This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, September 10th, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

Teachers in Chicago are now on strike, but it's not immediately clear exactly why.

The negotiations over that issue are taking place behind closed

doors, despite the fact that they implicate the interests of taxpayers and their children.

Neil McCluskey, Associate Director of the Cato Institute's

Center for Educational Freedom, offers his thoughts. It's not, of course, out of the

ordinary unheard of to have teachers and their unions threatening to strike to say that look

all we're asking for is a fair wage fair conditions and if we don't get them we're

going to stop working.

Now in many places that's not legal.

Chicago and Illinois are one of the few, about 13 states that allow public unions to strike.

But you see it threatened in other places.

It's happened where it's illegal and nobody's really done anything about it.

But of course, ultimately, this is about teachers who are normal human beings and their unions are run by normal human beings trying to get as much for themselves as they can.

And naturally what that seems to me is they want to get as much pay as they possibly can

and not be held accountable for their performance.

Very normal things.

But to get to that, you really got to work

through a whole lot of Bluster and PR work

to really begin to guess what's at the heart of this strike.

Now there can be some legitimate complaints about whether or not teachers should be held

accountable directly one-to-one for student test scores.

...