The Daily Change

Anti-GMO protesters.

This November, Californians will get a chance to vote on Proposition 37 — a “right to know” law that would require GMO (genetically modified organism) labeling on food products so that consumers know what food has been genetically altered.

Whatever your opinion is about genetically modified food, it’s hard to argue that the public doesn’t deserve to know whether or not the products they’re consuming have been genetically altered. But that’s exactly what big pesticide companies are spending millions to argue.

The Yes On 37 campaign just released new numbersAi??totaling the spending by big pesticide companies against the measure:

Monsanto just gave an additional $2.89 million to defeatAi??Proposition 37, which would require labeling of genetically engineered foods in California. Monsantoai??i??s total contribution against Proposition 37 now stands at $7.1 million, according to campaign finance disclosureAi??recordsAi??filed with the California Secretary of State. […]

The ai???Big 6ai??? pesticide firms (Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer, Dow, BASF and Syngenta) have contributed $19 million of the $32 million that the No on 37 campaign has raised.

This is a stunning amount of money being spent to make sure Californians aren’t properly informed about the food they eat. But so far this corporate subterfuge campaign is falling short. Polling released earlier this month shows that 67 percent of Californians back Prop. 37.

Romney demonstrating his view on how government should treat rich people.

Yesterday, video emerged of Republican presidential nominee essentially telling donors that 47 percent of Americans are lazy and just want to be dependent upon the governor. In Romney’s world, these are all Obama voters:

ROMNEY:Ai??There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.

Watch the video of Romney’s remarks, obtained by Mother Jones:

Romney’s words are rightly being condemned as offensive. But here’s the interesting part about his remarks. He talks about Americans who believe they are entitled to basic goods like health care and food. In Romney’s mind, this probably means the poor.

But government actually spends a relatively small amount of its budget on assisting the poor. It actually spends an extraordinary amount of money handing the already-rich even more money. Here’s five ways that Republicans like Romney use government to give even more money to the already-rich (who finance the party):

Supporting The Oil Subsidies: The newest line among Republicans is that they despise “crony capitalism.” But House Republicans have votedAi??unanimouslyAi??Ai??time and time again to give billions of dollars to the oil industry. Paul Ryan’s budget maintains $40 billion in subsidies for Big Oil over ten years. The oil industry is giving approximately ten times as much cash to Republicans this year as it is giving to Democrats.
Providing Federal Funding For Rip-Off For-Profit Colleges: The for-profit college industry has abused students …

A Chicago Teachers Union action. (Photo credit: Flickr user JeanPaulHolmes)

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike enters its sixth day today. Negotiators are reportedly nearing a resolution, but the CTU wants to give its members ample time to weigh in on any proposed agreement.

Late yesterday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel moved to request a temporary restraining order that would force teachers to go back to work. Emanuel’s argument is that state law does not allow teachers to strike over non-compensation issues (click here to find out some of the reasons the strike is happening).

A few minutes ago,Ai??Cook County Circuit Court Peter Flynn denied this request. He said through a spokesman that he may consider instead holding the hearing on Wednesday, when many observers believe the strike may actually end.

“CPS’ spur-of-the-moment decision to seek injunctive relief some six days later appears to be a vindictive act instigated by the mayor,” said the CTU in a statement. “This attempt to thwart our democratic process is consistent with Mayor (Rahm) Emanuelai??i??s bullying behavior toward public school educators.”

Four years ago, Wall Street’s fraud, deception, and other risky financial behavior set off a global recession that plunged as many as 60 million people worldwide into poverty, according to figures released by the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

This misbehavior by the world’s banking elite set off the Occupy Wall Street movement one year ago today. Tens of thousands of Americans took part in demonstrations nationwide, and many set up tent camps to protest the country’s growing economic inequality. The movement inspired not only a nation but the entire world as copycat movements sprung up globally.

But one of the central demands of the occupiers — that the Big Banks that broke the law and caused the recession be held accountable — has yet to be fulfilled. Few bankers have gone to jail for their complicity in white collar crimes (although bold progressive candidates like Elizabeth Warren are running on a pledge to prosecute these criminals).

Yet while bankers have committed crimes while avoiding arrest, thousands of those who have demonstrated against them have been arrested. According to OccupyArrests.com, which has been tracking reports of arrests since the movement started, at least 7,435 protesters have been arrested in 120 cities nationwide.

