Diane Ravitch Praises Randi Weingarten on Her Blog and All Hell Breaks Loose

[Smarmie Doofus]

Let's just say it was not the reaction she was expecting. Holy Cats.

I like this exchange especially, involving NYC's Michael Fiorillo, who always seems to have a cogent analysis at the ready:


Ron Poirier
July 11, 2013 at 11:20 am
Again — how do I vote in the AFT election? I’ve asked my local union leaders and gotten vague answers about delegates going to NY. What can I do? Does anyone know?

Where can I learn how the AFT election system works? If the only option available to me is to petition my local leaders, can anyone help me create a set of bullet points that I can send along to my leadership regarding Randi W. and why they might not want to vote for her next time around? It sounds like such a list must already exist somewhere.

I feel like there isn’t a lot of transparency regarding how the AFT election system works.

Reply
Michael Fiorillo
July 11, 2013 at 12:04 pm
Ron,

As a rank and file teacher, you can’t vote in AFT national elections. That is only done by delegates elected on the local level. To have direct rank and file elections of national officers – something very, very few unions permit, by the way – would require re-writing the union by-laws.

With the UFT in NYC being the tail that wags the AFT dog in Washington, in practice that means that only loyalty oath-signing members of Unity Caucus become delegates. It is no accident that, with the exception of a brief caretaker administration after the death of Sandy Feldman, every AFT leader has sprung from Unity Caucus leadership in NYC.

Under Albert Shanker, that meant support for the Vietnam War until the bitter end, and support for the coup that killed Salvador Allende in Chile and ushered in the neoliberal era in 1973. Under Randi Weingarten, that means nominally (though empty and meaningless) support for more liberal politics, but also co-managing teachers as their profession is de-professionalized and de-skilled, and as public education is re-configured into a vehicle for corporate profits and explicit social engineering.

This is the same Unity Caucus leadership that was elected in April with 52% of the votes coming from retirees, and only 18% from working teachers. This is the same Unity Caucus leadership that the year before passed an amendment to the by-laws giving increased weight to the retiree vote.

And this is the same Unity Caucus leadership that boasts about its “collaboration” with Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, John King, Andrew Cuomo, and others members of the Overclass and their political brokers.

There is, however, hope for change. The Unity Caucus mentality of collaboration with those who would destroy us is being challenged by teachers who see what is happening to them, their schools and their communities, and refuse to cooperate with their own destruction. Chicago, DC and Newark show that teachers are perhaps waking up to the epochal struggle, or in the absence of struggle, the demise, that faces them.

link:http://dianeravitch.net/2013/07/10/my-friend-randi-weingarten/