“It’s certainly a step in the right direction,” CTU President Karen Lewis said. “We have a long way to go before this contract is settled.”
With that, the CTU announced a breakthrough in the historic negotiations with the Mayor on the issue of the longer school day.
From the beginning the Mayor had promised he would get a longer day out of the teachers. But he had no plan for what to do with it. And he had no plans to pay for it.
But a 98% strike vote, 10,000 teachers in the street and the report from the mutually agreed upon arbitrator who sided with the teachers on the need for compensation changed all that.
The school day will be longer for students, but not for teachers. CPS will have to rehire nearly 500 teachers who have been laid off over the past two years. Principals must hire from that pool.
Current instructional time for teachers (not students) remains equal to or close to current minutes.
If you surrender you will always lose. If you don’t fight you will never win.
Fred Klonsky 
Any chance of swapping Karen Lewis for Cinda?
We will have to see how this all works out at the school level. The time schedule, the number of preps per day, the lack of made-up preps during testing (always testing, you know), time in the building, this may not be the huge victory the CTU is claiming. Or it may be. The devil’s in the details, as they say. If there is a way around it, CPS and many of its principals will find it.
I have not seen where the CTU is claiming a huge victory.
Quite the contrary, they have said quite clearly that there is much more that must be bargained, including the issues you raise.
What the signed agreement addresses is just the length of the teacher work day and the rehiring of 500 teachers. That’s a lot, but not everything.
In fact, it is the proposal that the CTU made months ago.
History repeats itself. A history of Chicago teachers and strikes here: http://bit.ly/Chiteachers