As we arrive here at the anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protests, let’s not forget about the justice that remains to be done and the sacrifices made by protesters who have been arrested while in the process of calling for the Big Banks to finally be held accountable.

Two just-released polls find that progressive champion Elizabeth Warren is now leading incumbent Senator Scott Brown (R) in the Massachusetts Senate race.

First, here’s a poll from theAi??Western New England University Polling Institute:

Of the 444 likely voters interviewed for the survey, 50 percent said they would support Warren if the election was held today, 44 percent said Brown, and six percent said they were undecided. Among the larger sample of 545 registered voters, Warren led Brown by 12 points, 53 percent to 41 percent, with six percent undecided. The margin of sampling error for the sample of likely voters is plus or minus 4.6 percentage points, and the margin of error for the sample of all registered voters is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.

Second, here’s the results from a new Public Policy Polling survey:

Things have been going Elizabeth Warren’s way in the Massachusetts Senate race over the last month. She’s gained 7 points and now leads Scott Brown 48-46 after trailing him by a 49-44 margin on our last poll.

Warren’s lead is likely a result from her excellent convention speech and voters’ increasingly realizing that Brown has been a shill for Wall Street during his time in the Senate.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN)

Last week, theAi??Senate Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee held a hearing on college affordability. During the hearing, Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN) made the claimed that states are having a hard time affording aid to students because the costs of Medicaid are too high.

He then suggested that states simply drop responsibility for Medicaid altogether and just focus on funding education.

But Alexander is hardly one to complain that states don’t have money for education. After all, he is one of the Senate’s biggest proponents of sending billions of dollars to for-profit colleges that abuse students and veterans and rip off taxpayers.

Earlier this year I asked Alexander why colleges that fail to keep their promises to students and taxpayers should get up to $32 billion of federal aid. He responded with some platitudes about school choice and then refused to take follow up questions.

Unsurprisingly, for-profit colleges like DeVry, Corinthian, Westwood College and others are donors for the senator. Americans shouldn’t fall for Alexander’s choice to blame health care programs for poor people for the drying up of aid for students, especially not when he’s for subsidizing some of the top scam schools in the country.

Brown stands on the opposite side of patients and most voters.

WhenAi??MassachusettsAi??voters go to the polls in November, they won’t only have a chance to elect bold progressive Elizabeth Warren. They’ll also be presented with the opportunity to vote on a ballot referendum (Question 3) which would legalize the use of medical marijuana in the state.

Polling conducted by Public Policy Polling has found that 58 percent of Massachussetts voters support the ballot initiative, while only 27 percent oppose it.

Warren’s Republican opponent weighed in against it on Friday. Senator Scott Brown told the Associated Press that he sympathizes with suffering people but that he thinks the law is too broad.

MassachusettsAi??voters should keep Brown’s unpopular position in mind when they vote in November.

Rivera

Last month, we told you the story of Mark Rinehart, a Georgia teacher who wasn’t allowed to use sick days donated by his colleagues to see his ill quadruple amputee wife.

Last night, local news station KTVU reported about another tragic case that is emblematic of American sick leave policies. 44-year-old San Francisco firefighterAi??Janette Neves Rivera was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She has spent months in the hospital, but her alloted sick leave will soon be used up.

Several of her coworkers stepped up to offer her their sick days. KTVU reports that as many as half of the fire department’s staff — 700 employees — offered their leave time to Rivera, a stunning act of compassion and solidarity.

But the city of San Francisco is not allowing her to take the leave days, saying her condition is not “life-threatening.” That means she will have to return to work in a week — which also requires leaving the side of her 3 year-old daughter — just days before she is scheduled to undergo a mastectomy. “I’m scared. I’m a strong, tough woman, and this does scare me,” she told the local news.Ai??Click here to watch KTVU video about Rivera’s plight.

This would not be in issue in most of the rest of the world. 144 countries, including even poor countries like Haiti and Nigeria, offer guaranteed sick leave, and paid dozens provide sick leave for up to six months or longer.

But there is hope for progressives who think the United States shouldn’t be playing catch-up with countries like Haiti and Nigeria. Last year, Connecticut became the first state in the country to guarantee paid sick leave to some of its workers. And pressure is mounting …

(Photo credit: Flickr user psd)

The media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has put out a new report that looks at the national media’s coverage of poverty in the United States.

