School Is Out, Indefinitely, Ctd

Noah Millman has mixed feelings about the Chicago Teachers' Union strike. He's not a big fan the teacher evaluation system that Emanuel wants:

What’s happened in New York is that the curriculum has been badly distorted by the imperative to teach to the test, an epidemic of cheating has broken out, and some of the most talented teachers have fled the system in frustration. In hindsight, it’s kind of obvious that a heavy-handed command-and-control approach to running a school system produced perverse incentives. That’s just what you would expect in any organization, public or private, that attempted to run everything from the home office.

Earlier, Rick Perlstein argued that lengthening the Chicago school day means teachers are being asked to do "20 percent more work" for "2 percent more pay." This isn't so, according to Dylan Matthews:

The school day is increasing from five hours and forty-five minutes for elementary school and seven hours for high school, to seven and seven and a half hours, respectively. Isn’t an increase in hours of that scale effectively a wage cut, in per-hour terms? Not a big one. Under a deal reached by Emanuel and the Chicago Teachers’ Union in July, almost 500 new teachers will be hired to enable the new schedule, and while high school teachers will have to work another 14 minutes every day, elementary and middle school teachers’ hours won’t change at all. So the overall effect on per-worker hours is minimal.