Naturally poor kids in "failing" schools don't deserve libraries or counselors. Why would someone on a liberal board agree with this shit?
Chicago Teachers Go to Bat -- and Take a Hit -- for Their Students
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elaine-weiss/chicago-teachers-go-to-ba_b_1880744.html
But this proposal provides much reason for concern, as evidenced by, among other things, a letter authored by 88 professors and researchers at 16 universities in the Chicago metropolitan area warning against this new law. These scholars raised concerns about lack of preparedness, prior findings that such scores are inherently unreliable measures of teacher effectiveness, the intent to increase the weight of test scores to half over the coming years, and, most troubling of all, that "[s]tudents will be adversely affected by the implementation of this new teacher-evaluation system." The researchers point to the narrowing of curricula, incentives to avoid harder-to-teach (and test) students, a less nurturing teacher-student relationship, and reduced collaboration among teachers.
Indeed, in the recent wave of reform, hundreds of Chicago teachers won a suit based on the judge's findings that the city had saved money by replacing effective, experienced teachers with low-paid novices. In Washington, D.C., which has seen the same pattern, effective teachers now are leaving to teach in districts in which they feel more appreciated, to the detriment of the city's students.
Resources. The teachers are striking to stop the city from citing limited resources to justify shuttering libraries that enrich classroom instruction, eliminating the nurses, counselors, and social workers who enable at-risk students to come to class and to focus on learning, and increasing class sizes such that the individual instruction touted by "reformers" as key to effective learning is impossible. The mayor has largely dismissed those issues as peripheral, as have schools across the country. Yet there is substantial evidence that such cuts do real harm to students and counter any gains that might be seen from other changes.
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