, which eventually will cause voters to tune out. Steve Peha, and education consultant and founder of the nonprofit Teaching That Makes Sense, recently spent a week in two elementary schools in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood. “Tough place to be a kid. Tough place to be a teacher. Tough place to be alive,” he observed on National Journal’s Education Experts blog. “What I can’t see is the value for management in squeezing labor, or the value for labor in holding out.”

Editor’s note: Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro professor of political science at Stanford University, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a member of the Koret Task Force for K-12 Education. He is the author of “Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools” (Brookings, 2011).

It is easy to see the Chicago teachers strike as an unfortunate incident that will soon pass. This is, after all, their first strike in 25 years. The norm is that the district and the Chicago Teachers Union have regularly negotiated their way to contracts every several years. So it might appear that, almost always, collective bargaining “works.”

But does it? The purpose of the Chicago school system — and of the American school system more generally — is to educate children. The way to assess collective bargaining is not to ask whether it works to bring labor peace. It is to ask whether it promotes the interests of children in a quality education. And the answer to that question is no, it does not. Not even remotely.

Collective bargaining is not fundamentally about children. It is about the power and special interests of adults. In Chicago and elsewhere, the teachers unions are in the business of winning better salaries and benefits, protecting job security, pressuring for restrictive work rules and in other ways advancing the occupational interests of their members. These interests are simply not the same as the interests of children.
And they inevitably lead, through the exercise of union power, to contracts whose countless formal rules are literally not designed to create an effective organization for schools. In fact, they guarantee that the schools will be organized in perverse ways that no one in their right mind would favor if they just cared about what is best for kids.

Because of the formal rules that unions fight for in labor contracts, district leaders can almost never get bad teachers out of the classroom. Nor can they allocate good teachers to the schools and classrooms where they can do the greatest good for kids. Add to this that the evaluation process is a full-blown charade, and 99% of all teachers, including the very worst teachers, are regularly given satisfactory evaluations. Also, teachers are paid based on their seniority and formal credits, without any regard for whether their students are learning anything.

And so it goes. This is a school system organized for the benefit of the people who work in it, not for the kids they are expected to teach.

Collective bargaining is not the only arena in which jobs take priority over kids. It also happens in the politics of state and national governments, which should be governing the public schools in the best interests of kids, but aren’t.

A major reason is that the teachers unions are by far the most powerful political force in American education. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have some 4.5 million members between them, they are among the top spenders in state and national elections, they have activists in virtually every electoral district in the country, they have formidable lobbying machines and much more. They are among the most powerful special interests of any type in the country.

What have they done with all this political power? For more than a quarter century, this country has been frantically trying to reform and bring real improvement, effective organization, to the public school system. And the unions have used their political power to block or seriously weaken these efforts: by preventing the spread of charter schools, undermining true accountability for schools and teachers, resisting performance pay, protecting teacher tenure and in countless ways defending a poorly performing status quo. Very successfully.

Every one of us pays the price. Our children are being denied a quality education, fulfilling careers and productive lives. The nation is losing precious human capital, its long-term economic growth is taking a direct and destructive hit and its position of leadership in the world is seriously threatened.

So, yes, Chicago’s teachers are out on strike. That is today’s news, today’s headline. But the real problem is much larger. It is that power over this nation’s key educational decisions — in Chicago and virtually everywhere else — is disproportionately exercised by special interests.

Long after Chicago’s teachers are back to work, this problem will remain. The fundamental challenge facing our country is to find some way of solving it.

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.”

Adding teeth to Michigan’s law preventing teachers from striking won’t be a topic in state House Education Committee meetings despite the walkout by 30,000 Chicago educators, the committee’s chairwoman said.

State Rep. Lisa Posthumus Lyons, R-Ada, said there is a bill before her committee that would allow the state to suspend certification for teachers who strike.

But Lyons said there are more issues before the committee that she wants to address first, including making sure veterans have more educational opportunities.

“It’s so heartbreaking to see children being hurt because adults cannot find solutions,” she said of the Chicago strike.

She said the Education Committee last year conducted hearings on the bill, sponsored by state Rep. Bill Rogers, R-Brighton. She has now immediate plans to call for a vote.

Lyons said she doesn’t think Michigan teachers will follow the lead of the Chicago teachers, who walked off the job on Monday in part because of objections to a plan to use student test scores in evaluations.

“Michigan teachers are better than that,” she said.

A group of 14 Michigan school districts are piloting four programs that would look at ways to link student achievement to teacher evaluations.

Michigan teachers strikes have been illegal since 1994, though there have been three strikes — two in Detroit and one in Wayne-Westland.

Michigan’s Public Act 112 stipulates striking teachers be fined one day’s pay for each day they refuse to work. But a district must report a strike to the Michigan Employee Relations Commission, which has up to 60 days to verify such an action was taken. The commission must then conduct individual hearings for each employee before approving fines or employee dismissals.

HB 4466, which has been on the House floor for more than a year, would allow districts to consolidate the hearings and establishes $250-a-day fine.

Chicago union leaders said the use of tests “is no way to measure the effectiveness of an educator.”

