Chicago-Town Shakedown

Labor Day may have passed, but in Chicago school is still out for the summer. That’s because, for the first time in more than 25 years, the brothers and sisters of the Chicago Teachers Union are striking. Though they are already among the best-paid educators in the country, making an average of $76,000 per year in salary — plus benefits — the union is unsatisfied with an offer from the city’s board of education that provides them a 16 percent raise over four years, worth a total of $400 million. (The CTU’s original offer was for a 30 percent raise over two years.)

Accounts from both sides indicate that the sticking points are the maintenance of the union’s lavish benefits structure and a teacher-evaluation system that labor officials worry could — horror — result in the firing of large numbers of its most ineffective members.
On the merits, the case isn’t close. Chicago teachers currently pay just 3 percent of their own health-care costs, and nearly three-quarters of new education spending over the last five years has been gobbled up by their retirement costs. This sort of thing isn’t sustainable in a strong economy in a well-governed city in a state with its fiscal house in order, much less in Chicago, Illinois, in the midst of President Obama’s lost decade. To put things in perspective, the Chicago Public Schools system is facing a budget shortfall roughly one and a half times the size of the salary-increase offer rejected by the unions, its bonds have been downgraded by two of the “big three” ratings agencies, and the state’s teacher-pension system is less than 20 percent funded.

Read more: http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/316488/chi-town-shakedown-editors