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Saturday, August 4, 2012

Randi Weingarten: It's Time To Play Along To Get Along

Just like current UFT President Mike Mulgrew, former UFT President Randi Weingarten is now revealing her true feelings about what her members should be rallying for....and it's not what the rank and file say they want.

UFT "President" Mike Mulgrew

For years here in New York City, the UFT has been the willing partner with the New York City Department of Education in removing teachers from their assignments, keeping hands off while so-called "investigators" lie about members who are alleged to be either incompetent or guilty of various acts of misconduct, and not representing members in good faith in the grievance procedure.

Randi Weingarten on tenure, 2010


Now  Randi, who just won a third term as AFT President with 98% of the vote,  says its ok to compromise and go along with the Plan of education reformers, as she is quoted by Reuters:

Weingarten rebuffed her critics in the union for mistaking collaboration with surrender and said her overwhelming victory in the election showed rank-and-file members supported the move.

But critics say,

"Concessions don't lead to more prestige with the public. Concessions don't win more credibility at the bargaining table. They lead to more concessions."

Critics say Weingarten's willingness to see traditional job protections like tenure disappear and to accept charter schools, merit pay and other changes is a retreat from core principles and plays into the hands of those who want to eliminate public education, privatize government services and curb the ability of workers to unionize."
Source: U.S. teacher union boss bends to school reform winds

Let's remember 2009:
Randi Weingarten and Mayor Mike Bloomberg

 
OCTOBER 29, 2009, 10:28 AM

The Teachers’ Contract Up Close

Think textbooks are long and dense? Try reading the 165-page contract that spells out the pay and perks for New York City's 79,000 public school teachers.
At the moment, it is a document of some interest for teachers, their union and city officials since it expires on Saturday, just as the mayor's race crawls to a finish.
Does the "education mayor" really need teachers screaming for his head as voters go to the polls?
Since he took office in 2002, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has had a pretty good relationship with the United Federation of Teachers and its bosses, like its former president, Randi Weingarten, in the above photo. Her successor, Michael Mulgrew, said he has a pretty good relationship with the mayor, too, though they have never kissed.
As a document, available here, the union contract is long on boilerplate and speckled with anachronism. (Schools must have pay phones per the contract.) But studded here and there are the kind of nuggets that illuminate the internal workings of the school system.
Appendix A lists teacher salaries, currently anywhere from $43,530 to $100,049. Not stagehand money at Carnegie Hall, but still 43 percent higher across the board than what teachers were making when Mr. Bloomberg came into office.
Page 148 reports that there is a 10 percent premium for teaching agriculture. Who knew?
Teachers in middle school on up cannot be asked to teach more than three classes in a row. Pages 17 and 22.
Junior high school teachers and below are assured five periods of preparation time each week. Teachers who are consistently pressed into teaching during their prep time earn an additional $5,660 per semester.
No elementary school teacher has to collect milk money. Page 29.
Mr. Mulgrew said the work rules were for the good of the system. "Nobody enters this profession without wanting to change children's lives for the better,'' he said, and "we protect things we feel might hurt that process.''
Maybe, dear readers, there are other clauses that catch your fancy. Or maybe you feel the contract is not nearly the kind of benefit-bulging giveaway that some critics have suggested. Either way, if we have missed a point, or are missing the point, share.
Current betting is that the teachers' union will hold out for 4 percent raises, in line with what other local unions have won for their workers. Almost no one expects an announcement until the election is in the books.

