Progress in Chicago teachers strike talks

Significant progress was reported in contract talks between the school board and striking public school teachers in Chicago, negotiators said. Chicago school board president David Vitale said he's hopeful the city's 350,000 public school students could return to class by Friday, the Chicago Tribune reported Thursday. Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Louis agreed that Wednesday's talks were fruitful. "We feel like we're in a pretty good place, we've made a lot of progress today," Lewis said late Wednesday night. "We spent a lot of time on evaluation. We still have a lot of work to do but it seems like we're definitely coming much closer together than we were certainly this morning." Chicago Public Schools officials presented a revised contract proposal to the union on Tuesday. Lewis said the two sides are coming closer on an agreement about teacher evaluations, which have been a key stumbling block, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. While not ready to check it off her list, "it's a lot better,'' Lewis said. Students have been out of school since Monday as 29,000 teachers have been walking picket lines and rallying around the city. The district proposal softens an evaluation system demanded by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that the union said could put nearly 30 percent of public school teachers on the path to dismissal if they didn't improve their performance within a year, the Sun-Times said. Emanuel has called for teacher performance to be evaluated in part on the results of standardized tests. The union says the tests don't take into account socioeconomic differences among students in vastly different neighborhoods. Another key issue involved rehiring teachers laid off from schools that get shut down or shaken up. The proposal made public Wednesday would let teachers vulnerable to dismissal stay at their jobs indefinitely, provided the test scores didn't dramatically decline after the first poor score. "I think it's a pretty generous concession," Tim Daly, president of New York's New Teacher Project, told the Sun-Times. The project seeks to ensure poor and minority students get equal access to effective teachers. Rallies by striking teachers were smaller in number Wednesday than on the strike's first two days. At a rally union organizer John Kugler asked the crowd of red-shirted teachers if everyone was doing on a personal level. "I need money!" a teacher yelled out. Other teachers laughed, the Chicago Tribune said. The district is the third largest in the United States, with about 350,000 students normally attending more than 600 schools. The strike is Chicago's first in 25 years and the first in a major city in a half-dozen years. Chicago's longest teachers strike went on for 19 days in 1987. The longest strike in the United States was in New York City in 1968.