Here is just one example among many as to why Chicago teachers are striking.

[madfloridian]

This is just one incident among many by not just Brizard and Rahm....it is being done by political leaders in other states against teachers.

This is from Huff Post in March:

On the Outside Looking In

February was an interesting month for sixth-grade math teacher Octavia Sansing-Rhodes. On February 28, WGN-TV and St. Xavier University named Sansing-Rhodes their "Teacher of the Month" and awarded her a $1000 check for her fine work at Chicago's Herzl Elementary School.

That honor, however, was bittersweet because it came just six days after Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard effectively fired Sansing-Rhodes, along with everybody else who works at Herzl.

The purge was announced at the February 22 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. Late that afternoon, the mayor's hand-picked board voted (unanimously, of course) to "turnaround" Herzl in 2012-13 by handing the school over to the mayor's friends at the Academy for Urban School Leadership.

Bottom line -- everyone in the building gets fired, and AUSL gets to hire its own teachers, principals, custodians and cafeteria workers. Oh, yeah -- and as an added bonus, the Board of Ed (headed by former AUSL chairman David Vitale) will provide the new AUSL management with roughly $9 million for upgrades to the building.

From the comments an interesting post:

This is all about money and has little to do with education. The BOE's only purpose is to make the transition from public to private and divert the blame from Rahm Emanuel. When finished, the board members will go back to cushy jobs at AUSL, UNO, Noble, etc. and have the thanks of the masters they have served so well. The students and the taxpaying public gets screwed!

[No Elephants]

1. Ed Shultz, whose mom was a teacher, had on people last night who said

money was NOT the main issue.

It was class size and resources--resources like Rahm's kids have at the University of Chicago Laboratory School that they attend. However, by law, salary is the only thing they can strike over.

Great example, when a Mayor in a city like Chicago won't send his kids to the public school. In truth, they shouldn't be taking seats inthe laboratory school, either.

But, then, on Morning Joe on the same network, Joe pretended it was only about money.

All the news that is fit to distort.