We should all hope for better days in the Chicago Teachers Union as Deborah Lynch-Walsh replaces Thomas Reece as president. Ms. Lynch-Walsh has a lot of work to do.
Most important is the issue of unqualified teachers. Several years ago, when Reece was on a TV talk show, I asked him what the union was going to do about ridding the system of teachers who did a bad job. He said then that firing teachers was the principal’s job. Passing the job of teacher qualification off to principals and state licensing is a kind of irresponsibility that insults the good teachers in the system and damages the community.
The CTU has to set the bar higher than all the rest. We on the outside have to know that every part of the system is working for education first, because we on the outside are painfully aware that the schools get the children for the first 12 years and we get them for the next 50.
