Advocating Public Teacher Contract Negotiations

Andrew Rotherham:

Spoiler alert: when Maggie Gyllenhaal's new feature film, Won't Back Down, hits theaters later this month, its plot hinges on the forcing of school officials to make big decisions in front of parents rather than behind closed doors. The film is fictional, but raging against backroom power politics is not. Teachers' unions and district officials almost always negotiate privately, so when those negotiations reach a deal or an impasse -- or lead to a strike, as they did in Chicago yesterday -- the public gets to hear only part of the story as families scramble to figure out what to do with their kids. Chicago, whose 400,000 students make it the U.S.'s third largest school district, today offered safe havens for kids in dozens of public libraries and churches and, for a four-hour stretch this morning, in nearly 150 public schools staffed with nonunion workers.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 12, 2012 2:08 AM
Subscribe to this site via RSS/Atom: Newsletter signup | Send us your ideas