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

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

Leo, forgive my delay in responding to your comments.  You wrote:

> 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.

Only you forgot to describe any attacks from Bloomberg or Klein on this 
issue.  In fact there's been no significant opposition from the UFT 
leadership.  Recent indications are that they're still using the issue to 
curry favor from the Bloomberg regime.

Here's Randi Weingarten's response to the initial announcement of the 
retention plan in January:  "For years the city's teachers and the UFT have 
tried to get the system to stop social promotion, so we welcome this 
3rd-grade initiative."  New York Teacher (1/14/04).

As the outcry against the plan mounted she made statements concerning the 
implementation and whether there would be enough support given to 
low-performing third graders.  Randi never asked why only third graders were 
being made the focus of the new policy.  This contrasted with the opponents 
of the plan who pointed out that the retention plan was not meant to "stop 
social promotion"  but is a thinly veiled scheme to boost fourth grade 
scores on the state tests in 2005 (the mayoral election year) by holding 
back low-scoring third graders this year.

Randi has refrained from questioning whether a concern about future test 
results should be a reason for creating new policies.  In January rather 
than criticizing the numbers game she invited Chancellor Klein to address 
teachers in the union newspaper.  Tellingly, the first concern he raised 
about the city schools in his long letter to teachers was the low city-wide 
test scores for fourth graders.

Two months after the plan was announced and with implementation of that plan 
already started, the UFT leadership responded to the groundswell of 
opposition by offering an ?alternative plan? to the City Council.  This 
proposal maintained the focus on third graders and the use of the third 
grade tests.  The departure was in creating a "conditional" fourth grade 
level.  If you're arguing that this plan constituted an "opposition to the 
3rd grade edict" you're not going to fool anyone.

I attended the PEP meeting the night of the "Monday night massacre" and 
noted the underwhelming reception given to Randi from the audience.  There 
were several hundred activists there including supporters of Time Out, 
NYCORE, ICE, I-COPE, the citywide parents' association as well as City 
Council and Community School Board members.  I was amazed that after 
strongly criticizing the firing of the panel members Randi went on to argue 
that if the UFT plan wasn't going to substitute, the mayor's plan should be 
given more time to take effect.  With the room in an uproar over both the 
removal of independent-minded panel members and the retention plan itself 
she still avoided expressing any opposition to the plan she might have been 
harboring.

Lately comes news of UFT participation on the "secret panel" formed by 
Bloomberg to study and develop a program for students affected by the 
retention plan.  City Council members were told that panel members' names 
could not be disclosed, nor the schedule of meetings, nor details of its 
business.  A UFT spokesperson informed the New York Sun that this panel 
includes the union's VP for Elementary Schools and its head of staff 
development.  No surprise.  Time and again Randi has appealed to the mayor 
to let the UFT to become a junior partner in his corporate-style management 
of the schools.  Perhaps it's this pathetic groveling that's convinced the 
mayor he doesn't really need her help in controlling the teachers...

You also wrote:

> 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.

This claim is ludicrous.  Not even plausible.  TJC has written nothing about 
small schools reform that I'm aware of.  Here is their platform:

http://teachersforajustcontract.org/

For reference, ICE's platform is at:

http://68.198.125.9:8383/elfrank/friends/ednotes/ICE%20platform.pdf

ICE/PAC has cross-endorsed TJC's candidate for Vice President of Academic 
High Schools, Kit Wainer who works in a specialized small school, Leon 
Goldstein.

While TJC has no such position, ICE raised the issue of small schools reform 
in its Winter 2004 high school newsletter.  It demands a halt to such school 
reorganizations until DOE conducts impact studies to account for how the 
reduced capacity will affect other schools, small or large.  This is not all 
that different from what the UFT leadership was saying during the last 
school year.  Frank Volpicello dramatically described the process in the 
Bronx as being akin to ?sinking ocean liners? with too few life boats.  In 
response to situations of chaos and overcrowding in the fall of 2002 the UFT 
Delegate Assembly passed a resolution calling for such impact studies to be 
done.  The only difference now is that ICE is asking that such empty 
pronouncements start to mean something.  Your claim that TJC and ICE are 
jointly condemning existing small schools and small school teachers is 
bizarre.  Please describe the sources of the "documented record" you say you 
have.

I'm especially interested in this because of the way your claims made their 
way into some UNITY caucus campaign literature.  I'm talking about a glossy 
blue brochure entitled, "New York City School Teachers Can't Be Divided and 
Won't Be Defeated."  It repeats the claim you made in your post to this list 
that TJC and ICE/PAC were blaming small schools and "not the DOE" for this 
year's overcrowding.  I find it hard to believe that someone else could have 
spontaneously invented something so ridiculous.

That brochure also contains a nasty bit of redbaiting.  It lifts a quote 
from Progressive Labor Party literature that faults the UFT for supporting 
"bourgeois politicians" in the effort to get more school funding.  It 
clumsily attributes the statement again BOTH to TJC and ICE/PAC.  While TJC 
and ICE/PAC have cross-endorsed candidates we've made no joint statements 
and we?ve never said anything like this.  Did you by chance have a hand in 
authoring this brochure, Leo?

The UNITY caucus propaganda solemnly states that teachers are faced with a 
"dangerous enemy seeking to destroy the UFT."  It suggests that groups who 
choose to contest the election are giving comfort to that enemy.  So what do 
you think would be a convenient time to discuss the UFT's leadership's 
complicity with regard to the position teachers find themselves in?

Regards,
John





Leo Casey writes:

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