Margaret Haley, the "lady labor slugger" of Chicago. She was one of the nation's first teachers' union organizers. I live in New York, and like almost every national education commentator, I have no idea about the specific details left on the table in the Chicago teachers’ negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students’ achievement scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped?
I’m not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers’ union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the