The Assailed Teacher: A Turn of Fortune


A Turn of Fortune

LINK

by The Assailed Teacher
  
In the last post, I explained how Save Our Schools put the kibosh on showing the film about Mary Thorson because of the accusations made against the filmmaker, Myra Richardson, some 10 years ago. By allowing an unsubstantiated accusation to determine how they treat a fellow teacher, I explained that that SOS was feeding into the culture of teacher bullying for which Mary died.
God sometimes works small miracles because SOS did allow the film to be shown at the opening day of their conference yesterday. The catch was that I would present the film. It was also shown at the very end of the day, after the keynote address and after many people had spent the day traveling long distances to get to the conference here in Washington, D.C. Needless to say that the turnout was not great and there were many sleepy eyes in the audience of those that remained.
Hopefully, the movie had an impact on those that saw it and they will go out and screen the film for their colleagues back home. This is the only way any important idea or film is promulgated among he national teaching force.
Here is the text of the speech. Hopefully, it had an impact on those who were there that night:
Presentation Speech - The Killing of Mary Thorson (8/3/12)
Thank you for having me here tonight. My name is xxxxxxx from New York City. I am 33 years old and have been teaching history in the city's public high schools for the past 12 years. Public schools have been a major part of my life from the age of 5. Every single year since then, I have had a first day of school and always feel the trepidation that comes with i
Whether as a kindergartener, a high-schooler or a teacher, my trepidation stems from the same anxious question, which is: will I be accepted? We want to be accepted because we know the ramifications if we are not, which could be isolation, harassment or bullying. We do not want to be judged unfairly by others and have that erroneous judgment follow us for the rest of the school year.
We know if that happens, that judgment becomes a label. There are going to be people that know of us exclusively through that label. When they see us they will not say "Hey, there is Dave" or "Hiya Susan!" They will merely say there is that weird person or stupid person or ugly person. Labels objectify us, turn us into memes and dehumanize.
Dehumanizing leads to harm like teasing and violence. This is the anatomy of "bullying" that has become such a popular watchword in recent months. While the anti-bullying campaign certainly has an admirable goal, and those who have participated in it certainly are genuine in their efforts to combat bullying, I wonder if all of this new-found vigilance against schoolyard bullying is being used as a subterfuge by certain interests to downplay another type of bullying no less epidemic in our country today: the bullying of teachers. To contrast it with the schoolyard bullying that our children face, I'd like to refer to the bullying of teachers as schoolhouse bullying for two reasons: one, the worst of it takes place within the confines of the schoolhouse and, two, the word house connotes opacity, since the bullying of teachers is a secret from the public.
On Thanksgiving Day, 2011, a 32-year-old middle school physical education teacher from Illinois named Mary Eve Thorson put herself in the path of an oncoming semi on an Indiana interstate. In her suicide note, she referred to her students as her “babies". Her babies were suffering from a school climate that repressed teachers through abuse and harassment. Towards the end of her note she asked a question that more and more teachers are asking: why isn't anyone stopping this?
The origins of Mary's nightmare can be traced back to the familiar culprits: No Child Left Behind, the high-stakes testing regime, the rise of convoluted education data, Race to the Top…. the bludgeons of the ed reform movement. Teachers like Mary Thorson, teachers like us, are required to comply with the conversion of their children into numbers no more valid than the numbers Wall Street dealt in before and after the financial meltdown of 2008.
Teachers have a front row seat to this corporate education show. There is a chance that a good many of us are horrified by the dehumanizing of our students as numbers. It is imperative that teachers keep that horror to themselves. To ensure this, the teachers who have civil service job protections, mistakenly dubbed "tenure", have been the targets of a nasty media campaign to garner public support for tenure’s erosion. The media dutifully does the bidding of local leaders like Mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York. They run stories daily about teachers accused of horrible things, or how teachers are to blame for sub-par test scores, and how tough it is to fire "bad" teachers.
They have used the very word “teacher” as an insult. It connotes an old, burned out mossback who reads the paper all day while eager young minds cry out for an education. The United States is losing ground to other countries, countries producing the next generation of nuclear scientists. Furthermore, bloated teacher pensions are bankrupting state governments during this time of economic recession. Condoleeza Rice and Joel Klein inferred that teachers were threatening national security, so teachers joined the ranks of Alger Hiss and Osama Bin Laden.
These labels and judgments create the environment that supports the bullying of teachers. The public does not know us as Dr. Ravitch or Mr. Kozol anymore. They know as those lazy hacks, union bums and public enemies. This gives local politicians, beholden to the billionaire boys’ club, the popular mandate to railroad unions in contract negotiations, which has led to the denuding of workplace conditions and job protections for teachers.
This means that those above the teachers in the education bureaucracy: principals, superintendents, chancellors and mayors, are given ever widening latitude over our careers. The bureaucracy now rewards those administrators who are the most effective at entrenching the worship of data in public school buildings. A good administrator is one whose data looks good. The easiest and most surefire way to get the data to look good is to pressure teachers to make it look good through dishonest means like scrubbing. Those teachers who refuse to do so have no protection from any harassment the administration might unleash. This is where the next step of the bullying process, direct harm, comes into play. Any teacher with a conscience and a sense of ownership of their profession is a target.
The system rewards good data. Children are the numbers they attain on high-stakes exams. Teachers are the numbers their students attain on high-stakes exams. A new generation of educators, both teachers and administrators, are being trained in this philosophy. The idea of humanistic education is becoming foreign, in favor of a worship of numbers that dehumanizes the entire learning process. Inhuman systems breed inhuman behaviors. Teachers who don't play ball in the new regime risk facing fake and embellished charges from their administrators. Pushing a teacher out of their career, depriving them of their livelihood through harassment and intimidation, is easy in a system where humans are numbers. It is classic bullying: first dehumanize, then harm.
And so, in 2010, Rigoberto Ruelas jumped off a bridge when the Los Angeles Times published data portraying him as a bad teacher. In 2011, Mary Thorson stepped into the path of an oncoming semi. As a union leader, I have worked with many harassed teachers whose only crime was questioning the worship of data and speaking up in defense of their students. They faced termination because of it, faced living on the streets and being stripped of their identities as teachers, unable to provide for themselves or their families. I have sat with too many teachers who have cried and talked of suicide. Every time I do, I have to stop myself from crying.
Why isn't anyone stopping this? That's Mary Thorson's question. Her suicide note is a primal scream of frustration over what it means to be a teacher today. The things that worried her about the profession are the same ones that worry us. Not once in her note did she mention her own horror story of bullying. Instead, she was gravely concerned for her babies and her colleagues. She was concerned that tremendous harm was being done to them and nobody cared. She was locked in an educational fiefdom where harassment and extortion from above were the norms. Why isn't anyone stopping this? Does anybody care?
As you will see in this film, Mary did what she did for us. She wanted to draw attention to the anonymous suffering that goes on in our schools by sacrificing her very existence, which was the only thing she had left after being methodically and systematically bullied for so long.By making this film, Myra Richardson has taken the first step towards redeeming Mary's sacrifice. With nothing but a simple camera and a laptop, she interviewed those closest to Mary Thorson and the bullying she faced. The film is a series of in-depth interviews, each of which peel back the onion of Mary Thorson's story.
By showing this film, Save Our Schools is taking the next step towards redeeming Mary's sacrifice. This is the first time SOS is showing a film. By being here right now, all of us share in a very important moment for the teaching profession in the United States. I thank Myra Richardson, Save Our Schools and all of you for being here for this moment. It is my honor to introduce to you Dying to Teach: The Killing of Mary Eve Thorson, Educators Who Bully