SORE members hold a soup kitchen and serve half a cola outside Representative Robyn Gabel’s Evanston office.
Our chapter of IEA Retired, the Skokie Organization of Retired Educators, met over lunch yesterday with Will Lovett from IEA Government Relations.
Among other things, Will is our IEA Springfield pension lobbyist.
It was a full room at Ruby Tuesdays, down the street from Old Orchard Mall – another successful event organized by our chapter that is less than a year old.
“How many of you have never been to a Retiree event before?” I asked at the start of our program. A half dozen hands went up.
“What do you mean by an event,” asked somebody.
Tough crowd.
We are building IEA Retired in the north Chicago suburbs.
We decided to turn the program’s format upside down. Instead of Will talking and then answering question, we placed cards and pencils on each table and did the questions first. Anything not asked of importance, Will could fill in at the end.
The conventional wisdom is that all retired teachers care about are our pensions. And that same conventional wisdom says that young teachers are not concerned about their pensions.
It may be that the conventional wisdom is wrong.
About young teachers and pensions: Will shared with us that IEA polling data of IEA members suggests that the intensity of concern about the pension issue is highest among the youngest teachers.
That data flies in the face of assumptions many of us make about who cares about what.
I remember back in 2003 when our Park Ridge Local walked out on strike. The conventional wisdom was that the non-tenured teachers would be the least active.
We were wrong about that too. The youngest teachers were over-the-top active in the strike.
At the luncheon yesterday the first half-dozen questions were about charter schools and the bills before the Illinois General Assembly that would abolish the state’s undemocratic Charter Commission.
IEA and NEA policy towards charter schools was developed over a decade ago when the charter school movement was young. The union’s attitude towards them was more positive back then as long as it included the right to collective bargaining.
A number of retirees suggested the need for the IEA and the NEA to revisit that policy in light of more recent experience, and our friend and fellow-retiree, Bob Kaplan, reported to us that the IEA was doing exactly that.
My point here is that the interest in charter school development was definitely on the radar of retired teacher activists.
We’re not just a one-trick pony.
Fred Klonsky 