Read
Reuters Photojournalism
Our day's top images, in-depth photo essays and offbeat slices of life. See the best of Reuters photography. See more | Photo caption
Ethiopia's salt trails
For centuries merchants have traveled to Ethiopia to collect salt from the surface of the vast desert basin. Slideshow
Sponsored Links
Teacher strike in Chicago hometown may be headache for Obama
Chicago teachers stand behind police barricades before taking over the streets outside the headquarters of Chicago Public Schools in Chicago September 10, 2012.
Credit: Reuters/Jeff Haynes
CHICAGO |
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The Chicago teachers' strike is putting President Barack Obama's re-election campaign in a bind, pitting unions loyal to him against officials with ties to the White House.
The Obama camp needs to be careful not to upset the unions, which it needs for campaign funds and to do ground work leading up to the November 6 election, while not alienating independent voters who are worried about the Democrats being too close to powerful labor groups.
While not directly involved, Obama is associated in many minds with local politics in his hometown, where one of his current cabinet members, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, formerly oversaw the schools and now endorses the changes that have angered teachers.
And Mayor Rahm Emanuel is a former Obama chief of staff.
Some 29,000 teachers and support staff are involved in the strike to protest reforms such as performance evaluations for teachers and more authority for school principals.
"They should go back to work. I think it's unbelievable," said a major Obama donor in the Chicago area, worried about the effect the strike will have on Obama's image with the independent voters in swing states he needs to defeat Republican Mitt Romney.
"Every person I know who is a major donor to the president is against the strike decision," the donor said.
But the Obama campaign relies on the Democratic legions of rank-and-file union labor to carry out voter drives in key battleground states, which may be their best chance to overcome well-funded Republican attacks over the airwaves.
Obama is expected to handily win Illinois on Election Day, but he needs union help in closely contested Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio, where polls show Romney and Obama roughly in lock step.
"The unions are a strong part of the Democratic party and when you alienate the unions then you begin to pull the Democratic dominance of Chicago apart," said Dick Simpson, a political science professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Monday that Obama was aware of the situation in Chicago.
"(President Obama's) principal concern is for the students and families who are affected by the situation," Carney said. "We hope both sides are able to come together to settle this quickly in the best interest of Chicago's students."
DEMOCRATS HOPE FOR QUICK RESOLUTION
The strike in the nation's third-largest school system is also a distraction for Chicago Mayor Emanuel from a key fundraising role for Obama.
Emanuel, Obama's closest aide during his first years in the White House, last week stepped down as one of several Obama campaign co-chairs to take up a role raising funds for political action committees backing Obama and Democrats.
That might take a back seat while he deals with the teachers' strike, the city's first in a quarter of a century.
"The mayor's first priority is the residents of the city of Chicago," said Thomas Bowen, director of Emanuel's political action committee. "He is committed to re-electing the president, but he must focus on his job as mayor right now."
Emanuel skipped a previously scheduled appearance at a fundraising event for Democratic House of Representative candidates on Monday due to the strike, Bowen said.
Romney, a former private equity executive, was quick to take sides. He and fellow Republicans are likely to link the strike to Obama if it does not end soon.
"Teachers' unions have too often made plain that their interests conflict with those of our children, and today we are seeing one of the clearest examples yet," Romney said, in a statement.
Union representatives and the school district negotiated throughout Monday but no agreement was reached.
"The Obama campaign and the White House hope Mayor Emanuel will solve the problem quickly, so it will go away," said Larry Sabato, a political analyst with the University of Virginia.
"My assumption has been that Rahm Emanuel is going to solve this. He recognizes that he hasn't just created a problem for his city, but he's created a problem for his president," he said.
(Additional reporting by Lisa Lambert and Greg McCune; Editing by Alistair Bell and Lisa Shumaker)
- Tweet this
- Link this
- Share this
- Digg this
- Reprints
Obama won’t lose the union vote. Additionally, performance evaluations in the public sector are necessary. If you want the right to collectively battle for better wages and benefits, then you need to be willing to have reasonable evaluations.
Education in the US is not where it needs to be these days. We need to both, increase incentives to get high quality teachers and increase performance measures to make sure the education kids are receiving is going to pay off.
Teachers don’t want any type of evaluations based on student performance, they don’t want to enforce continued education and training for their members, they want to control the firing and hiring of members (regardless of effectiveness or more troubling their ineffectiveness),enforce CBA’s across both union and non-union members through manipulating local school boards, they block value added incentive programs and worse of all young people who start out teaching are far more likely to get fired during budget cutbacks program contractions and redistricting than their older counterparts regardless os effectiveness (tenure system anyone?).
Add to the the overall failure of any local, city, municipal, state or federal ability to see educations a national priority and the #1 way out of poverty by continuously cutting budgets, programs and scaling back the educational impact through inaction and belligerent complacency.
Teachers don’t want to change (for the most part, I’m sure there are some who see this system as broken as we do), governments don’t want to fund, parents don’t care…is there any wonder about the large number of kids who just don’t care and don’t want to learn?
And all that aside, the way to make your point that there’s something rotten in Denmark is not to QUIT TEACHING THE KIDS AS A WAY OF PROTEST!
This shows me the self-serving nature of the unions more than anything.
Follow Reuters