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Eminentoes
Randi’s Tangled Vine Garden
As teachers unions come under fire, the AFT’s combative Randi Weingarten is happy to play triangulation to stay in the game.
(Page 2 of 2)
Weingarten’s dealings have certainly made the AFT seem reasonable in comparison with the more militant NEA. But school reformers are no longer looking for half-measures; neither are legislators and governors who are tired of failing schools and costly teacher benefits that add to taxpayer woes. States spent $68 billion on teacher pension payments in 2007-2008 alone, $18 billion more than they did five years earlier; in many states, a teacher can retire at age 55 (a decade earlier than their private sector counterparts) and yield a defined-benefit pension that pays as much as $2 million over a lifetime. As a result, reformers and cost-cutters alike are pushing to go a lot further than Weingarten is willing to go.
There is also dissension over Weingarten within the AFT ranks, especially among leaders of AFT locals that have been on the losing side of battles against school reformers and need to placate their fellow Baby Boomers. In New York City, Weingarten’s successor, Michael Mulgrew, has battled tooth and nail against Bloomberg’s new reform initiatives. Last year, he teamed up with the NAACP to stop the mayor from shutting down 19 of the city’s worst dropout factories. AFT leaders who have embraced Weingarten’s rhetoric haven’t exactly been rewarded by the rank and file. In Chicago and D.C., Weingarten allies and other moderates have lost to firebrands more interested in beating back reforms than in embracing half-measures; Weingarten’s own slate for national leadership had to withstand a challenge last year from hard-line elements, the first such challenge in four decades.
AFT LEADERS MAY ALSO demand that Weingarten follow the moves being made by the rival NEA, which is using its considerable resources to mount an aggressive pushback against efforts to abolish collective bargaining and other reforms. The NEA is doubling the amount of dues dedicated to political campaigns (currently at $10), giving the union another $40 million a year for its efforts; it is also using its foundation arm to raise money to mobilize rank-and-file members. Weingarten has already taken up harsher rhetoric. During an appearance in March at Detroit’s famed Cobo Hall, Weingarten declared that efforts to expand charter schools — most of whose teaching staffs are not unionized — are merely attempts at “silencing voice” of teachers and their unions.
Meanwhile Weingarten must also deal with the generational divide: younger teachers, who want to be rewarded for high-quality work and whose lack of seniority makes them more likely to be laid off during the current retrenchment. From where they sit, neither Weingarten nor the rest of the AFT leadership is going far enough in ending tenure and other seniority-based privileges that are keeping far too many laggard colleagues in the classroom. In New York City, the AFT local is struggling to respond to Educators 4 Excellence, a group of young teachers whose push to end seniority privileges is being cheered on by New York City Mayor Bloomberg. A similar battle is brewing in Los Angeles, where NewTLA, a small group of younger, reform-minded teachers, is challenging the regime of the local’s notoriously hard-line president, A. J. Duffy. More young teachers (and even many longtime veterans) share the view of Grace Snodgrass, a special education teacher in the Big Apple who declared in the Huffington Post that “my students’ success hinges on the quality of my teaching.”
With dissension from within and challenges from school reformers, cost cutters, and union foes from without, Weingarten is going to have to do even more triangulating. In the process, the AFT (along with the NEA) will have to accept an end to the array of near-lifetime employment benefits and protections from private sector-style performance management that has made teaching the most comfortable profession in the public sector.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (5) | Leave a comment
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gearjammer| 5.16.11 @ 8:12AM
Just another left wing human wrecking ball who belongs in jail.
Whitey O'Carr Kennedy Dukakis| 5.16.11 @ 9:14AM
So she became a union leader after ten months as a teacher? What this woman does not have any war stories to tell or does not know of anyone she can point to as an example of who she taught? What subject did she teach while as an instructor? Did she have to deal with any delinquents or insane parents? I have an aunt who worked for twenty-two years in the Mass. districts and she has plenty of horror and success stories to tell. This Weingarten woman is a PIKER!
C Smith| 5.16.11 @ 11:12AM
The caption "Teachers Unions Gone Wild" screams for attention. Seems some itinerant journalist recently "crashed" a New Jersey Education Association's "leadership" conference and video chronicled the event. Reminds me of an expose I compiled (circa 1992) regarding America's only government funded religion. The intent: to challenge believers to "have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them" (cf. Ephesians 5:11). The elder board did not approve distribution. The following is a facsimile:
The National Education Association (NEA) with 2.1 million members is the most powerful force in education. Although it purports to represent the interest of teachers, many of its members are not in agreement with its policies, have limited awareness of its politics, and are naive about its power and past. William Bennett, former Secretary of Education, in The Devaluing of America, describes the NEA's policies and politics:
"In recent years, the union's Representative Assembly went on record in favor of teacher strikes; school- based clinics dispensing contraceptives; a nuclear freeze; gay rights; the Equal Right Amendment; D.C. statehood; and Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis for president. It has voted against merit pay for teachers; parental choice; voluntary school prayer; state takeovers of bad schools; home schooling; English as the official language; drug, alcohol, and AIDS testing; nuclear power plants; aid to the Nicaraguan resistance; the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; and Ronald Reagan and George Bush for president...Opposes every common-sense reform measure: competency testing for teachers, opening the teaching profession to knowledgeable individuals who have not graduated from 'schools of education,' performance-based pay, holding educators accountable for how much children learn, an end to tenure, a national examination to find out exactly how much our children know, and parental choice of schools...."
