CPS chooses hostility over planning

But maybe that is just the nature of things.

What is it with this city and the school system?

Does the job description for Mayor have an entire detailed section on Hostility To Teachers?

Does the job description for CPS CEO require complicity with whatever hostility the mayor is apparently required to mete out?

Does the job description for CPS Board Member specify Going Along To Get Along?

I can only understand this mayoral-controlled, unelected school-board district’s constant difficulties if I posit that it’s all required by a legally binding contract.

Otherwise, I can’t understand why the teachers’ voices are never heeded when they push for very basic things. Why treat with hostility, teachers who raise objections about dilapidated buildings and scandalously insufficient resources? Why not acknowledge that the district’s resource distribution remains so inequitable and race-based? How can you disagree that schools should have nurses? Why not allow teachers who have medical problems or live with high-risk family members to teach remotely?

Why do these rational objections add up to “teachers are lazy and selfish and just need to get to work”?

Of course that belief is not unique to Chicago mayors.

It’s the media narrative too, has been for a long time, for decades. And it’s a national narrative. David Brooks is the most recent talking head to weigh in. He sets his recent editorial, “Children Need to Go Back to School,” against a backdrop of two current cultural motifs: the trending preference for fiction over facts, and current considerations of race-based inequities. After aligning teachers with those who prefer fiction and lies over facts, he moves into rhetoric of racial thoughtfulness and generosity, opining about how it’s especially important for Black and Brown children to get back to school. The problem is the progressive mayors in the big cities with the powerful unions standing in the way. (It’s a little hard to concentrate on his points what with all that high-pitched dogwhistling, but one wonders why he even wants kids to go back to what he also calls “the disaster of public school.”)

Reader, he earnestly asks, weren’t we all just marching for Black Lives this summer? “[S]houldn’t we all be marching to get Black and Brown children back safely into schools right now?”

I would answer to Mr. Brooks that in fact, yes, we should, and that is EXACTLY what those union teachers are arguing for. It’s exactly what they’re doing.

Because no matter what CPS says, their reopening plan is not safe and it is not serious. No plan with voluntary testing once or twice a month could possibly be. No plan with inadequately sized or altogether absent HEPA filters could possibly be. No plan that does not include vaccination of teachers could possibly be.

So the teachers are objecting, until the plans to get Black and Brown children back into school ARE SAFE. Parents of color are declining to send their kids to school until such time as it is SAFE.

We’ll see what happens tomorrow, the day that all remaining K through 8 students are able to go back into the classroom, and the day teachers are required to return—whether or not the district with its poorly ventilated buildings, insufficient PPE, and unvaccinated staff is ready, or the neighborhoods, many of which on the west side have case positivity rates of 10% to 12%, are ready.

[Above graphic comes from the South Side Weekly’s amazing, open-source data visualization project, @ChiVaxBot.]

And we’ll see how much hostility the mayor, the CPS CEO, and the unelected board are willing to mete out to teachers who, because of data, and understanding the needs of their communities and their own families, choose to be safe and teach from home.

Follow CPF Insider on twitter @JulieVassilatos.