FAIR looked at six months of campaign media coverage — Ai??starting on January 1st and ending on June 23rd — on eight news outlets: CBS Evening News, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Newsweek.

It found that “just 17 of the 10,489 campaign stories studied (0.2 percent) addressed poverty in a substantive way.”

As we covered here recently, a fifth of American children live in poverty. Now we know in even greater detail how the facts about those children and otherAi??impoverishedAi??Americans aren’t getting out in the media and the bloodstream of the political debate of the election.

One of the criticisms levied against the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike is that it’s bad for the community because it is keeping kids out of school and burdens parents.

But a new independent poll finds that those parents are actually quite supportive of the strike. A poll for Capital Fax conducted by We Ask America finds that 66 percent of Chicago’s parents who have kids in Chicago Public Schools support the strike.

Asked who was most to blame for the strike, “just over 34 percent pointed their finger at Mayor Rahm Emanuel, while 29 percent blamed the Chicago Teachers Union and 19 percent blamed the school board,” meaning that most respondents to the poll blame management.

Here’s a strange cause Republican congressman Joe Walsh has taken on. He is advocating for a visa for Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the Gujarat province of India. Modi was banned from coming to the United States under the Bush Administration due to an immigration law prohibiting foreign officials who “who have committed particularly severe violations of religious freedom”Ai??from receiving visas.Ai??”Instead of denying him a visa, we should be inviting him to apply,” said Walsh.

It’s odd that Walsh would take on Modi’s cause. The Indian official is a pariah to human rights groups. In 2002, a string of deadly riots broke out in Gujarat that ended with the massacre of hundreds of Muslims by Hindu nationalists. AAi??resulting investigation by organizations such as Human Rights Watch concluded that Modi at least turned a blind eye to the riots and may have even played a role in inciting them.Ai??Since then, he has worked to avoid international scrutiny, and actually called off a 2005 visit to the United Kingdom after some rights activists decided to seek a warrant for his arrest. He has also dragged his feet in complying with compensating refugees from the riots, and even derided Muslim refugee camps near Gujarat as “child-breeding centres.”

But like so much in American politics, Walsh’s actions make sense in the context of money in politics. Last month, a small right-wing Indian-American organization called The National Indian American Council (NIAC) announced that it was reviving itself Ai??and would soon be forming both a Political Action Committee (PAC) and a Super PAC. In a Daily Caller article about the revival, NIAC named two candidates it would be enthusiastically backing: Reps. Allen West (R-FL) and Joe Walsh. In the article, NIAC …

Workers at a Sensata industrial plant in Freeport, Illinois recently found out that their jobs will be outsourced to overseas workers in November. It turns out that Sensata is owned right now by Bain Capital — the company Mitt Romney built his fortune from.

So rather than sit by and allow their jobs to be outsourced without a fight, the workers at this Sensata plant yesterday set up “Bainport” — a protest tent camp meant to draw attention to their plight and hopefully get Romney to speak out against the outsourcing occurring there.

“My name is Bonnie Borman. I’ve worked at Sensata for 23 years,” said one of the workers in an uploaded video. “We’re here today setting up can’t because we’ve tried everything we can to get into contact with Mitt Romney and have him try to help us save our jobs. We’ve went to offices, campaign offices and locked out. We’ve went to Tampa and didn’t get any response. So we’re going to camp here outside the Sensata factory hopefully until we get some response.”

Watch it:

You can learn more about Bainport and the plight of the Sensata workers by going to a website they’ve set up here.

Yesterday, the U.S. Census Bureau released a new report titledAi??Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2011.Ai??The report has some shocking statistics about how much work must be done to ensure a strong and secure middle class in the United States.

The Economic Policy Institute used the Census data to put together its own report thatAi??contextualizesAi??some of this data. Here’s some important facts from their report, titled State of Working America:

Nearly A Fifth Of American Children Are In Poverty:Ai??The report finds that 21.9 percent of children under the age of 18 are in poverty (the poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,811).
Millions of Americans Depend On Social Security To Be Kept Out Of Poverty:Ai??EPI estimates that 21.4 million Americans were kept out of poverty thanks to this social insurance program.
Unemployment Insurance Is Keeping Millions Out Of Poverty:Ai??2.3 million people kept out of poverty in 2011 by unemployment insurance.
Incomes Fell For Many Middle Class People From 2010 to 2011: There was a negative 1.7 percent change in average household income between 2010 and 2011 for the middle 20 percent of earners. Meanwhile, the top 5 percent saw a gain of 5.1 percent.

