Update: Rahm thanks both Obama and Romney for supporting him against the Chicago Teachers.

I thought Obama was going to walk the picket line:)

2nd day of trying to get to that petition with no luck. Is there a more direct route?

Just click on the photo of Rahm, but if it gives you problems, here’s the direct link:

http://action.firedoglake.com/page/s/rahm-bgcc?source=fdl&subsource=postWIDGET

Thanks for your support!

Let’s kick this balleroni back to right-wing Israel where he belongs. Where does the line form to take him out in the next election? I ain’t giving Obastard any $ this time like I stupidly did last time, but I would place a large simoleon right now to kick Rahm out of office. Hold me back I can’t stand this guy.

She said the Obama administration, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief executive, is “too fixated on measurements and competition.”

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-13/weingarten-cautiously-optimistic-chicago-strike-near-end.html

Why test teachers if class room size is already to big? If students don’t get text books until later in the semester instead of the start of the semester?
If private and charter schools are so great lets see how Rahm and Obama’s kids do in a school with 50 students in a classroom and text books coming in weeks? months after the semester starts!

Do Rahm and Obama have links to Charter schools financial ones?

Why test teachers if class room size is already to big? If students don’t get text books until later in the semester instead of the start of the semester?

Because as Rick Perlstein says, “anti-union charter school advocates…poured $12 million into his coffers to elect him mayor.”

Update II: Dave Dayen reports that Rahm is blinking, under pressure from the Obama campaign

Rahm is one of those guys that blinks too much. It’s always annoyed me, that constant over-blinking.

“Please please Rahm, people are starting to notice I suck as prez. Knock it off and pull the curtain shut again.”

Paul Street rips into Rahm for waging a war on inner city children, calling his proposals “noxious” and “neo-Dickensian”

I <3 Paul Street.

Weingarten’s assessment of Rahm’s performance is charitable compared to others, who have accused the Chicago Mayor of taking badly needed money meant to repair inner city schools and funneling it to his billionaire political cronies like Penny Pritzker and Hyatt Hotels.

Can’t seem to find the link to this in the article would like to read more. Also Chicago politics are about the Mayor and the Chicago Aldermen on the city council they only support something as politically stupid as this if they are getting some cash.
If we can link aldermen in the worse schools financially to charter schools and show again charter schools suck then we got a better case.

Thats the kind of talking points we need in these articles:)

Words fail me. That backstabbing, money grubbing, bootlicking,lying 1%er.

Boxturtle (And I don’t have anything nice to say about Rmoney, either)

Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers seems out of touch,cuz even with all the kicking to the curb by the DNC of teachers,Randi Weingarten is still profusely supporting Obama’s re-election.

Is there any wonder why,the DNC don’t give a damn just like the GOP does
about teachers…

Education is free in Cuba folks granted they may not have air-con in every class-room but education is free.And in this supposedly super rich country our Govt can’t even provide an environment conducive to learning for the not so wealthy….

Randi Weingarten is part of the veal pen. She recently stated that she wanted the teachers’ union to remain allied with the Dems. Karen Lewis has a better idea: ally the teachers and the parents.

Chicago’s murder rate is going sky high as well as crime in general. Older kids out of school long enough will surely make these numbers worse

While the third largest city in the nation’s top politician gets extreme exposure for himself nearly 800 miles away from the city filled with controversial turmoil including the highest murder rate in the country and an impending teachers’ strike within the next week, he obviously leaves behind an extremely troubled city.

UPDATE: Late Monday, Sarah Hamilton, Emanuel’s communications director, said: that Emanuel has changed his plans from staying in Charlotte until Friday to return on Wednesday. She also said that Emanuel has said that the impending teachers’ strike and the crime and murder situation in Chicago has nothing to do with his decision to abbreviate his trip out-of-state

http://www.examiner.com/article/no-chicago-teacher-contract-or-murder-rate-reduction-is-no-sweat-for-mayor-rahm

My bold Sure the murder rate and the teacher’s strike had nothing to do with Rahm cutting his visit short and i got a bridge I want to sell you!

