New Secretary of Education -- Arne Duncan

We District #150 teachers are going to have to grab the bull by the horns -- and soon. With the appointment of Arne Duncan as Obama's Secretary of Education will come massive school reform. Many (if not most) of us are not opposed to changing the way things are. Let's face it, we do need reform. That said, what I learned from the Manual High School debacle is that teachers need to firmly establish themselves as the catalyst for and facilitators of this change.

Teachers were left out of the Manual High School restructuring process. Now, with over half of the teachers placed elsewhere and several new teachers likely to abandon ship at the end of this year, Manual is a disaster. We cannot let that happen again. We teachers must be at the forefront of discussions about school reform, charter schools, etc.

We have much to gain from the Obama / Duncan era -- so long as we teachers establish ourselves as the professionals fully capable of and fully willing to drive the educational future of our district.

As union officers, we will meet with the union officers of the Chicago Public School System. We will get a solid feel for what Duncan's reforms have meant to Chicago teachers -- what has worked, what hasn't, what to look forward to, what to look out for, etc.

Again, we teachers must take the bull by the horns. We must be the ones who drive the educational future of our district. We must and we will.