Not long ago, I ran into someone I’d not seen for a while, who moves in moneyed circles in New York. We started chatting about the usual things—kids, schools—and she told me she’d been consumed lately with political work, raising money for candidates nationwide who were committed to breaking teachers’ unions. She said this with the same kind of social enthusiasm with which she might have recommended a new Zumba class, or passed on the name of a place to get really great birthday cakes.

A certain casual demonization of teachers has become sufficiently culturally prevalent that it passes for uncontroversial. And there will be more talk about the virtue of breaking teachers’ unions this week, now that Chicago schoolteachers have gone on strike. On the right, that city’s educators are already the incarnation of evil: “Chicago thuggery personified” was the measured description of Karen Lewis, the union leader, provided by Michelle Malkin, the conservative commentator.

A picket line of educators rarely looks good from a public-relations perspective, and those of us in New York who are wondering what we are going to do with our kids when the schools close for the Jewish High Holidays next week can sympathize with the frustrations of parents of the three hundred and fifty thousand Chicago schoolchildren who are suddenly without classes to go to. Meanwhile, fifty-thousand-odd kids in Chicago still are in school this week: those who attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and are staffed by non-union teachers. According to Chicago Business magazine, parents have been calling charter schools, desperate to get their children in a classroom, any classroom, as soon as possible, even though, as “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” the flawed pro-charter movie, showed, the most sought-after charters are oversubscribed, with long waiting lists established well before the beginning of September.

The details of the dispute are peculiar to Chicago, but the general issues will be familiar to anyone who has an interest in education in this country. Teachers’ salaries and job security are part of what the teachers are asking for; but they are also trying to limit class size, calling for increased in-school counseling services, and questioning trends toward standardized testing, as well as questioning the assumption that low test scores are always and everywhere caused primarily by bad teaching. Many of Chicago’s schools, like schools in other big cities in the United States, are struggling, and this week the numbers will be presented to prove it: fourth-grade students scored low in math (224 as opposed to a national average of 240 on the standardized National Assessment of Educational Progress test) and reading (203 as opposed to a national average of 220). Only sixty per cent of Chicago students graduated from high school this year.

But the most compelling figure in the debate over education is that more than eighty per cent of students in the Chicago school system qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, which is usually taken to be a measure of poverty. (The number in New York City is about three-quarters.) One problem with Chicago’s schools—like schools in urban centers all over this country—is that their constituents, the students, suffer from the usual hindrances of poverty: having no place at home to study; having no support at home for studying; sometimes having no home at all. Another problem is that talk of breaking teachers’ unions has become common parlance among the kind of people whose kids do not live below the poverty line, polite Pinkerton agents of education reform, circling at cocktail parties. No doubt there are some lousy teachers in Chicago, as there are everywhere. But blaming teachers for the failure of schools is like blaming doctors for the diseases they are seeking to treat.

Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty Images.