Rahm is conniving sack of pirouettes

LOL nice One! If Mitt had a brain he would have supported the Chicago teachers after all if the Dems can’t win Chicago then the Dems can’t win illinois! If the Teachers strike lasts until election day that very well might happen if only Mitt had supported the teachers and walked a picket line.
True Machiavelli’s would realize when to abandon their useless friends ( just how many charter schools voters are their vs public school voters) just how much cash can the charter schools give him?
Cash buys tv ads but even non stop tv ads cannot sell dog food that dogs don’t like. Mitt and Obama need popular issues to support.
Obama is only winning because Mitt is worse not because we are happy with Obama.

Brothers of a feather flock together, and so it is with Rahm and Bamb.

Totally.

out of the veal pen into the grinder… what a choice we have between phony dems like rahm and right wing scum

Apologies, I had it in yesterday’s post. I’ll add it again today:

http://www.pdaillinois.org/site/content/hyde-park-demo-wed-aug-8-save-tif-schools-not-corporate-welfare

Anyone ever notice how these pieces of shit never touch upon the sociological factors surrounding the kids in Chicago.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city leaders have long heralded charter schools’ innovative approach to education, but new research suggests many charters in Chicago are performing no better than traditional neighborhood schools and some are actually doing much worse.

More than two dozen schools in some of the city’s most prominent and largest charter networks, including the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO), Chicago International Charter Schools, University of Chicago and LEARN, scored well short of district averages on key standardized tests.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-11-30/news/ct-met-charter-schools-performance-1130-20111130_1_chicago-international-charter-schools-andrew-broy-school-report-cards

Rahm wants to break the Teacher’s Union and when he is done convert all the public schools to charter schools!
I wonder if Chicago Charter schools have the same class size and the same wait for text books that the public schools do?
If not then comparing Charter Schools to Public Schools is a false comparison rigged to favor the Charter Schools and pay back the $12 million the Charter Schools gave Rahm.
How much did they give Obama and Mitt?

What.You.Said.

x 10

Like many slimy politicians, Emanuel is handling the Hyatt Hotel financing with a TIFF. Go look it up. It’s a opaque way to get public money for private business without the taxpayer realizing how he’s getting the shaft in the long run.

From 2010, the Reign of Rahmses by Driftglass

Fire me 100 million dollars worth of staff by 9:00 AM tomorrow or I’ll stab you in the fuckin’ neck with a fuckin’ pencil.

but, but, but…teachers unions. Mojoe and Jebbie said so!

Teachers need to tell Emanuel to eat shit. They don’t owe him a damn thing. He OWES them. Randi Weingarten has a job to represent teaching professionals in her membership. She plays defense poorly and should have been playing offense to get these people what they need. She should be condemning Emanuel’s actions. Lightweight and probably too much of a political insider with Obama. Lousy Democrats too.

The Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign (CTSC) demand:

The billionaires on the unelected Chicago Board of Education return the TIF (tax increment financing) money taken from the schools and use it for education .
Penny Pritzker resign from the board due conflicts of interests.
Chicago move to an elected school board.
Hyatt Hotel heiress Penny Pritzker was appointed to the unelected Chicago Board of Education by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Instead of going to neighborhood schools, the money is being taken from parents and teachers’ property taxes in a $5.2 million TIF (Tax Increment Financing) scheme for a Hyatt hotel at 53rd and Lake Park asked for by the University of Chicago.

The U of C ($6.6 billion) and Penny ($1.8 billion) have over $8 billion together and can afford to build their own hotel without robbing the community and defunding local schools.

http://www.pdaillinois.org/site/content/hyde-park-demo-wed-aug-8-save-tif-schools-not-corporate-welfare

In Obama’s last Presidential Campaign Penny was called Obama’s Money Honey this looks like Quid Pro Quo.

This is the 11:30 am Chicago time local teevee news update on negotiations. The Boyd-Bennett person below is the city’s spokesperson (school district mouthpiece); “Lewis” is CTU President Karen Lewis:

Some negotiators did not get to bed until 3 a.m. and then had to be back at 9 a.m. to continue negotiations.