Read the full report here.

(Photo credit: Flickr user Bonnie Brown)

The nation’s eyes are focused on Chicago as 29,000 teachers and support staff remain on strike in a protest against substandard schools and reneged pay raises.

As the Chicago Teachers Union soldiers on, it’s important to remember the plight of teachers nationwide. The New York Time’s Catherine Rampell has put together a few charts showing that American teachers work longer for less pay than teachers in most other developed countries.

Rampell notes that the “average primary-school teacher in the United States earns about 67 percent of the salary of a average college-educated worker in the United States. The comparable figure is 82 percent across the overall O.E.C.D. [Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development].”

Here’s a chart showing the ratio of salary between middle school teachers compared to full-time, full-year college-educated workers. American teachers fair better than those in Estonia, but are worse off than the average of rich countries in the OECD:

Next, let’s take a look at teaching hours. As you can see, Chile and Argentina are the only countries where teachers work longer hours:

If Chicago’s teachers succeed, they may inspire other educators to follow suit. By the looks of these numbers, they certainly have something to protest over.

Rep. Jon Brien

The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a powerful corporate front groupthat lets Big Business draft legislation to pass in state legislature. Most of its allies are Republicans, but a few are Democrats, too.

Rhode Island state representative Rep. Jon Brien is one of those Democrats. He even serves on ALEC’s board. But Brien received some bad news late yesterday, as a firefighter who challenged him in his Democratic primary defeated him by 50 votes.

Stephen Casey, an area firefighter, will be replacing Brien on the Democratic ticket this fall. “I’m not surprised,” he told the press during a victory celebration. “We worked hard. Weai??i??re in a climate that people are looking for new ideas and new people to help out at the State House.”

According to a local press report, Brien’s reaction at his planned victory party was a little different. He “stared at a placard listing the poll numbers with an expression of grim disbelief.”

Take action with PCCC and tell Democrats to dump ALEC.

Photo credit: Flickr user Global Mitch

There’s one news outlet that has been very unsympathetic to the striking teachers and staff in Chicago, to say the least. Fox News has been blasting the Chicago Teachers Union since the strike began; host Greta Van Sustern proudly proclaimed that “CHILDREN LOSE!” on her blog as teachers began their actions.

But in its spree of teacher-bashing, there’s one very serious conflict of interest that Fox News has failed to disclose.

Let’s start in 2010. That’s when Fox News’s parent company, News Corporation, acquired the education technology company known called Wireless Generation by purchasing a 90 percent stake in the company. Soon afterwards, former New York City schools chief Joel Klein — who had a history of warring with unions — became head of the education division at News Corp.

News Corporation’s involvement in a hacking scandal eventually lost Wireless Generation its planned contract with the state of New York.

But in May of 2012, the education technology company found another willing buyer — the city of Chicago. The Board of Education of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) — the district Ai?? that CTU is striking against — approved the purchase of education technology services from Wireless Generation. Here’s a snapshot from the Board’s agenda meeting:

If you click on the two agreements listed, you’ll see that they’re for $1,700,000 each.

We contacted Wireless Generation to see if they have any other contracts with CPS, but we have yet to get a response.

Americans want to trust the media and hope that it can provide thoughtful and accurate information that is uncorrupted by secret conflicts of interest. Fox News is betraying that …

Photo credit: Flickr user juggernautco

Rahm Emanuel is having a bad week. His anti-worker antics — like forcing the cancellation of a promised 4 percent pay raise — have brought about a massive teacher strike, and tens of thousands of people are marching against his policies.

But there is one group of people that have fallen in love with Rahm’s policies: Republicans and the far-right. Here’s a short and far from comprehensive list of some of the praise he’s gotten:

The Washington Examiner:Ai??The teachers union is waging a “small war againstAi??Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.” [9/10]
Republican Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan: “I’veAi??known Rahm Emanuel for years. Heai??i??s a former colleague of mine. RahmAi??and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but MayorAi??Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacherai??i??s union strike isAi??unnecessary and wrong.” [9/10]
News Corporation Owner And Fox News Kingpin Rupert Murdoch: “Three cheers for Rahm Emanuel standing up in Chicago.” [9/11]
Former Republican Presidential Contender Mayor Rudy Giuliani:Ai??”I hope he wins.” [9/11]

It’s clear whose side Rahm is taking — Rupert Murdoch and Paul Ryan’s.

