Stay focused on the students

Like last year’s expensive and extensive noisemaking from unions in Wisconsin, the current teachers union strike in Chicago is putting public sector unions on a pedestal for all to see and the picture isn’t pretty.

The display of angry picketing teachers and 350,000 students being shut out of their schools certainly isn’t good public relations for the union.

That’s because it is a display of a major disconnect between the teachers and the taxpayers who support them.

The teachers walked out on a deal that would have given them a 16 percent pay raise over the next four years, adding to Chicago having one of the highest average teacher salaries in the nation at $76,000 before benefits. It would be outrageous if the teachers were holding out for a bigger raise, but apparently pay isn’t the holdup in negotiations.

One of the major obstacles is union resistance to teacher evaluations. Union leaders say that there’s too much reliance on standardized testing that doesn’t take into account poverty, poor parental conditions and other characteristics that exist with inner-city schools. That’s reasonable, but teachers everywhere should be evaluated and held accountable for demonstrating improvement.

And that brings us to another huge disconnect: According to the U.S. Department of Education, 79 percent of Chicago’s eighth-graders are not proficient in reading, and only 56 percent of students who enter high school as freshmen end up graduating. We’re sure there are other dismal statistics to be found, but those are pretty eye-popping numbers.

Another disconnect: About 50,000 Chicago students are unaffected by the strike because they attend charter schools, which are frequently resisted by teachers unions. And that raises the question, is it all about the teachers or the kids?

But the granddaddy of problems is that Chicago Public Schools face a $1 billion deficit next year and the teachers’ pension fund has only 60 percent of assets needed to satisfy forecasted obligations that were generously negotiated away by former city leaders during better economic times.

We’ve seen this movie before, in states like Wisconsin and California and even right here in Montana, where the state faces a long-term public employee retirement fund shortfall of more than $3 billion.

That’s what makes the situation in Chicago relevant across much of the country. It is a showdown between private sector and public sector economies and something has to give. Chicago parents and taxpayers, it seems, have given enough and they aren’t getting much of a return.