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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]One of my friends is a CPS elementary teacher. Here's what she said about the issue: 
The Board of Ed wants a 5 year contract with 2% raise the 1st year, then up to 2% each year after that based increased test scores, grades, & parent review or in my case - principal and parent review (I have a brand new principal with NO experience & she doesn't ever leave the office so she hasn't a clue what we do. She has NO experience ever dealing with children 3 to 13 in education). They want to get rid of capping off class size - so far I have 30 2nd graders (5th grade has 38 in her classroom right now, no aide and Kindergarten is full time with 35, no aide), and the BoE wants to eliminate all step or lane raises counting years of service and set the salary the same for everyone regardless of how much schooling you've had or how many years you've been in the system[b] so basically pay everyone the same even though most of us have at least one or two Masters degrees[/b]. Not looking pretty at all. :(

The parents ARE in an uproar! They've joined us at rallies and they've formed groups to protest what he's doing to our children. Rahm could care less as long as he's known as the dude who broke up one of the largest unions here and made education what he thinks it should be. To top that off, he's mandating recess for all schools - even the schools without playgrounds (not sure how that works out for them) and schools in high crime areas in which shootings happen day, night, all the time (Heaven help these children). He says "it's good for the kids to get out." I don't care so much for the raise, but it's the working conditions I care about. He wants teachers/staff to work 15 days longer a year, 3 hours more a day without paying for the time. He's set the schedule for us to teach 7 hours and then meet with parents for 5 hours immediately afterwards for conference twice a year. Wanna bet we're not going to be the most pleasant people?

Now, I disagree with her on some things (DC has a similar recess requirement with crappy facilities as well), but to totally get rid of step increases and incentives for graduate degrees? And not capping class size?

Anyway, this is what she's heard. She's worried and upset about the whole thing and hates that this is going on. [/quote]

That is always the point where teachers lose me.  I will defend you  like crazy on working more than 10 months a year or only 7-8 hours a day but to base pay simply on education level is ridiculous.  Please.  [/quote]

Why? That's been a standard practice of government classification and compensation models for at least 30 years. Across the board. Not just teachers.   There are several reasons for that. The standard one is that years of education are seen as equivalent to years of on the job training. The other, particularly relevant with teaching, is that outcome measures show better performance by teachers who have more education. [/quote]

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