(Photo credit: Flickr user soukup)

Reuters/Ipsos just released a new poll that looks at the attitudes of southern white voters. The results were in some way unsurprising. 69 percent of working class and middle-class southern whites oppose the Affordable Care Act, for example.

But check this result out. Among poor and middle class southern whites, the group “agreed by more than 4 to 1 with the statement: ‘The wealthiest Americans should pay higher taxes.’”

America’s a progressive nation, sometimes it just doesn’t know it. (Hat tip to The Nation’s George Zornick for locating the poll.)

Rhee’s organization has been intent on fighting teachers unions, even by parroting false figures. (Photo credit: Flickr user angela n.)

Anti-labor education activist Michelle Rhee likes to say that she isn’t partisan — even though she has worked with Republican governors to crush unions.

Today, the New York chapter of her advocacy organization — Students First — parroted talking points from the Heartland Institute, a global warming denying corporate front group.

In response to concerns from Chicago parents and teachers that students are being packed into over-sized classrooms, the StudentsFirstNY Twitter account retweeted a Heartland Institute advocate claiming that the average class size in Chicago is 16 students:

This statistic is wildly lower than any credible estimate of class sizes in Chicago. So we decided to look into it.

If you go to the page from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) dealing with Chicago, you’ll find that it actually doesn’t list class sizes. Rather, it has a teacher-to-student ratio. That ratio is 16.44 — this is presumably where the Heartland Institute staffer got the number from.

The problem is, a teacher-to-student ratio is not the same thing as class size. The districts and states that report data to the NCES label a variety of support staff and tertiary individuals as teachers, including a lot of people who do not have sole responsibility for a classroom. The NCES itself admits that this ratio is not the same as class size. Check out this page of “Fast Facts” — you’ll see that NCES numbers show a teacher-pupil ratio of 15.4 in 2009 but class sizes between 20-23 over roughly the same time period. Simply put, the Heartland Institute …

A new poll just released finds that the 29,000 teachers and support staff of the Chicago Teachers Union that just went on strike have a lot of support from the city of Chicago:

In the live survey done by McKeon & Associates, a Joliet-based opinion polling company, 47 percent [of registered voters] support the strike, 39 percent oppose it and 14 percent didnai??i??t know. The poll has a margin of error of 3.8 percent.

These poll numbers should serve as a warning to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city officials who so far have not been willing to offer a fair deal to Chicago’s teachers and the students and schools they are fighting for.

Yesterday, we reported that in addition to overfilled classrooms and leaky roofs, one of the issues that brought Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to the point of striking is the widespread lack of air conditioning in schools. During a heat wave this summer, 21 summer schools without air conditioning actually cancelled classes out of concern for their studentsai??i?? health.

On Twitter, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system responded to our reporting on the air conditioning situation:

In a follow-up tweet, CPS insisted that “in extreme heat we make sure multiple fans are on, cold water’s available & move students to cooler areas.”

First of all, it’s important to note that no one is calling for the air conditioning problems to be solvedAi??tomorrow. The teachers of the CTU understand that these things take time and money.

The problem is that the Chicago Public Schools have been avoiding the issue by sidestepping it in negotiations and making no substantiveAi??commitments. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel even callously dismissed teacher, student, and parent concerns about lack of air conditioning.Ai??ai???Itai??i??sAi??71 degreesAi??outside,ai???Ai??he said, either forgetting that summer will come around again or intentionally mimicking the non-credible arguments used by climate-change deniers during the winter.

While CPS is complaining about money concerns, it is also laying the groundwork to shift as much as $70 million away from the public system and to charter schools (which just happen to be mostly non-unionized). It also is planning to significantly lengthen the school day (without properly compensating teachers for the extended day). The city has used Tax Increment Financing to take money out of property tax funds and use them to funnel millions of dollars to wealthy property developers in a scheme the Chicago Reader has …

Rep. Bill Young (R-FL)

In July, Rep. Bill Young (R-FL) had a very rude reply to a constituent who asked him about raising the minimum wage. “Get a job,” Young told him.

