There are few more naturally sympathetic constituencies than teachers. After all, they do the hard work so few of us can or would do: educating the next generation, providing the kind of support, guidance and attention to young people and their families that tie neighborhoods and communities together. At Chicago Public Schools, teachers have played a critical role in an ongoing success story, improving graduation rates—just one important proxy for achievement—to 74.7 percent, which is still behind the national rate of 84.6 percent but significantly better than rates in the low 40s and 50s that plagued Chicago schools until as recently as 2011, when Rahm Emanuel became mayor.

Teachers should be rewarded for those hard-won gains, and they will be if they accept the latest offer from the Chicago Board of Education: a 16 percent pay hike over five years that will lift average teacher pay within the district about 3 percent a year to the $100,000 range by the end of the contract. That 16 percent hike is the level recommended by a neutral fact-finder brought in to help hammer out a deal, and Mayor Lori Lightfoot's administration decided to match it, bumping up its initial salary offer and adding a 1 percent employee health care contribution. The district also made some moves to restore nursing, librarian and other support positions that were slashed amid earlier financial crises. In fact, Lightfoot and CPS leadership say they plan to add 200 social workers, 250 nurses and additional case managers for the district's highest-need schools over the next five years.

The Chicago Teachers Union, however, isn't having it, rejecting the fact-finder's report, arguing that more support services are needed and setting the clock ticking for a strike that could come as soon as Sept. 26.

In a city where few residents can expect a guaranteed five-year pay raise of 16 percent . . . in which few occupations can guarantee an average salary above $100,000 a year . . . and in which residents have been asked and will be asked to dig ever deeper to finance teacher pensions the likes of which most nonteachers will never see . . . the teachers union would be wise to tread lightly. The Civic Federation, a respected fiscal watchdog, has provided the Lightfoot administration some political cover, writing in a new report that it supports CPS' proposed $7.7 billion budget for the new school year while also warning that cost pressures brought on by volatile labor negotiations "could put the district's hard-earned financial stability and educational gains in jeopardy."

It remains to be seen whose side most Chicagoans will be on if the teachers do eventually strike, but the mayor and her team so far have played their hand pretty well, staking out the high ground by accepting every recommendation put forward by the fact-finder. Our bet is most Chicagoans will side with the administration on this one, and they'd be right to do so.

Union leadership seems to have looked at teacher uprisings in certain red states and in Oakland, Calif., and drawn the conclusion that the same tactics will work here, igniting a grassroots brushfire of support for their cause. But teachers in those districts truly are miserably paid and their schools woefully underfunded. Chicago teachers, however, have been well paid for years, and Chicago isn't Oklahoma or West Virginia. Chicagoans understand the connection between good schools and a city's economic viability. They're also smarting from the tax burden being placed on them. And they've just elected a mayor who ran not on a message of slash-and-burn progressive politics but on a commitment to clean up government and restore financial order. Chicagoans are unlikely to have much patience for a union that seems hell-bent on misreading the moment.