Phil Cantor talking:
We’re striking for a lot of reasons. If you just see what’s in the mainstream media, all they talk about is that teachers want more money. But that’s really far from the truth. We’re fighting for reasonable class sizes. We’re fighting for wraparound services for our students. I teach in a school with a thousand students; we don’t even have one social worker in that building for most of those kids. So we’re fighting for the education our students deserve in Chicago. We’re fighting against reforms that we see, from the classroom level, are not going to work.
Rahm Emanuel has pushed through laws in Illinois, basically designed for his political gain, in my opinion. We’re not allowed legally to strike over anything but compensation. But teachers are not most interested in compensation; we’re most interested in being able to do our jobs for the students we serve. So, you know, I think we’re trying to tie other issues that we feel are very important to compensation, so they’re part of the bargaining table agreement.
At my school, I looked at the calendar for the year, and there are about 15 days where students are being tested on standardized tests. These tests are not designed to help the students. Many of these tests are designed because of No Child Left Behind to measure the school. And now, because of Race to the Top and these new reforms, now these tests are being used to measure teacher performance. So, what does that mean? It means that rather than planning rich-inquiry, interesting lessons for our students, we have to focus on very specific tested standards in a very narrow way that students have to then demonstrate those skills.
To give an absurd example, this week I’m supposed to give a district-mandated test to my ninth grade biology students, who I’ve known for one week, on DNA-to-RNA transcription and translation in protein synthesis. The reason they’re getting this test, on material they’ve never seen before, is so that I can be measured from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. It is putting our students in a terrible position to do something that was never—it’s an insane way to try to measure teachers. It’s clearly sort of the business model, the corporate model of people who don’t understand the classroom, saying, “Oh, we’ll test them at the beginning of the year and the end of the year and see growth.” But it’s an absurd sort of test that is not going to work even for that purpose, and it’s certainly not going to help our students.
Charter schools are being used to privatize the school system. There’s research that shows that charter schools actually tend to be used as a tool of gentrification in the city. The threat is that if we don’t do well on standardized tests, then our school will be turned around, meaning it will be turned over to a private charter school operation. So there’s this constant threat over teachers that if you don’t get test scores up, your school will be privatized into a charter, you’ll lose your job, your community will lose a community-based school, and students will have to sort of lottery to get into your school.
What I see at the school at the neighborhood school level—where I work is a neighborhood school—I see the best students of my neighborhood sort of getting pulled out toward the charters, because their parents have the impression that they’re better. And then, when the charter struggles with a student with behavioral difficulties or learning disabilities or language disabilities, that kid ends up getting pushed out of that charter, and then I see them at my school. Most of the charters are not unionized at all.
– source democracynow.org
Phil Cantor, has taught science for the last nine years. He currently teaches at North-Grand High School in Chicago. He is a strike captain at his school. Cantor is also part of the group Teachers for Social Justice.