By Eric Carter
Education Reporter

CHICAGO - Parents and caregivers who scrambled Monday to figure out what to do with more than 350,000 idle children must do it all again Tuesday – and perhaps longer – after the teachers union and district failed to reach a settlement to end the first strike in the city's schools in a quarter century. On Monday, only about 16,000 students showed up at schools and other venues where authorities organized activities and provided meals for those in need. That means the vast majority of parents had to make alternative arrangements or leave their children unsupervised through the day.

Chicago School Board President David Vitale said he thought an agreement could be reached on Tuesday. But Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis sounded less optimistic, saying the district has not changed its offers on the two most contentious issues, performance evaluations and recall rights for laid-off teachers.

The walkout – less than a week after most schools opened for fall – has created a tense political distraction for Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In a year when labor unions have been losing ground nationwide, the implications were sure to extend far beyond Chicago, particularly for districts engaged in similar debates.

"This is a long-term battle that everyone's going to watch," said Eric Hanuskek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. "Other teachers unions in the United States are wondering if they should follow suit."

The union had vowed to strike Monday if there was no agreement on a new contract, even though the district offered a 16 percent raise over four years and the two sides had essentially agreed on a longer school day.

Parents and caregivers said they were upset that the two sides can't seem to agree. About 11,000 students showed up Monday at the 144 schools kept open by the district to offer breakfast, lunch and activities; another 5,000 attended activities at other sites, including churches, park district buildings and libraries.

Michelle Li walked her 5-year-old daughter, Amber, to Mays Elementary but turned back once she realized she didn't know which adults would be watching her child. She said that the kindergartner just started school last week.

"I don't understand this, my little girl just started kindergarten," she said.

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said he took officers off desk duty and deployed them to deal with any protests as well as the scores of students who might be roaming the streets, but police said there were no incidents on Monday.

Martha Malloy, whose husband dropped off their two elementary-age children and a granddaughter at Mays Elementary – where some picketers yelled "don't go in!" – said she doesn't blame the teachers and thinks Emanuel should give them what they want "because he's not in the classroom with those kids."

"They need to be at school and learning," Malloy said. "I don't want my children or others to get off track."

Teacher Kimberly Crawford said she is most concerned about issues such as class size and the lack of air conditioning.

"It's not just about the raise," she said. "I've worked without a raise for two years."

So teachers walked the picket lines at the schools in the morning, then thousands of educators and their supporters took over several downtown streets during the Monday evening rush. Police secured several blocks around district headquarters as the crowds marched and chanted.

The strike quickly became part of the presidential campaign. Republican candidate Mitt Romney said teachers were turning their backs on students and that Obama was siding with the striking teachers in his hometown. Obama's top spokesman said the president has not taken sides and is urging both the union and district to settle the dispute quickly.

Emanuel, who recently agreed to take a larger role in fundraising for Obama's re-election, dismissed Romney's comments as "lip service."

But one labor expert said a major strike unfolding in the shadow of the November election could only hurt a president who desperately needs the votes of workers, including teachers, in battleground states.

"I can't imagine this is good for the president and something he can afford to have go on for more than a week," said Robert Bruno, a professor of labor and employment relations at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

For two decades, contract agreements have slowly eroded teachers' voices, Bruno said. "But this signals to other collective bargaining units that the erosion of teachers' rights isn't inevitable. They (the union members) are telling them, `You don't have to roll over.'"

Emanuel, who has engaged in a public and often controversial battle with the union, is not personally negotiating, but he's monitoring the talks through aides.

Not long after his election, the mayor's office rescinded 4 percent raises for teachers. Then he asked the union to reopen its contract and accept 2 percent pay raises in exchange for lengthening the school day for students by 90 minutes, a request the union turned down.

Emanuel, who promised a longer school day during his campaign, attempted to go around the union by asking teachers at individual schools to waive the contract and add 90 minutes to the day. He halted the effort after being challenged by the union before the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.

The district and union agreed in July on a deal to implement the longer school day, crafting a plan to hire back 477 teachers who had been laid off rather than pay regular teachers more to work longer hours. That raised hopes the contract dispute would be settled soon, but bargaining stalled on the other issues.

By Eric Carter
Education Reporter

CHICAGO - Thousands of teachers walked off the job Monday in Chicago's first schools strike in 25 years after union leaders announced that months-long negotiations had failed to resolve a contract dispute with school district officials by a midnight deadline.

The walkout in the country's third-largest school district posed a tricky challenge for the city and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who said he would push to end the strike quickly as officials figure out how to keep nearly 400,000 students safe, off the streets, and occupied.

