Why do they have signs when so few of their students can read? The shocking facts behind the Chicago Teachers strike. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show in the world - http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Ah, the battle is on, my friends. | |
| Let's get ready for it. | |
| This is just the beginning of a massive Death Star battle between the free market and the vampirism of the public sector. | |
| So in Chicago, yesterday morning, the government... | |
| Oh, I don't know, what would you call them? | |
| Teachers? | |
| It's an insult to real teachers. | |
| The indoctrinators, the twisted, brain-crushing lackeys of the status quo, they went on strike. | |
| And why did they go on strike? | |
| Well, you see... | |
| They have the highest average salary of any city, $76,000 a year, before you even count benefits. | |
| Now, in Chicago, the average family in the city only earns about $47,000 a year, so they're already doing pretty well. | |
| The city has tried 20 different negotiating tactics, have changed things 20 times. | |
| What does it matter? | |
| When you've got the children hostage, you can pretty much get anything you want. | |
| Of course, the basic fact is that the kick of the can down the road, inevitability of public choice, socialist nightmarishness that we're living in, is boomeranging is coming back to bite us in the ass. | |
| So in the past, the teachers wanted more money, but if you pay them more money in terms of salary, then you actually have to spend that money in the here and now, which means raising taxes, borrowing, and so on. | |
| Politicians didn't really want to do that. | |
| So what they did was they said, okay, we're not going to give you more salary now, but to keep labor peace with you monopolists, we are going to kick the can down the road by giving you massive healthcare pension benefits down the road long after we're all out of the picture. | |
| And this is basically what's happened. | |
| Teachers pay only 3% of their healthcare costs, and out of every new dollar set aside for public education in Illinois over the past half decade, over 70 cents of that dollar has gone to teacher retirement costs. | |
| Because, you see, in the crazy world of statism, you pay people the most who aren't teaching. | |
| But, of course, the Chicago schools, like all status schools, need a huge shakeup. | |
| Government unions are resisting that like crazy. | |
| They want to make sure that student performance is not really going to be considered when it comes to evaluating teachers. | |
| Of course, how could you conceivably expect that? | |
| How could you expect teachers to be judged by student performance? | |
| How can you expect teachers to be judged at all? | |
| You see, the judgment It's only for the children. | |
| The children have to perform according to certain standards. | |
| The teachers, oh, heaven forbid, it would be crazy to ask them. | |
| See, remember, as a society, it's always very important that we have infinitely higher moral and educational standards for six-year-olds than we do for 50-year-olds. | |
| It's really, really important. | |
| Keep the moral standards the highest on the smallest. | |
| That's really important. | |
| How are these schools doing? | |
| Well, What percentage of fourth graders are proficient in reading in Chicago? | |
| That would be 15. | |
| That would be 1.5. | |
| 15% of fourth graders are proficient in reading. | |
| And for those of you who come from Chicago, that's quite a small percentage. | |
| Now, what percentage of students who enter their freshman year of high school end up graduating from these? | |
| That's only 56% of students. | |
| And again, for those students who are coming from Chicago, you know, imagine cutting an apple in Haas, throw a few pits over, and it's just that amount. | |
| So just over half of students end up graduating. | |
| Well, 79% of 8th graders in these Chicago public schools are not grade level proficient in reading. | |
| And this is like US standards grade level with teachers teaching the test like crazy. | |
| God knows what it would be like in any kind of objective standard. | |
| Only one out of five Chicago students are grade level proficient in math and these standards are being watered down like crazy. | |
| Just like crazy. | |
| So one of the major issues behind the strike, there's a new Chicago plan to use for evaluating public school teachers. | |
| So student improvement on standardized tests will count as 40% of a teacher's evaluation. | |
| And teachers, of course, prefer something called breathing, i.e. | |
| seniority. | |
| In other words, I'm not dead yet, therefore I'm better. | |
| And this, of course, is the kind of standard you end up with when you don't care as much about children as you do about keeping peace with entitled thugs. | |
| So, the number of Chicago Public School 8th graders who tested advanced in reading? | |
| Well, that would be 2. | |
| Count them, 2%. | |
| In math, 3% rated advanced. | |
| Hey, that's 50% better. | |
| I think it's fascinating. | |
| I think it's fantastic. | |
| Because I think it's vaguely, vaguely, vaguely possible that we may be entering a time in society Where we will start actually thinking about what might be beneficial to children rather than basically just using children as hostage-taking resources to extract more taxes and pay from their helpless parents. | |
| Just a thought. |