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

[Smarmie Doofus]

27. As veteran teachers are driven out by Danielson and the generally hostile work environment....

... they're replaced by new college grads who work without tenure, for less than half the pay, and for fewer benefits.

In about 1/3 of UFT chapters there is no elected Chapter Leader. (No one wants the job, in most cases; it's too dangerous.) If there is no CL there is no consultation committee, no chapter meetings and so effectively there is no contract in force.

In many other chapters there are "dummy" or "puppet" CLs. These people are like add-on admins... and are treated to add-on perks by the the admin... which is grateful for labor peace they enforce. ( In other words, filing grievances is discouraged.)The admins are highly skilled at manipulating written contract provisions to actually make the work atmosphere more untenable for teachers. Example: superfluous out of classroom positions are created thru "school-based options" ( Do they have this in other locals?) and then staffed w. teacher-cronies who then do a lot of the admins' paperwork while they kick back, come in late, go home early. My old school reverted to this type of system when I left.


The number of leaderless chapters has swelled w. the movement toward "small schools" ( a movement enabled by the adoption of mayoral control.... which was supported by Weingarten & co.). Young teachers in these places know nothing of the genesis of the union, its long history of job actions, work stoppages, jailings and strikes. They are unaware of chapter elections. There's no one to keep them connected or to pass on the history.( I went into one formerly large HS to campaign in the last UFT election. It is now broken up into eight separate schools ( 2 non-union charters) with eight separate faculties and eight separate administrations. Few teachers there were aware there was an election. several told me that they did not have union meetings. *Ever*. One thought that the union's role was limited to providing dental coverage. ( Actually, increasingly, it is.)

So... this is the State of the Union, 2013, NYC. A fine state of affairs. And what are President Weingarten's priorities? Smooth implementation of the CCSS and collaborating with the Gates empire to produce a more "rigorous" teacher eval system.

Really? From the AFT's vantage point *THAT'S* what's wrong? We don't have homogenous standards and teachers need a complicated bureaucratic rigamarole of eval benchmarks and rubrics??!!

Well. You could have fooled me.