"This is not a strike I wanted," Emanuel said Sunday night, not long after the union announced the action. "It was a strike of choice...it's unnecessary, it's avoidable and it's wrong."

Some 28,000 teachers and support staff were expected to join the picket. Among teachers protesting Monday morning outside Charles Darwin Elementary School on Chicago's North Side, seventh-grade teacher Emma  Jackson said she wanted a quick contract resolution.

"I don't like the idea of a strike, but we are overworked and underpaid...we need to resolve this quickly" Jackson said, adding that wages and classroom conditions need to be improved.

Contract negotiations between Chicago Public School officials and union leaders that stretched through the weekend were expected to resume Monday.

Officials said some 130 schools would be open between 8:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. so the children who rely on free meals provided by the school district can eat breakfast and lunch, school district officials said.

City officials acknowledged that children left unsupervised – especially in neighborhoods with a history of gang violence – might be at risk, but vowed to protect the students' safety.

"We will make sure our kids are safe, we will see our way through these issues and our kids will be back in the classroom where they belong," said Emanuel, President Barack Obama's former chief of staff.

The school district asked community organizations to provide extra programs for students, and a number of churches, libraries and other groups plan to offer day camps and other activities.

Police Chief Garry McCarthy said he would take officers off desk duty and deploy them to deal with any teachers' protests as well as the thousands of students who could be roaming the streets.

Union leaders and district officials were not far apart in their negotiations on compensation, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said. But other issues – including potential changes to health benefits and a new teacher evaluation system based partly on students' standardized test scores – remained unresolved, she said.

"This is a difficult decision and one we hoped we could have avoided," Lewis said. "We must do things differently in this city if we are to provide our students with the education they so rightfully deserve."

Before the strike, some parents said they would not drop their children at strange schools where they didn't know the other students or supervising adults. On Monday, as only a few students arrived at some schools, Esther Sanchez said she wouldn't leave her daughter with an adult she didn't know. Her daughter, Esperanza, started school just a week earlier.

"I don't understand why Emanuel is being so stubborn: give the teachers what they want so my baby can go back to school," Sanchez said at Rudy Lozano Elementary in Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood before turning around and taking her daughter home.

Some students expressed anger, blaming the school district for interrupting their education.

"They're not hurting the teachers, they're hurting us," said Moniqua Jones , a 17-year-old student at Jones College Prep High School. She said her mother made her come to class to do homework so she "wouldn't suck up her light bill."

But there was anger toward teachers, as well.

"I think it's crazy. Why are they even going on strike?" asked Mike Thompson, a 16-year-old student at Jones.

Emanuel and the union officials have much at stake. Unions and collective bargaining by public employees have recently come under criticism in many parts of the country, and all sides are closely monitoring who might emerge with the upper hand in the Chicago dispute.

The timing also may be inopportune for Emanuel, whose city administration is wrestling with a spike in murders and shootings in some city neighborhoods and who just agreed to take a larger role in fundraising for Obama's re-election campaign.

As the strike deadline approached, parents spent Sunday worrying about how much their children's education might suffer and where their kids will go while they're at work.

"They're going to lose learning time," said Margarita Simmons, whose son  is in the sixth grade on the city's Northwest Side. "And if the whole afternoon they're going to be free, it's bad. My boy has to learn and I have to go to work."

The school board was offering a fair and responsible contract that would most of the union's demands after "extraordinarily difficult" talks, board president David Vitale said. Emanuel said the district offered the teachers a 16 percent pay raise over four years, doubling an earlier offer.

Lewis said among the issues of concern was a new evaluation that she said would be unfair to teachers because it relied too heavily on students' standardized test scores and does not take into account external factors that affect performance, including poverty, violence and homelessness.

She said the evaluations could result in 6,000 teachers losing their jobs within two years. City officials disagreed and said the union has not explained how it reached that conclusion.

Emanuel said the evaluation would not count in the first year, as teachers and administrators worked out any kinks. Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said the evaluation "was not developed to be a hammer," but to help teachers improve.

When he took office last year, Emanuel inherited a school district facing a $700 million budget shortfall. Not long after, his administration rescinded 4 percent raises for teachers. He then asked the union to reopen its contract and accept 2 percent pay raises in exchange for lengthening the school day for students by 90 minutes. The union refused.

Emanuel, who promised a longer school day during his campaign, then tried to go around the union by asking teachers at individual schools to waive the contract and add 90 minutes to the day. He halted the effort after being challenged by the union before the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board.

The district and union agreed in July on how to implement the longer school day, striking a deal to hire back 477 teachers who had been laid off rather than pay regular teachers more to work longer hours.

