Quality education requires social justice
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis and Vice President Jesse Sharkey at the annual CTU Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. celebration at the Kroc Community Center on Jan. 15, 2015.
Institutional racism, poverty, and the systematic underfunding of education lie at the heart of problems in education. While solving these social ills lies beyond the scope of traditional collective bargaining, the Chicago Teachers Union insists that leaders of both the city and the Chicago Public Schools take practical steps to address the profound crisis that we face in the schools.
CTU is fighting for the education our students deserve and highlighting fundamental issues often ignored by those in power.
OPINION
In addition to more traditional demands, CTU has introduced proposals for the next teachers’ contract with the Chicago Public Schools, including ones to address early childhood education, healthy schools, overuse of standardized testing, a higher minimum wage, homelessness, segregation, disproportionate incarceration, insufficient numbers of support personnel, as well as funding proposals. The recent CTU document A Just Chicago: Fighting for the City Our Students Deserve(http://www.ctunet.com/just) describes the research linking these issues to quality education.
CTU proposals include:
- Expand pre-kindergarten to 3- and 4-year-olds whose families have incomes less than three times the poverty line.
- Air condition all schools no later than 2019.
- Reduce standardized testing to six hours a year with no mandated tests for pre-kindergarten to 2nd graders.
- Pay at least $15 an hour to employees of CPS and subcontractors.
- Hire full-time liaisons to support homeless students’ needs.
- Establish a CPS-CTU committee to focus on greater racial and socioeconomic integration.
- Jointly advocate for laws reducing nonviolent crimes to misdemeanors and redistributing prison funds to schools.
- Hire at least one full-time nurse in each school and one full-time licensed librarian in every high school.
- Pay for these proposals by seeking a financial transaction tax, a state progressive income tax, and the return of tax increment finance dollars to CPS.
- Sue the banks to return their excess profits on “toxic swaps” and bar future business with financial institutions with predatory lending practices.
The political and business communities have continually advocated for policies that further inequality in Chicago. They spend money on sports stadiums, but not on schools. Any city is only as rich as how it treats its most vulnerable residents. Chicago’s students deserve much more than they have gotten to Quality education requires social justice | Chicago:
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