(Another blog rejected by editors of Huffington Post)
Below is a beautiful letter to teachers from a group of
parents in the Chicago Public School (CPS) district. The Illinois
legislature had pushed through a law, SB-7, requiring the union to get a 75%
vote before they could authorize a strike, a vote of ALL its members. Since the negotiations and presumably the
vote would come in August, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel figured they would never
be able to contact and get the vote from that many teachers. So the teachers held the authorization vote
this past month, even as they hope a strike is not necessary in the fall.
June, 2012
Chicago, IL
Dear Teachers,
As CPS parents, we are writing
to recognize you for your work on behalf of Chicago’s children, and to offer you our
support in the coming months and years. We share your sense of urgency and your
aspirations, and we recognize the brilliant, difficult work you do every day,
in the biggest and smallest moments of our kids’ lives. Parents and teachers
are on the same side because we want the same things—better schools for all
children, and a better system to support those schools. You see our children in
all their complexity and curiosity, in their desire to learn, to be challenged,
to be respected, understood, and seen. And we see you.
We know that the recent strike
authorization vote received the support of 89% of CPS teachers. In our school,
the rate was over 98%. We know that you are voting not for yourselves, but for
all teachers, particularly those in schools with the least resources. We take
that vote and level of consensus seriously; your independent, collective voice
is indispensible to any sensible conversation about education. We want to say -
to you and to everyone - that the recent steady drum-beat of contempt from
politicians and pundits is unacceptable, and that we, as parents, do not and
will not accept a narrative that vilifies or blames you. This is not simply a
conversation about wages and benefits, but one about our shared goal of
building a just and decent school system for both teachers and kids.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s
proposals represent a fair set of standards for everyone: smaller
class sizes; more student access to music, art, gym, and libraries; more
counseling time; and yes, adequate compensation and benefits for teachers, who
are being asked to work longer hours next year. All of these are clearly
essential to both good teaching and good learning. In our school, in all CPS schools,
and in every school everywhere, good working conditions are good teaching
conditions. And good teaching conditions are good learning conditions.
Yesterday, the last day of the
school year, we watched you re-organize hundreds of books you donated
personally to our school, all of them labeled by hand, by you. One was the
first book a small student, in the room helping, had ever read “all by self,”
with you cheering. She remembered; you remembered. We have watched you think
through everything from questions about math, music, and literature – to the
daily social and developmental challenges of childhood. We have heard you sing
songs from your own childhoods, and seen you engage our kids with each other
and the world, studying everything from bugs to berimbaus. With you, they wrote
and signed their own books, traveled to D.C., choreographed and performed
dances, solved fractions, slept at the nature museum, read life-changing books,
cooked Brazilian cheese puffs, made documentaries, learned English, and sang
with seniors at our neighborhood retirement community. You are teaching them to
be engaged citizens, like you, people who care about others. That is the lesson
we take from your work and your vote.
Seen up-close, the complexity of
teaching is breathtaking and often unheralded; you guide our children through
their days in more ways than it’s possible to quantify. So we are writing to
say that we understand that teaching is deeply intellectual and ethical work.
And that we see you doing it beautifully. We see you, and we stand by you.
Your Fans,
Rachel DeWoskin, Zayd Dohrn,
Elizabeth Caya, Rob Caya, Dan Cohen, Beth Hobson, Scott Hobson, Julie Kosowski,
Seth MacLowry, Stacy Markham and others. . .
