One retired teacher here. Shame on the Chicago teachers. JMHO. 

One teacher here. Need more facts.

They were offered a 4%/year raises for four years and make an average of $76,000 annually already.  They are striking to avoid having measurable job performance metrics and accountability for their students' academic progress.  This is a ridiculous strike that tells me the teachers are far more interested in their own status quo than they are in providing quality education to their students.  Shame on them as a group for forgetting what their professional mission is and using the students as pawns in their game.  They are fairly compensated and should want to thin the herd of poorly performing teachers.  If this was going on in my local school system, I'd be very disturbed.     

Thanks for providing facts.  Glad you were not timid about  commenting.  Around the country most districts average way less than $60,000 per teacher and increases are rarely annual.  Districts are in financial trouble everywhere and Chicago reportedly has a deficit of hundreds of millions.  This is not the time for some of the highest paid in the profession to walk away from their students.  Illinois needs some Ohio/Wisconsin attention to the problem.  JMHO

This is why teachers as a group are underpaid.  So many people run the guilt trip of "you're hurting the students."  Well, if they're that important, pay them.  i probably have as much experience as anyone on this site in terms of working in the public and private schools in diverse locales.   There are many great teachers out there that do it for the love of the game and there are many out there that i would love to take with me when I leave a building so that they never return.  Got to work with one of the former today in Ohio and another one in KY two weeks ago.  If I was starting a school, they both would get hired the first day.  Some of us may be experts when it comes to OU athletics but most of us are novices when it comes to public education today and especially public education in an urban environment.

Each district is different, yet, every teacher is evaluated annually, usually by their principal.  Principals are in the building every day and over the course of 170+ school days it becomes clear who are the most effective teachers. I do not believe merit pay is a fix for anything wrong in education. Schools districts are so diverse; urban/rural, big/small, wealthy/poor, I have no clue how anyone would think they could administer education nationally.

My wife is a teacher, also.  (bobcatbob will be amused to know she used to teach at Coolville Elem.)  The combination of the union at Federal Hocking Schools and several of the veteren teachers there at the time hammers home the need for a housecleaning at a bunch of schools.  As was posted earlier, it doesn't take a long time in each school to figure out who is good and who is not.  The principals know, but unless there is something illegal done, the positions are all based on seniority.  The teachers unions are directly responsible for the dumbing down of America.  They protect the bottom feeders, not the stars.  If you do some research, you will find very little support for the teachers unions among the teachers with the most accolades.

It would work better than the alternative, which is the mess we now have.  Yes, there are some bad principals and some would make bad decisions, but I'd rather have someone in a position to try to weed out the bad teachers than continue to allow the system to be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator.

Hard to complain about these ideas.

I don't mind unions at all.  But, one thing I never understood is why they want to protect the low performers.  Unions should demand excellence from their fellow members and then brag about it and use that to improve their total compensation package.

  
   What about the coach who won the 2008 state title in basketball then had a sub-.500 record the next season? Was he a great basketball coach one year and below average the next? Or did the talent level change from one year to the next? And if so, could this also apply to a teacher's students?

As a school principal in Illinois, I am watching this closely.  There are mixed feelings, none of which relate to the money.  That's for those in that market to decide.  I don't begrudge anybody for what they make. 

The argument that there is no way to measure a whether a teacher is good or not is just not true.  The old adage that, "I can't define good teaching, but I know it when I see it" is also something I hold little stock in.  Instead, Charlotte Danielson's method for evaluating teachers truly does help define what good (and great) teaching is.  As far as I am concerned (and studies, as well), it's pretty on-point.  It, like everything else, has its flaws.  Yet they are far less glaring than the old system.

Now, this is the method the state of Illinois has adopted by law to evaluate teachers.  This is now used to determine whether those teachers remain employed by a district or not, especially when the district is required to reduce the workforce of teachers. 

However, nothing in that evaluation takes student performance on testing into account to judge the efficacy of teachers.  That's where the matter gets dicey.  Chicago Public Schools are the only district in the state that is required to implement student performance into job security this year.  That is the reason for the panic.  They being the guinea pigs, nobody really knows what that looks like or how it will be administered. 

Alan,

I could not agree with you more.  It's a great system....if you know how to properly use it.  Otherwise, it's just as easily manipulated as anything in the past.  I should amend my earlier post to say: When used correctly, it hits the nail on the head.