“I can concur with CTU that it was a beneficial night. I think we moved closer. Everyone was incredibly tired, but we are so close. I do believe on this sunshiny day that it is very possible we will have a deal today,” Boyd-Bennett said.

Lewis said both sides spent the night going over calculations from the latest proposals. District officials hope to strike a deal by 2 p.m. when the CTU delegates are set to meet and possibly vote on the newest proposal.

At Kennedy High School, teachers rallied Friday morning. Hundreds of teachers and their families from four elementary schools that feed into Kennedy High School, rallied to provide a united force to the negotiating team, saying they will not go back to work until they have a fair contract.

Teachers began gathering along Archer at 9 a.m, attempting to form a human link all the way east from Archer and Harlem to Archer and Austin. Some teachers say they are getting tired of the picket line. Many of them remain united in their opposition to what they see as the mayor’s attempt to bully them.

“I think there is more information going out to parents that schools need more resources. I think that is the message we are trying to receive, especially working in public schools, we need more resources,” said teacher Yazmin Romo.

CTU House of Delegates meeting still on for 2:00 pm Chicago time, an hour and fifteen minutes from now.

Yes. Just this morning on Morning Joe, Jeb bush blamed teachers for the poor conditions. 1% Jeb also talked up Bill Gates and his money take-over of education.

Damn straight about that.

Dday linked to this Chicago Sun Times op-ed in one of his news desk posts this morning. It was last updated three (3) days ago, but it has some important facts of life, brought to you by a veteran educator:

On teacher pay in Chicago:

Chicago Public Schools starting salaries are among the highest in the region. That’s good news to parents who want their children taught by first- and second- year teachers. (Indeed, many early-career teachers are highly energetic and innovative, making up in enthusiasm for what they lack in experience and well-honed tactics. As department chair, I hired several.)

But the annual increases for teachers in CPS are much smaller than the annual increases in many suburban districts. For example, a teacher with a master’s degree, 30 additional credit hours, and ten years of experience, can expect to earn $87,513 in Evanston this year; last year, in Oak Park, a teacher would have made $88,978. In Chicago this year, the same teacher will earn $75,711 — about $12,000 a year less than in districts to which he or she could walk or take public transportation from a home in Chicago.

Over the course of a career, that difference amounts to over a quarter of a million dollars. This disparity should concern everyone, because it’s a primary reason why experienced teachers leave CPS to go to the suburbs — and why CPS has to train thousands of brand-new teachers every year.

On so-called “merit pay,” which is just a corporate term for evaluating teachers based on standardized test scores:

It’s hard to argue with the idea of merit pay, and perhaps even harder to understand why parents should care about it one way or the other. Tying meaningful evaluations to salaries should, in theory, reward teachers for doing the things we want them to do: build skills, teach our children to reason rather than simply memorize facts, and become better teachers by building on strengths and improving identifiable weaknesses. But the fact is that the largest-scale merit pay implementation, in New York City, has done none of these things.

Now in its second year, New York’s system has shown remarkable inconsistency. In some cases, the New York system gives a single teacher very different scores based on different classes, even though he’s teaching both classes the same subject during the same year. How would you tell that teacher what to improve? Skills-based tests penalize teachers who emphasize learning to think rather than memorizing facts that can be Googled. In New York, more than 70 teachers of high-performing students received scores placing them among the worst teachers, in large part because they taught critical thinking, and used projects to teach higher-level reasoning, rather than drilling skills: at the end of the year the students’ amazingly-high test scores were slightly lower than their even-more-amazing scores the previous year.

On the other end of the scale, a teacher who manages to drill in a few basic facts can show dramatic improvement in test scores among very weak students — from abysmal to only terrible — without actually teaching the concepts and ideas that would help the students learn more in succeeding years. So on both ends of the scale, New York’s system discourages teachers from doing what will help their students in the long run.

Maybe Chicago can do better than New York; as a lifelong Chicagoan and CPS graduate, I would certainly hope so. But, personally, I’m skeptical. Trying to measure how well people perform a complex skill is tricky at best; simple numbers rarely tell a consistent story.

