By Jim Vail
Second City Teacher
As a Chicago public school teacher, I can say it feels like we're getting our asses kicked every day by the mayor and his corporate paymasters.
The mayor during his election campaign said teachers are not underpaid (read: they are overpaid and need to give up salary and benefits).
Then he went to work on us after his bought and paid for election.
He first cancelled the last year of our salary raise claiming there is no money (but there is money for DePaul, and JP Morgan, etc.).
He then said he wanted a "full school day" - a longer school day despite this thing called a contract, which I guess only counts if you're a bank or corporation. If you are a bunch of teachers, then as the mayor always says, "%$#@ YOU!"
Well, the union did stop the mayor on that, temporarily. And we did stop merit pay, and restored our salaries with lanes and steps, and decent health benefits, thanks to the week and two day strike last September.
But the mayor is right back to kicking our asses.
He closed the most schools in the country ever - 50 some! Boy did that feel good.
Then he announced his per pupil budgeting plan and schools are getting hit with 20% + budget cuts.
What's next?
Our pensions, of course.
Emanuel, the ruling class, want us stuck with 401Ks, not real pension plans. But there's that sticking point called the IL Constitution, that guarantees our pensions (and the reason we got pensions in the first place was to save employers some money by paying workers less).
So now the mayor is blaming the pensions for these drastic school budget cuts.
Raise Your Hand, an excellent parent organization on the fighting front to stop school closures, budget cuts and the privatization of public education - is even putting "pension reform" on their agenda to getting more revenue into the schools.
And when you read the mainstream media - it is obviously pensions that are the problem for everything. No mention about tax the rich, no mention about making the banks pay these ridiculous interest rate swaps that makes the schools and other public bodies pay what the banks got bailed out on. No mention about a stock market transaction tax.
This latest piece from the otherwise decent reporter Ted Cox for DNAinfo.com, brought back dreadful visions of Fran Spielman's reporting from the Chicago Sun-Times on former mayor Richard Daley's press conferences. If da mayor said the sky was blue and the sun red that day, Spielman faithfully reported every word.
Cox's DNAinfo report on mayor Rahm Emanuel's speech blaming the pension problems for the individual school budget cuts being made today was eerily reminiscent of Spielman's shameful city hall reporting.
Not one word from Cox questioning why your lordship does not give back the stolen TIF funds to the schools, renegotiate toxic bank interest rates costing the schools $30 million a year or taxing the rich, or roll back wasteful corporate tax giveaways.
That's what you call their media, their propaganda.
Here, at Second City Teacher, we present the people's media. Our propaganda. What is good for the 99% is reported here.
Pensions are good for us (and everyone!). Taxing the rich is good for all of us. Demanding the banks bailout the people, after they got bailed out by us, is of course good for us.
We need to stop these attacks on us, we need to restore worker decency and re-implement a fair taxation system.
But how to do it is the big question.
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Rahm Blames CPS Budget Cuts on Pension Problems
In the first chance for media to ask Emanuel questions since he returned from a trip last week to Israel — during which many of the local school councils discovered their new budget cuts — the mayor said pension payments were responsible for 45 percent of the projected $1 billion Chicago Public Schools deficit.
That deficit has not only led to budget cuts but the closing of 50 schools, some of which had their final days of operation on Monday.
Emanuel said he warned a year ago that "this day of reckoning will come to our classrooms" if the General Assembly did not pass pension reform.
"I warned everybody," Emanuel said. "If we don't reform our pensions, there are going to be some very difficult choices to be made.
"So we have to get pension reform so we can make the right sort of choices rather than the wrong sort of choices," he added.
Gov. Pat Quinn has called the state legislature back to Springfield and set a July 9 deadline for pension reform to be passed.
Emanuel refused to discuss individual school cost-cutting measures, such as Whitney Young Magnet High School's plan to charge $500 for seventh period next year or therefusal of Blaine Elementary's Local School Council to approve staff cuts.
He blamed choices pension payments deferred for decades and "kicking them down the can" for the current budget crunch at CPS passed on to individual schools.
"We invested in our children and we're going to continue to invest in our children and nothing's going to change that," he said.
Yet, he said making pension payments could divert CPS funds away from classroom spending.
Earlier, in touting $1.7 million in grants to neighborhood nonprofit organizations specializing in mentoring, conflict resolution and job training, Emanuel said, "You can never go wrong by investing in the children of the city of Chicago."
Emanuel also defended the appointment of Deborah Quazzo to the Board of Education, saying she had "deep experience in education" and would widen the diversity of approaches on the board.
Quazzo has ties to charter schools, a connection criticized by the Chicago Teachers Union. Charter schools are typically non-union.
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