By Eric Carter
Education Reporter

As the Obama administration makes efforts to reach their college graduation goals by the end of the decade, attention turns to the over 50 million Latinos in the U.S.

As the largest minority population in the country, Latino college graduation rates will play a vital role in the nation's quest to become the world leader in college completion by 2020. Latino students will need to earn 5.5 million certificates or degrees over the next several years for the U.S. to meet Obama's goal, according to Excelencia in Education's initiative, "Ensuring America's Future by Increasing Latino College Completion,". Excelencia in Education is a Washington, D.C.-based education research organization.

Socio-economic factors, however, limit Latino access to college and graduation rates.

"Over 40 percent of Latinos who are enrolled in college are the first in their family to go to college. And so you already have issues not just of enrollment but persistence to completion that require academic support," stated Deborah Santiago, Excelencia in Education's co-founder and vice president for policy and research.

Earlier this month, the Pew Hispanic Center reported that Latinos became the largest minority group on college campuses across the country--with 2 million Latino students enrolling in two-year and four-year college institutions in 2011.

Despite this increase, Latino high school and college graduation rates continue to lag behind those of other groups. The majority of Latinos who earn degrees also do not leave campus with degrees in fields with strong hiring prospects or high-earning potential. With many economists predicting that the nation's labor market will remain tepid for some time, the drive to expand the Latino college completion rate could benefit from aligning what more students study to workforce needs.

James Hinojosa, a 3rd-year student at DePaul University in Chicago, mentioned his feelings towards his educational goals and current major. "I'm the first in my family to graduate from high school, the first to go to college," Hinojosa stated. "Growing up in Pilsen, I've seen crime, gangs, and drugs: I want to change that. I think getting a major in Sociology with a focus on Latin American and Latino Studies will help me work directly with my community."

James, who grew up in Pilsen, one of Chicago's predominantly Mexican/Mexican-American neighborhoods, believes that working at the grassroots level will create the bigger changes the Latino community desires. "I know that working with local people - families, immigrants, youth -  is more important than talking policy somewhere in D.C. because my people have seen this happen. (Latinos) have been victims of policy-work that doesn't reflect the realities of our communities. Education, healthcare, safe neighborhoods, we really need this."

In July, the national unemployment rate sat at 8.5 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The nation's Latino workers faced the second highest unemployment rate in the country, with 10.3 percent, seeking work but unable to find it. Latino unemployment has become such a persistent problem that in July, Latino joblessness sat just 1 percent lower than it did during the same period a year ago.

This is a primary reason that Carlos Valle, a freshman at Loyola University Chicago, decided to pursuit a degree in finance and accounting. "While I believe that Latinos need to help other Latinos, the reality is that money talks," Valle confidently stated as he walked to his condo in the upscale Gold Coast neighborhood. "There is too much pressure from the Latino community to give back to the poor, those without anything. I think that's great, but the reality is you have to help yourself become someone in the world before offering your money away."

Despite an increase in college enrollment, the number of Latinos graduating from two-year and four-year institutions lags behind that of other groups. In 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, 112,000 associate degrees and 140,000 bachelor's degrees were conferred on Latinos. Compared to the 1.2 million bachelor's degrees awarded to non-Hispanic white students and the 165,000 bachelor's degrees conferred to non-Hispanic black students.

Nonetheless, the number of Latinos graduating from college continues to grow. In 2010, the number was seven times higher than it was four decades before.

The number of Latino students graduating from high school has also grown, a 76 percent rise from 2010 to 2011. However, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the Hispanic high school dropout rate of 15.1 percent continues to outpace that of all other racial and ethnic groups.

"We can't be satisfied with such low graduation rates for Latinos," Hinojosa told Le Prestige. "I think it's selfish and unsustainable when we have Latino politicians, celebrities, business elites, and lawyers who aren't putting their time, money, and effort to the communities they come from and represent."

While some believe that Latinos themselves have a commitment to giving back to the Latino community, others don't feel the same way. Trish Calvillo, an investment banker from Manhattan, believes hard-work and persistence is crucial to improving the state of the Latino community across the United States. "No, I will not donate a bunch of my money to your local organization, but I will perform workshops on financial literacy and offer my time," Calvillo stated.

"I believe that if you have the right attitude and you work hard, good things will come. I have offered my time and knowledge to Latino communities in Chicago, New York City, and Miami, but time and time again I find that they simply want money from you. The sad thing is that if you also don't live among la raza, and look and talk like them, then you are automatically considered a malinchista - a traitor. It's not fair: no one helped my mom and dad when they struggled to find employment in the '60s."