Out of public schools comes the greatness of the nation. Mark Twain

Chicago Sun Times news update at 12:45 pm Chicago time. “Bloch” is CTU attorney Robert Bloch, who is one of the union’s negotiators, apparently.

Also incredibly sticky is the issue of a new teacher evaluation system, which eventually puts more weight on student growth than the 30 percent required by a new state law.

“The system they are using to evaluate people is based on an extremely complicated, esoteric formula to measure student growth — so complicated I think everybody on the CPS team will admit they don’t understand it,” the CTU’s Robert Bloch said. “Experts developed it but not educators.”

Of special concern is that 70 percent of CPS teachers do not teach a tested subject, yet up to 20 percent of their evaluation would be based on schoolwide test results, Bloch said.

Another at least 10 percent would be based on student growth on district-written “performance’’ tasks being used for the first time this school year. Student surveys of teacher practice would count 10 percent—another union concern.

The complicated algorithms used to determine student growth — called “value-added” — are being debated nationwide.

“The problem is, how do you hold teachers accountable for improvement when so many things that are used to evaluate them are outside their control or very complicated?’’ Bloch said.

“The science behind the student growth aspects of testing is untested and uncertain, and you’re going to risk a teacher’s career based on some guy in a back room writing algorithms or students who are not tested in the subject you’re teaching?

“There’s a lot of unknowns. People’s careers should not be decided by factors people don’t really understand.”

I knew I didn’t like him first time I saw him on Sunday MTP.

Long tiome no see…..

Students in some neighborhoods in Chicago, fear for their lives going to and coming from school. How would anyone like to cope with fearing for their lives everyday going to and coming home from work?

Get real people, those students have to cope with things they shouldn’t have to.

I agree. I think most of the 99% is starting to get fed up with bullshit. Wew need to remember we ARE the 99%. We don’t have the money BUT we HAVE the numbers.

I have grown to just hate bushes. I’d like to rid the country of them.
Everybody, join me and let’s all do that and plant trees and flowers.

It’s kind of a “symbolioc” jesture.

Always excellent commentary.

Some of our schools in Houston have very similar problems. And worse. And, here in Texas, with revenue shortfalls and what I think, we can all agree NOW,is the dumbest somebitch governor in the country, our educators feel like a one-armed paper hanger most of the time.

Wew gots lots o’ problems, but education, next to jobs, gotta be the biggest.

That worked, thanks!

It’s all tied together, only Republicans try to separate everything and boil it down to working people getting too much money.

If Bernanke printed money, and hired people to dig ditches, followed by hiring more people to fill the ditches after they had been dug; lower middle class people would have jobs. That money would circulate up the ladder as opposed to trickle down, that never trickels.

Sociological problems are tied to “lack of money” unemployment. Deprived people eventually become depraved people, and create a culture of “depravity”. Such as it was in Chicago some time ago. It’s a lot worse now. I realize this has “zit” to do with the teachers strike, but this is at the very core of our present problems that must be solved. There is no way we can solve any problems the Republican way, by putting a price tag on everything when we are talking about living breathing human being.

He said he would, so therefore you knew he’d do exactly the opposite. That pretty much is an accurate description of the zer-O.

Thanks Mz. Hamsher, good to see that putz get bitch slapped and propahly, too, by Weingarten.

Heh, Obama admin wants Rammy to stop, but not cuz they support the teachers, not by a long shot. Good to see the old fucking ‘tard butt screw with his bosses re election campaign . . . *G*

N good to see yer fonts gracing your pages, as always.

Good lord, they are paving the way for destruction of public ed and the inroads of privatizing it all thru charters and vouchers.

Fully bought and paid for by corporate overlords NO doubt. I suppose that site which shows where campaign money comes from might offer some factual basis to my posit, but I’m assuming most of the western known world is HIP to all this.

I mean, we ALL read FDL, right? And this stuff’s been covered thoroughly for years now . . . bless FDL’s heart and vital organs.

*G*

Paul Street for Mayor

Is there any reason(other than it would be hard) that we can’t get guys like this into office? It would be nice if the teachers had an alternative to boot licking corporatist Democrat or bootlicking corporatist Republican.