If CTU members get what they want, that's not coming out of the pocket of "the bosses" it's coming out of the pocket of the people who work at charter schools or the people who pay taxes in Chicago.Now, to be fair, Matt has some follow up posts that reflect a more nuanced view of this dispute. But this point was seized on by Eric Loomis:
It’s these experiences that make me absolutely furious when Dylan Matthews and Matt Yglesias and Jacob Weisberg and other so-called liberals attack Chicago teachers by openly rooting from Rahm Emanuel to crush them or undermine them by warning readers about the effect of paying teachers on taxpayers. I don’t really know any of them personally. But I doubt any of them went to a public school, nor has much of the liberal punditry. And if they have, it’s almost certainly not one serving working-class communities like areas of Chicago or even Springfield. They can sit in their nice New York or Washington offices and attend retreats in baronial mansions like Slate held earlier this week and fret about the taxpayers and shame the teachers into thinking about the children all they want. They would never send their own children to the schools about which they pontificate. They have no idea what they are talking about.No I don't want to discuss whether teacher pay in Chicago is sensible or not (Matt Yglesias defends the current levels here). What I find a lot more interesting is the whole question of mixed system (with public and private options co-existing). As a younger person, I often asked the question of why Canada generally made private medical services illegal (they have definitely relaxed the rules since then). After all, why should be ban a person who wants to spend money on non-evidence based procedure or get faster service from spending cash to do so? We do not ban pet rocks or other products of limited use.
The answer was always that if there was a parallel "pay system" then the elite would attack the public option (as they would use the higher end options almost exclusively). The net result would not just be a two tier system, but a two tier system that was actually worse than a designed one (as the lower tier would be formed by a series of constant cuts and the result would be worse than a planned low service level). At the time, I did not see this as a likely outcome.
But linking Chicago teacher pay increases to less resources for charter schools (even implicitly) makes this a much more credible concern.