Now, facing the fallout from these remarks, Young is simply just skipping meetings with constituents. There was a candidates forum held recently that actually took place in the very same building that his district office is in, yet he failed to show up. The Florida Consumer Action Network (FCAN) interviewed some of Young’s constituents about his no-show status. Here’s one constituent:

TERRIE WEEKS, CONSTITUENT: We’ve tried to get meetings with Bill Young for years and years. Friends of mine, other citizens have wanted to meet with Representative Young to discuss other issues that are of concern to them. It’s impossible to do.

Watch FCAN’s video:

Before insulting other people about their jobs, Young should try doing his by showing up and meeting with constituents.

A Chicago Teachers Union action. (Photo credit: Flickr user JeanPaulHolmes)

Chicago’s 29,000 public school teachers and support staff aren’t just on strike to defend their own wages and benefits. They’re also fighting for better schools for the communities they live in. Click here to learn about why Chicago’s teachers are on strike.

Here’s five facts — from a well-researched early 2012 CTU report — that you need to know about the abominable state of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system — facts that Mayor Rahm Emanuel would rather you didn’t know:

Class Sizes Are Among The Largest In The State: Chicago’s kindergarten class sizes in particular are larger than 95 percent of classes across the state. Sometimes kids are sitting in classrooms with 40 students for months as the city drags its feet on lowering class sizes. Right outside of Chicago, in the Matteson School District, the average class size is between 16 and 23 for most of a child’s education.
Students Lack Access To Arts And Music Education: Instruction in the arts and music is essential to educating gifted and responsible children. But only 25 percent of Chicago public elementary schools have both art and music instructors.
There Is A Severe Lack Of Social Workers And Counselors:Ai??Over 15,000 homeless children attend Chicago public schools. Yet there are only 370 social workers for the entire district. You do the math. Each social worker, if dedicated totally to homeless children, would have a caseload of 42 kids. Meanwhile, each school has only one counselor, meaning that schools with up to 1,200 kids have only one adult offering intensive counseling services.
160 Schools Don’t Even Have Libraries:Ai??Libraries give kids, especially impoverished kids, access to information that they’d never otherwise be able to attain. …

(Photo credit: Flickr user MSVG)

Chicago’s teachers aren’t fighting just for their own wages and benefits. They’re on strike for better schools for students, too. One of the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) demands is to install air conditioning in schools, particularly poorer ones that may lack these amenities.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel (whose net worth is estimated at $14 million) downplayed these teacher concerns on behalf of poor children.Ai??”It’sAi??71 degreesAi??outside,” he said. “You don’tAi??go onAi??strikeAi??for air conditioning.”

But lest the mayor forget, seasons change. Earlier, in July, there was a heat wave so severe that school officials decided to cancel classes at 21 schools one Friday that were serving summer school students. The reason why? They lacked air conditioning. The heat wave this summer was so intense that there were actually a number of deaths attributed to it in the city.

CTU is fighting for everyone in the city — teachers, students, parents. Mayor Emanuel may feel comfortable with the fact that some of his city’s schools without air conditioning can get so hot that officials canceled school to protect the health of their students, but the CTU isn’t.

If the strike ends up getting air conditioning installed in these boiling schools, the kids will be the first ones to benefit as a result.

Far-right activists as well as even a few mainstream journalists have made wild claims about how much Chicago’s teachers earn. Nightline’s Terry Moran even claimed that the Chicago Teachers Union is doing “much damage” to the profession by striking, and then went on to say that teachers in the city earn an average of $74,000.

That just isn’t true. To fact check this claim, I went to the best source available to the public: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The BLS has data from May 2011 for the Chicago metropolitan area that breaks down the average salary for teachers. Across the profession, teachers in the area were earning an average salary of $56,720. Keep in mind that a median salary would probably be a more accurate picture of what teachers actually earn (veteran teacher salaries will be dragging the number upwards) but that this number is not available. The number is also dragged upward because a number of university staff are included in this calculation (they earn more than public school teachers). We spoke with a BLS official earlier today to confirm the veracity of these numbers.

If you look at the different subsets of teachers, some earn as little an average salary as $44,480 (foreign language teachers). Ai??Also keep in mind that the cost of food and living is well above the U.S. average in Chicago.

The only way Chicago’s teachers and students will win this struggle is by not letting misinformation turn the tide of public opinion.Ai??Use the Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit buttons on this page to spread the word. (Thanks to labor journalist Doug Henwood for pointing us in the right direction to look for these figures.)