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

[LeoCasey@aol.com]

When I first became a NYC public school teacher and became active in the UFT, back in 1984 when Al Shanker was still president of the UFT, I joined the main [and then, only] opposition group, assuming that was where I belonged for all sorts of historical reasons, such as my involvement in the anti-Vietnam War movement. I quickly became disillusioned with the opposition, as they were completely bereft of any vision of where education should go and what role teacher unions should play in getting it there, and left their ranks. When Sandy Feldman became UFT president, I found myself, to my initial surprise, agreeing with her on issue after issue, while the opposition simply opposed whatever she and the UFT did. I also found that her thinking and the thinking of many in the UFT leadership had a sophistication, and grappled with the important issues in education, in ways that were completely lacking in the opposition.

Nothing that has happened in the intervening years has changed any of that; to the contrary, it is truer now than it ever was. You would not know that from reading John's summary of the situation, but then again, if you were from NYC, you wouldn't recognize that it was NYC he was supposedly describing.

Consider just one of the issues John raises, and the gap between reality and John's narrative...

While John talks of Randi's support for Mayor Bloomberg's and Chancellor Klein's edict to hold back third grade students who do not pass city-wide literacy and numeracy exams, the NYer reading this passage would wonder why it was that the city tabloids were so viciously attacking Randi and the UFT for their opposition to that very plan [see, for example, this editorial in last Thursday's gutter of tabloid journalism, the Mudoch owned NY Post -- www.nypost.com/seven/03042004/postopinion/editorial/19689.htm].Indeed, they might wonder why the UFT newspaper and web page has been highlighting UFT testimony to the NY City Council which laid out an UFT alternative which called for the conditional promotion of these students, and their placement in special classes with no more than 15 students and an intensive literacy and numeracy program, so that the students received the help they needed to learn these essential skills. [See Randi's column in this issue of the NY Teacher, which contains the City Council testimony outlining the UFT's plan at www.uft.org/?fid=198]. It would also come as news to the main NY coalition group opposed to the Bloomberg-Klein third grade mandate, Time Out From Testing, which issued a public statement which read, "Time Out From Testing applauds the UFT in its call to end high stakes testing as the sole determinant of whether or not a students gets promoted and enthusiastically joins the Union in calling for policies which give support to children who need extra help. We strongly endorse the UFT's determination to craft educational solutions that serve the needs of children while also rejecting models based on a 'deficit model'."

And if you followed NYC educational politics the way that John does, you would also know that the teachers he cites in his e-mail were a group from Randi's and my own home school, Clara Barton High School, and you would almost certainly have learned by now [since part of the story is outlined in Randi's column], that Klein manipulated the teachers in the school by soliciting from them a statement against social promotion so that he could publish it, without their permission, in order to suggest that those teachers opposed the plan put forwarded by the UFT and Randi. Their letter was printed in the Post, in ways that misrepresented it to suggest that the teachers believed their students were illiterate, thus causing a very dangerous situation in the school.

Yet while Bloomberg and Klein are going to such lengths to attack Randi and the UFT because of our opposition to their third grade edict, John is writing about how Randi and the UFT support them on this issue. It is as if he was looking into an amusement park mirror, and saw some sort of twisted, inverted version of reality.

Unfortunately, this is the pattern throughout John's e-mail. I will not burden the list with a line by line recitation of these various points. Suffice it to say, that John thinks he knows better than Deborah Meier who supports and does not support the type of school change she advocates and participates in, since her essay which was the starting point for this thread discussed her experience with teacher unions in NYC and Boston.

Indeed, the documented record of the current campaign for union office refutes the very description John offers. Teachers for a Just Contract, the small group loosely affiliated with Labor Notes which printed the article John forwarded here, has made one of its primary campaign points an attack on small high schools and teachers in small high schools, as it tells teachers in large schools that the source of all the problems of their schools is not Bloomberg, Klein and the DOE, but the small schools. Teachers for a Just Contract and the small group which John is associated with, ICE, have put together a joint slate for the high school position on the UFT executive board, and they point out to everyone who will listen that ALL of their candidates come from large high schools, not small ones. [They have a joint slate just for the high school slots, because they think they have a real chance of winning them, as Randi's leadership caucus is not contesting those seats, following an agreement with the largest of the opposition groups, New Action, to present a more united front against Bloomberg's and Klein's effort to bust the UFT. ] John talks about dividing teachers, when the very groups he is affiliated with have a conscious, calculated policy of setting teachers from large high schools and small high schools against each other.

The interesting question in this election will be by how much of a landslide NYC public school teachers reject such a politics. 

> Date: Mon, 08 Mar 2004 15:53:10 -0500
> From: "John Lawhead" <twoflightsup@hotmail.com>
> To: arn-l@interversity.org
> Subject: Re: Labor Notes Polemics [was: Unions and Education]
> Message-ID: <BAY15-F38ilcjbOv38l00011503@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

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 --