The following article was selected from the Internet Edition of the Chicago Tribune. To visit the site, point your browser to http://chicagotribune.com/. ----------- Chicago Tribune Article Forwarding---------------- Article forwarded by: Cayata Dixon Return e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Article URL: http://chicagotribune.com/news/local/article/0,1051,SAV-0106030288,00.html ---Forwarded article---------------- New teachers union chief poised to pounce By Michael Martinez, Tribune education reporter. Tribune staff reporter Rick Hepp contributed to this report. A week after her stunning upset of a caucus that has ruled the Chicago Teachers Union for more than 30 years, president-elect Deborah Lynch-Walsh said she will intensify teachers' opposition this week to the annual round of academic sanctions now being prepared by the Board of Education. In a meeting this week with schools chief Paul Vallas and another possibly with Mayor Richard Daley, Lynch-Walsh will lodge protests against what have been the building blocks to Chicago's attempt to reform its public schools, she said. As Daley continues to search for a replacement to board president Gery Chico, who abruptly resigned in the wake of falling test scores last month, Lynch-Walsh is expected to unleash labor's most vocal assault yet on initiatives originally designed to bring more accountability to teachers and their schools: academic probation, re-engineering and intervention. These crackdowns put the worst teachers in the worst schools on notice, if not the chopping block. "We're going to hit the ground running," Lynch-Walsh said Friday, though her ProActive Chicago Teachers caucus's takeover of 39 of the union's 47-seat executive board doesn't officially start until July 1. "We hope to get into substantive issues and get the ball rolling." Perhaps equally revolutionary as the 1989 and 1995 state laws that began Chicago school reform was Lynch-Walsh's victory as union president on May 25 after losing the past two elections. For the first time since the 1960s, the United Progressive Caucus, headed by lame-duck president Thomas Reece, no longer runs the union. Reece, however, was re-elected president this spring to the union's state affiliate, the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Union spokeswoman Jackie Gallagher, a Reece supporter with two years remaining on her contract with the union, described Lynch-Walsh's victory to a three-year term as momentous. "Picture the House of Representatives under the Democrats for 40 years, and the Republicans come in and are elected to the entire House of Representatives. It's a big deal. ... It's the first time there will be radical change in a long time," Gallagher said. Vallas, who supported Reece during the election, has downplayed any potential conflict with the new union leadership, as has Daley. Reece supporters had accused Lynch-Walsh during the campaign of trying to lead the union to its first teachers strike since 1987. Lynch-Walsh responded that strike threats are a negotiator's last resort and dismissed the accusations. The union's four-year contract expires in 2003, the same year that Daley is up for re-election. "I think the objective here is to move the system forward and obviously strikes and work stoppages don't achieve that. I think that's campaign rhetoric," Vallas said. "I don't anticipate an adversarial relationship. I anticipate a close working relationship." In an interview last week after classes ended at her school, Marquette West Elementary on the Southwest Side, Lynch-Walsh, 49, an 8th-grade teacher, attempted to tone down her campaign rhetoric, which included a claim that the union has been in the mayor's pocket. "I would say you're getting to know the real me. I just didn't get reflective and substantive," Lynch-Walsh said. At a minimum, Lynch-Walsh will make public many shortcomings in the mayor's reforms, her supporters said. Of the former Progressive Caucus leader's style, Vallas said, "Tom Reece opposed those things vocally, but he just opposed those things behind closed doors." Lynch-Walsh denounced all of the mayor's reforms, including the re-engineering of a dozen or so high schools that Vallas said was the city's best example of cooperation between the board and union. During advanced re-engineering, a group of teachers and the principal identify their school's worst teachers for retraining and, if that's unsuccessful, possible firing. The harshest initiative is "intervention," in which a small number of teachers at five of the city's worst high schools are expected to face summary firings for incompetence this month, officials said. "There are many problems with those initiatives," Lynch-Walsh said. "Many intervention [school] teachers reported that these initiatives are being invented as they went along. The members in re-engineering schools themselves don't even know what's going on with re-engineering." Lynch-Walsh said the system can improve if teachers are made partners, not targets, of reform, if schools are designed smaller, and if more than 75 percent of faculty members agree to "buy in" to new instructional models. "We know how to do it better than any privateer or any so-called expert that couldn't last a day in a Chicago classroom," Lynch-Walsh said. On Saturday, Daley said he expects to name a new school board president sometime this week. He has interviewed at least a half-dozen candidates but offered no details on likely replacements. Some, he said last week, weren't interested in the job. "Some of them that I have talked to cannot take it. They don't have, to be very frank, the time that they can put into it, and it requires a lot of time." ---------------------------------------------------- This is the CPS Mathematics Teacher Discussion List. To unsubscribe, send a message to <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For more information: <http://home.sprintmail.com/~mikelach/subscribe.html>. To search the archives: <http://www.mail-archive.com/science%40lists.csi.cps.k12.il.us/>
