Rahm goes long

You've got ninety more minutes of instructional time.
Ready? Go!
(Photo by Search Engine People Blog)

In the Chicago Public Schools, the average school day is just five hours and eight minutes, the briefest in Illinois and one of the shortest in the nation. (A big deal, when you lay this fact next to all the research on the benefits of added instructional time.) Yet efforts to extend the day have long been derailed by the obdurate Chicago Teachers Union. Not even Arne Duncan could alter that reality. Now enters Illinois’s newly enacted SB7 and Chicago’s newly elected spitfire mayor, Rahm Emanuel. SB7 allows him to unilaterally lengthen the school day, starting in 2012. Emanuel, unimpressed with that timeline (or daunted by the CTU’s intransigence), has embarked on a building-by-building campaign to lengthen the school day in the Windy City. So far, teachers at six (and counting) CPS elementary schools have voted to accept Emanuel’s offer of a two-percent raise and $150,000 in additional school funding in return for waiving this item in their contract and adding ninety minutes to the school day. In response to these “rogue” teachers, the CTU has filed suit against Emanuel and his school board, accusing them of unfair labor practices. CTU officials should carefully note against whom they fight. It was not Emanuel who signed the death certificate of Chicago’s abridged school day but the teachers. Taking up arms against their own ranks? No good can come of that.