Re: Labor Notes Polemics [was: Unions and Education]

["John Lawhead" <twoflightsup@hotmail.com>]

Leo, your defense of Randi Weingarten's concessionary strategy has some 
novel elements but it's less than convincing.

You'd have us believe that Randi's offers to Klein and Bloomberg over the 
past months have not been concessions at all but simply an earnest effort at 
making education better.  So she's a reformer in the spirit of Deborah 
Meier, but uniquely placed to offer relief from the stifling contract work 
rules and problem teachers.  Your suggestion that the work rules are a big 
factor preventing a "flowering of diverse schools" is not supported by any 
specific example.  To propose that such diversity would be a major interest 
for the UFT leadership is implausible.  The admiration on its part for 
school-level innovation has been a rather well kept secret.

I saw the drama played out in my own building as newly formed small schools 
were suddenly saddled with mandated curriculums last year.  This over the 
objections of one school's outspoken teacher leaders who said they'd planned 
their school already, had become familiar with the programs and didn't want 
them.  They took their case to the new regional superintendent who wouldn't 
budge -- though he knew less about the new curriculums than they did.  At 
the time, instead of questioning the appropriateness of one-size-fits-all 
programs for newly formed schools Randi was busy clamouring to have them 
implemented with UFT coaches.  It's against this backdrop that small schools 
advocates themselves have wondered whether the Gates-funded schools are 
anything more than a scheme to restaff buildings and help clear the NCLB 
ledger.

Randi welcomed mayoral control and she's welcomed the important initiatives, 
including high-stakes testing for 3rd graders.   She's been echoing Klein's 
rhetoric about ending social promotion once and for all, ignoring the 
appeals of a large coalition of parents, teachers and city council members 
about the adverse effects of wholesale retention.  Perhaps her rhetoric will 
eventually curry favor with high school teachers like those who made the 
front page of the NY Post last week.  Blame the lower grades, divide the 
teachers, encourage the strategically important high school teachers in 
their convenient presumptions about other people's failings.  It seems more 
like an election concern than an interest in good reform.

Indeed it's regrettable that the opposition focuses so much on the person of 
Randi.  I'd much prefer we discussed the structural failings of our union 
and long record of company unionism that produced her.  But it's Randi that 
makes it all about Randi.  The reduction of the governing bodies to rubber 
stamps, the heavy use of hefty PR consultants, the constant courting of 
media attention with glib soundbites, and we're left with our interests as 
teachers represented by this one-woman show.

She's in her own world and the concessions will not come from her but from 
the membership.  It's true I'm with one of the smaller opposition groups but 
they're pleasant intelligent people who can at least provide an alibi for 
where I was in 2004.

Regards,
John




Leo Casey writes:
> When ideological journals are reduced to quoting themselves to make a 
> point, as this article in Labor Notes did on this subject of NYC public 
> education and the UFT, you have a very good idea about the paucity of 
> evidence that underlies the hyperbolic rhetoric. Indeed, there should be a 
> mandatory class in rhetoric for journals of this sort, so that those of us 
> who have to read them could at least see an occasional trope other than 
> hyperbole, maybe a stray metaphor or two.
>
> What is at issue here is the complete lack of political imagination and 
> vision in this small opposition, such that it can see no further than an 
> adamant defense of every last detail of an industrial unionism, in which 
> every school is cut out of the same cookie cutter, and every teacher in 
> every school teaches the same number of classes of the same length for the 
> same number of days in the same year. The notion that there might be a 
> different vision for public education, one that allows for the flowering of 
> diverse schools, organized around different themes and in different ways, 
> and that a union contract should support -- not prevent -- such diversity, 
> and that it should focus on a real teacher voice in those schools, rather 
> than insisting upon a blind application of rules made for factory model 
> schools, is translated by Teachers for A Just Contract and Labor Notes as 
> "concessions." Every step that the UFT has taken in that direction in the 
> last 20 years has been condemned by them, so it is not surprising that they 
> should continue their thoughtless opposition when Randi proposed a school 
> based contract, where in small schools with a demonstrated history of 
> collaborative governance, teachers and the school adminstration could 
> establish their own agreement on such questions as the length of periods, 
> the number of periods in a day and in a week, and so on. And this complete 
> lack of imagination and vision is covered by personal nastiness and 
> personal attacks, and all at a time when the attacks on the very existence 
> of the union from the city and the Department of Education are so 
> ferocious, that the main opposition group understood the importance of 
> closing ranks. All in all, not the sort of thing that makes you want to 
> stand up and say, "what they are doing makes me proud to be a teacher and 
> an unionist."
>
> But take heart, there is a different vision of unionism, with a different 
> view of the future of public education, out there, and they are not a 
> small, marginal group reduced to substituting personal attacks for 
> political analysis.
>
> Leo Casey
>
> In a message dated 3/5/2004 6:20:20 AM Eastern Standard Time, 
> arn-l-owner@interversity.org writes:
>
> > Date: Thu, 04 Mar 2004 09:08:59 -0500
> > From: "John Lawhead" <twoflightsup@hotmail.com>
> > To: arn-l@interversity.org
> > Subject: Re: On Unions and Education
> > Message-ID: <BAY15-F34UW9OteXwez0004b2b8@hotmail.com>
> >
> > Here's a less favorable treatment of Randi Weingarten's offer for a 
> "thin
> > contract" in a limited number of schools.
> >
> > http://www.labornotes.org/archives/2004/03/articles/c.html
> >
> > Labor Notes / March 2004
> >
> > New York Teachers Fear for Working Conditions as Union Leader Offers 
> Preemptive
> > Concessions
> >
> > by William Johnson
> >
> > Though contract negotiations between New York
> > City's United Federation of
> > Teachers and the city are just getting
> > started, UFT President Randi Weingarten
> > publicly declared six months ago that
> > she'll consider massive concessions on
> > working conditions for teachers and
> > staff in the New York's
> > public schools.
>
> Leo Casey
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who 
> want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and 
> lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
> -- Frederick Douglass --

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