“Further there are too many factors beyond our control which impact how well some students perform on standardized tests such as poverty, exposure to violence, homelessness, hunger and other social issues beyond our control,” the union said in a release.

The strike brought swift reaction from advocacy groups, union leaders and politicians. Here is a sampling of the comments.

Amy Wilkins, vice president of The Education Trust:

“Overall, the Chicago teachers’ strike is deeply upsetting. But it is especially tragic for the low-income students who don’t have a moment of academic time to waste. In announcing the strike, Karen Lewis, the head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, argued that children living in poverty or other difficult circumstances cannot be expected to perform well. But reams of evidence and a growing number of high-performing, high-poverty public schools tell us that is just not true. When children—including poor children—are taught to high levels by strong, well-supported teachers, children achieve at high levels. There’s no denying that poverty does matter. But what educators do in the face of poverty matters a lot. And when educators give in to myths of low academic potential for poor students, they not only condemn those students to limited futures but abdicate the enormous power that they have to change their life trajectories. For too long, too many Americans have accepted the myth that poor performance in schools is just a natural byproduct of impoverished neighborhoods. That Lewis would perpetuate that myth strongly suggests that she fails to take seriously the high price the city’s most vulnerable students are paying during this strike—or the costs they will pay for an agreement that fails to create better learning opportunities for them.”

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten:

“For the first time in 25 years, the members of the Chicago Teachers Union are on strike. No one wants to strike, and no one strikes without cause. In this instance, it comes on the heels of numerous steps that left CTU members feeling disrespected, not the least of which was the district’s unilateral decision to strip teachers and paraprofessionals of an agreed-upon 4 percent raise. The strike comes only after long and intense negotiations failed to lead to an agreement that would give CTU members the tools they need to help all their students succeed.

“The American Federation of Teachers and our members across the country stand firmly with the CTU, and we will support its members in their efforts to secure a fair contract that will enable them to give their students the best opportunities.”

The Center for Education Reform:

“The teacher’s union leaders have, for the last few years, worked hard to correct the impression that their focus is on job protection, and that they, too, like the rest of the nation, are frustrated with the slow pace of school improvement. The alleged willingness of the unions to engage in conversations about teacher quality and to call for an end to failing schools has all been interpreted as a sign that they have turned the corner. Some of us have remained unconvinced, recognizing that many often confuse action with rhetoric. The Chicago teacher’s strike of 2012 settles the issue once and for all. Parents and students are left without the education their taxes support. Taxpayers in general are beholden to union demands that are focused on rights and protections, not on kids. Chicago remains among the worst performing school districts in the nation, yet instead of embracing the mayor’s rational, modest proposals to begin instituting limited performance evaluations, union leaders begin acting more like the Chicago thugs of old than the leaders they want to be considered today.”

White House spokesman Jake Carney said President Obama is aware of the strike, but has not offered a reaction. During his Monday press briefing, Carney said:

“I can tell you that as a — more broadly, that our principal concern is for the students, and his principal concern is for the students and families who are affected by the situation. And we hope that both sides are able to come together to settle this quickly and in the best interest of Chicago’s students. But beyond that, I haven’t got a specific reaction from the President.”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney:

“I am disappointed by the decision of the Chicago Teachers Union to turn its back on not only a city negotiating in good faith but also the hundreds of thousands of children relying on the city’s public schools to provide them a safe place to receive a strong education. Teachers unions have too often made plain that their interests conflict with those of our children, and today we are seeing one of the clearest examples yet. President Obama has chosen his side in this fight, sending his vice president last year to assure the nation’s largest teachers union that ‘you should have no doubt about my affection for you and the president’s commitment to you.’ I choose to side with the parents and students depending on public schools to give them the skills to succeed, and my plan for education reform will do exactly that.”

Tensions with teachers unions have been brewing since Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel has been pushing for longer days and tougher teacher evaluations. The CTU has made it clear they’re unhappy with Chicago reform proposals, even going as far as protesting at Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house at one point. Unfortunately, this commotion is over evaluations that aren’t that strong to begin with — student performance only counts 25% in teacher evaluations, and that’s only by year five.

There’s a common misconception out there that teachers generally do not make very much money, but the average teacher salary in Chicago is $71,000 without benefits. CPS offered teachers a 16% pay raise, but the Chicago Teachers Union would not accept that offer. That raise was offered while the longer day issue was actually worked out so that current teachers would not have to work over the allotted hours they already work; CPS agreed to hire more teachers to fill in the extra hours students would be in school. The 90 minutes added to the school day would put CPS at the national average for student instructional time. Before that, CPS had the shortest school day in the nation.

Taxpayers are left to bear the brunt of the strike, as parents and students are left without the education their taxes support. Not only that, but taxpayers are the ones who have to foot the bill when boards succumb to union demands that are focused on the rights and protections of adults, not students. (This video from the Illinois Policy Institute, “Roadblock to Reform,” explains how Illinois’ labor law empowers government unions at the expense of taxpayers.)

All this comes at a time when unions are trying to get the message out that they are on board with reforms. But actions speak louder than words, and the actions in Chicago are telling quite a different story. Bottom line: beware of unions that talk the talk and say they’re for reforms, because if history is any indication of the future, you can bet they certainly aren’t about changing the status quo.