Liza Featherstone: Saving the Chicago public school system: Who's hurting the kids?

Liberals, you know what hurts children? Look in the mirror. Your complicity with a regime of austerity that deprives poor people's kids of everything they need in order to thrive. That's what the teachers are protesting. Not only are they seeking to improve their own dismal labour conditions, they are fighting to save Chicago’s public schools - and kids - from Democratic politicians who seek to destroy them. 

"Keeping class sizes small is one of the few proven ways to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor children."

The educators are asking for better learning conditions for the children they teach, including smaller class sizes. In early grades, it is well documented that large class sizes hurt student achievement. Keeping class sizes small is one of the few proven ways to narrow the achievement gap between rich and poor children. 

It doesn't matter how you measure that "achievement" - whether it's scoring well on standardised tests, graduating on time, graduating with honours, graduating at all, attending college, the children in the smaller classes do better. Despite this research, class sizes in Chicago - under Democratic mayors - have increased steadily over the past two decades, with one kindergarten teacher telling the New York Times today that she has 43 five-year-olds in her class. This "hurts children". 

Chicago teachers are also protesting a testing regime that only rewards schools for performance gains on reading and writing. With budgets brutally stretched, in a system that punishes poor test scores by closing down schools and firing teachers, the arts have also suffered in Chicago's schools. 

In 2011, only a fourth of the city's neighbourhood schools had a full-time art teacher and a full-time music teacher, and 42 per cent of them had neither. Mayor Emanuel obviously knows that such a state of affairs is intolerable for children, as he sends his own to a progressive school with whose director staunchly opposes standardised testing, as labour journalist Mike Elk has reported in In These Times. Standardised testing also hurts children, though not Mayor Emanuel’s children. 

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via www.aljazeera.com