This is the story I tell.
I went to college originally in the 60s in California. There were a lot of diversions back then and I was diverted by all of them. After two years at Los Angeles City College, I dropped out.
I was active in the Student Movement. I was head of my chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. When Martin Luther King was killed in 1968, we white students in SDS and the Black Student Union and MEChA, the Chicano student organization, organized a strike and closed the campus.
Dad, who was politically active himself, did what many dads did in those days. He offered me an ultimatum. Study or SDS. He wasn’t going to pay for school if I wasn’t going to go to class – if I was going to spend all my time protesting.
The laugh was that Los Angeles City College was essentially free. I think there was an $18 fee. It didn’t cost Dad anything. This was pre-Reagan, so the entire California public university systems were essentially free. Berkeley was free. UCLA was free. So were the state colleges like Cal State Los Angeles and San Francisco State College.
Having dropped out of college and moved out of my parents’ home, I went to work. Factory jobs mainly.
Which brought me to Chicago in 1973.
In 1973 there were a lot of factory jobs in Chicago. Over the next ten years I worked at places like Stewart-Warner, Schwinn, Rock-Ola – finally ending up at United States Steel’s South Works on the far East Side by 79th and the Lake.
Every factory I worked at is gone.
In 1973, 20% of all the steel in America was made between 79th Street and the Lake and Benton Harbor.
That is mostly gone.
As are the union jobs.
As are the union workers who worked at those jobs.
Ironically it was at just that time that skilled jobs at US Steel were opening up to women and minority workers. But that didn’t last long.
Adam, the journeyman millwright I apprenticed to, was barely 50 when the steel mill closed. He had worked double shifts since being hired as a recently arrived Polish immigrant 25 years earlier.
His union wages sent his girls to Catholic school and then to Marquette University.
But at 50 he was done.
If we want to understand what is happening to our schools and our city, we have to understand that this is not the Chicago I moved to in 1973.
Change happens. But who controls the change, who gets hurt by it and who profits from it is at the center of the fight for our neighborhoods and our schools.
I was still a young man when the mills closed. So I went back to school at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle and finished what I had started back in 1966.
By 1984 I was in my first classroom as an Art teacher.
As it turns out both my kids are teachers too. One teaches English in a Brooklyn public high school. The other is an Art teacher in public school in Manhattan.
The chart at the top of the post is from Atlantic Magazine.
It shows the schools and the majors with the lowest net return on investment: Art, English and education.
My family is a hat trick.
In other words, a high school graduate will out-earn (if they get a job) a teacher who earned a degree from one of these universities by an average of $150,000 over twenty years.
I’m not sure Adam would understand.
Fred Klonsky 
Thank you for telling us your story, Fred.
As all of us age, we appreciate our old humanities teachers more and more.
Too bad they are not compensated at the time.
I have a question—is there an article anywhere explaining why CPS has been betrayed by the mayor and even the President? I would like to read a behind-the-scenes analysis of their motivations. Perhaps you could write it?
I love the story and the history lesson, but can’t read the chart. It’s probably me. But minus what? This is a cut in funding for those majors? This is accrued debt?
THX.
Try going to the Atlantic Magazine link in the post to see the article. It is, I believe, a comparison based on cost, debt and earnings.
I can easily see those numbers, and if anything they might be a little on the low side. This is an example of the personal investment in time, opportunity sacrificed, financial sacrifice, and enormous personal effort that a person has to do just to become a teacher.
Typically it is 4.5-5 years to become a teacher. Between the money spent by the student (and parents), and student and parent loans, easily 70-100K is gone. Then figure 4 years of working at least another 70-100K of money not earned. So before you even work your first day as a teacher, you are 140 to 200K behind.
Now, thanks to SB7, many long term teachers have been or will be, fired to make way for friends or close relatives or administrators. Fired to hire cheaper replacements. Fired for refusing to participate in falsifying test scores to make the principal look good. Fired for refusing to change grades for kids related to school board members. (Of course they don’t say that, they make out 2 unjustified bad evaluations, and they are not called back for the following year.) It is very difficult for these fired teachers to find another teaching job. They sometimes lose their houses and all their savings working fast food/big box just to survive.
This can set the teacher back additional 100s of thousands. Then when and if the former teacher is able to collect a pension, SB1 steals 100s of thousands more. Add all this in and the numbers in the article are just a fraction of the real cost of becoming a teacher.
My mother and father were both longtime respected teachers. One of my sisters was also a long time respected teacher, as was her husband. My other sister, who worked in a college law office, had a husband that taught in college. I taught in a Junior High/Middle School for 39 years. I am glad I convinced my children NOT to go into education!!!! They are in the lucrative private sector. It was bad enough for teachers before. It’s worse today and will continue to get worse in the years ahead. What these rich idiots in the private sector (Rauner) and the idiots in politics (Quinn, Madigan, Emmanuel, and unfortunately probably Rauner) don’t realize is that there is no military type draft for teachers. No one HAS to go into education. I have seen many fine young teachers leave the profession the last ten years as it has gotten worse on MANY levels. There are others talking about going into the private sector. As a 6th grade science teacher at my school said back in 1979 “You get what you pay for!!”
Speaking of numbers, I just saw an article showing an example of a ridiculous common core math problem. Also I see the schools (right across the street from Chicago) in Indiana are scrapping common core statewide. Rauner keeps saying Illinois should follow Indiana’s example on things. On common core, I think that is right, exactly right.
https://shine.yahoo.com/healthy-living/common-core-parent-facebook-post-indiana-school-181841158.html
I was in AP International Relations with you at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles in 1965-66 and saw your spunk and intellect on display daily in that class, as you and our esteemed instructor debated the issues of the day. The highest compliment I can pay you is to say that Mr. Zagrafos, in whatever corner of the cosmos he currently resides, may have finally found something to agree with you about, almost 50 years later.