Bad deal for teachers
In "Take the money" (Editorial, Aug. 27), the Tribune urged the Chicago Teachers Union to accept the recent pay increase offer from the Chicago Board of Education. You gave a number of reasons for your position. Lets take a close look at one of those reasons.
The editorial states, "If you weigh Brizard's offer solely on pay per hour basis it isn't huge. It's ? 2 percent. But that's half of the raise teachers were scheduled to receive before CPS reneged." The Tribune also stated that this new offer is "a financial sweetener for some 15,000 elementary teachers."
Let's say the Chicago Tribune promised its workers a 4 percent raise. Then the newspaper reneged.
But then management came back to the workers and said, "We'll give you a 2 percent raise, but you will have to put in an extra day each week at the paper." Would you tell your fellow workers at the Tribune that this is a "financial sweetener" for you? Why does the Chicago Tribune believe the CPS teachers are that gullible?
On a pay-per-hour basis, the raise is not merely "not huge," it is actually a big decrease in pay. It is also not half of the raise that was reneged on, because that was a 4 percent raise without requiring an additional 90 minutes of work each day. CTU President Karen Lewis has a point when she says it would mean that most teachers would be working that extra hour and a half each day at $3.41 an hour: not even half the minimum wage.
Yes, some students can benefit from longer school days. That's why we already have after-school programs in most CPS schools. In after-school programs, these students get more individualized attention because class size is limited to half the size of a regular class. CPS realizes the benefits of these programs, but does not want to pay the teachers involved their hourly rate. No, they want to give them $3.41 an hour and have them work the extra time in the same crowded classroom where the at-risk students don't get that individual attention.
Yes, some parents will benefit from longer school days. They will have their children taken care of almost up to dinnertime. However, the problem with this way of thinking is that it ignores the fact that teachers are not baby sitters, policemen, or substitute parents. If you want to attract the best and the brightest to teach our children, don't demand that they solve all of modern society's ills.
In an open letter to teachers, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated, "I consider teaching an honorable and important profession, and it is my goal to see that you are treated with the dignity we reward to other professions in society."
Is this our reward, $3.41 per hour? Do you really think that there are many lawyers, doctors, engineers and journalists who would accept this kind of reward?
? Mary Arredondo, Chicago
Do no harm
Regarding "Sex offenders paid to baby-sit" (News, Aug. 28), some years ago there was a major overhaul of the welfare system in an attempt to prevent poor families from making poverty a multi-generational habit.
The government wanted to turn red ink into black, so it ordered many welfare recipients to go to work. This especially affected single mothers who had never married the fathers of their children.
"But what are we supposed to do with the children?" the mothers rightly asked.
So the government mandated that they'd be entitled to free baby sitters, which canceled out, to a degree, the money saved on the new welfare policy.
And worse yet, the honchos in charge of the new system did a poor job of conducting background checks on the people they hired to baby-sit at the taxpayers' expense.
It turns out that many of the sitters are convicted sex offenders. How's that for thinking ahead by the bigwigs in charge? They should take a leaf from the doctors' code of ethics: "First, do no harm."
? Gloria Kaplan Sulkin, Chicago
Tollway elites
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