The Chicago Teachers Union Fight is a National Fight
Dylan Matthews published a post today about how teacher strikes harm student achievement, reaching all the way to suggest that the future earning potential of students off from school today at the Chicago Public Schools will be impacted by a protracted strike.
Let’s set aside the fact that it seems a bit presumptuous to enter into this conversation ONE DAY INTO a strike action, and the fact that the company of the organization for which Matthews works, the Washington Post, has a subsidiary named Kaplan which makes the bulk of its money off test preparation services.
The entire rationale for this boils down to lost instructional days for the students, and it’s simply unknowable how many days students will miss and whether or not they will get made up on the back end, as snow days are. This is how it worked when my mother, a teacher, went on strike multiple times in the 1980s. So it’s a speculative discussion.
Of course, what doesn’t get factored into the discussion about future wages is the impact of a weakened national labor movement. I asked Matthews about this on Twitter, and he gave a very specific response about whether or
Let’s set aside the fact that it seems a bit presumptuous to enter into this conversation ONE DAY INTO a strike action, and the fact that the company of the organization for which Matthews works, the Washington Post, has a subsidiary named Kaplan which makes the bulk of its money off test preparation services.
The entire rationale for this boils down to lost instructional days for the students, and it’s simply unknowable how many days students will miss and whether or not they will get made up on the back end, as snow days are. This is how it worked when my mother, a teacher, went on strike multiple times in the 1980s. So it’s a speculative discussion.
Of course, what doesn’t get factored into the discussion about future wages is the impact of a weakened national labor movement. I asked Matthews about this on Twitter, and he gave a very specific response about whether or