Thomas Toch, education correspondent for U.S. News and World Report, "In the Name of Excellence" writes:
"In 1989 it [the NEA] spent $7.4 million on such things as a computerized system of mass producing letters to Congress from 300,000 NEA members who "pre-authorized" the use of their names; "Congressional Contact Teams" made up of 2 NEA members in each Congressional district who are specially trained as lobbyists and flown back and forth from Washington to promote the NEA's cause from the local level; a computerized file of NEA's entire membership; a satellite link-up between a television studio in the NEA's Washington headquarters and its state affiliates; and a full-time lobbing staff of 15.... The NEA also has been a major backer of Democratic candidates since 1976, when it played a leading role in the Carter campaign. (Carter signaled the size of the NEA's contributions to his election by pushing through Congress the law that established the U.S. Department of Education - a longtime NEA goal)."
The NEA's power in Iowa is of special concern. Again quoting Mr. Toch: "The NEA has sought to gain control of teacher licensing by establishing licensing boards with teacher majorities. Only Minnesota and Iowa have granted this board final authority in teacher certification." Particularly disconcerting for those of us in Iowa where an overwhelming majority of teachers are NEA members."
"With the NEA in charge, the role of the teacher continues to evolve. The NEA's report, Education for the Seventies, states: "Schools will become clinics whose purpose is to provide individualized psycho-social treatment for the students, and teachers must become psychosocial therapists."
The NEA has encountered little resistance because so little is known of its political expediencies, and according to Mr. Toch, that's the plan.
"Though the NEA has fought virtually every educational reform, it has poured millions of dollars into a public relations campaign designed to convince the nation that it is committed to the reform of the public schools, and of teaching in particular."
The NEA's publication NEA Today spawns a plethora of glossy images of appreciative students and their obliging teachers, but so little content that it prompted author Samuel Blumenfeld to describe it as having been "written at the intellectual level of the National Enquirer."
No expose on the NEA would be complete without investigating its contention with evangelical Christianity. Blumenfeld in his book NEA: Trojan Horse In American Education describes the organizations long association with secular humanism:
"...in 1933 John Dewey and 33 other liberal humanists drew up and signed that extraordinary document known as the Humanist Manifesto. It reflected all of the influences of science, evolution, and the new psychology which were reshaping American education... It was thus Dewey who began to fashion a new materialist religion in which humanity was venerated instead of God. This is basically the religion of Secular Humanism, and this is what has become the official religion of the United States, for it is the only religion permitted in its public schools and totally supported by government funds.... The NEA has remained remarkably faithful to the Humanist Manifesto since 1933. For all practical purposes, the public school has become the parochial school for secular humanism. Its doctrines pervade the curriculum from top to bottom. "
Dewey, for his contributions to education, was elected honorary president of the NEA in 1932. He was also issued the American Federation of Teachers' first membership card. With the 1973 signing of Humanistic Manifesto II, humanism became even more culturally entrenched:
"As in 1933, humanist still believe that traditional theism, especially faith in the prayer-hearing God, assumed to love and care for persons, to hear and understand their prayers, and to be able to do something about them, is an unproved and outmoded faith. Salvationism, based on mere affirmation, still appears as harmful, diverting people with false hopes of heaven hereafter. Reasonable minds look to other means for survival.... No Deity will save us; we must save ourselves."
Signers of Humanist Manifesto II include Alan F. Guttmacher, president of Planned Parenthood; Betty Friedan, founder of N.O.W; behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner, a horde of Unitarian ministers, and Lester Mondale, former president of the Fellowship of Religious Humanists. Such is the NEA's consanguine "fellowship."
The NEA's domination of education affects all teachers. It dictates the rules of professional advancement. It pressures teachers to be politically partisan. Its infusion of humanist curriculum places conscionable teachers in a moral dilemma. And its influence over accreditation and other policies is disconcerting for teachers public and private. In summation, the NEA's monopoly on education places teachers, and our children, at risk!
http://popularapostasy.blogspo.....-wild.html
Redstateboy| 5.16.11 @ 11:44AM
and I betcha she makes $250,000 a year. Only in Liber-ul Land could you preside over an organization that fails to deliver and still earn that kind of Jack.
Dee See| 5.16.11 @ 10:33PM
---Great piece.
Meanwhile, did you know the entire NEA
leadership is rock solid FREEMASON and has
been for ages?
---UH, shouldn't this be a 'Seperation of church
and state' (--or should we say coven?) issue?
And if that doesn't creep you out --consider this,
over 90% of even our 'conservative' Baptist
leadership is ---likewise.
Remember, Freemasonry IS a religion and is
absolutely incompatible with genuine Christianity.
We know the low level porch Masons haven't
a clue, but the dogma and belief system of
high degree, intergenerational Masonry is
not only explicitly Social Darwinist and elitist
--but Luciferian.
NO KIDDING
DO the background sometime.
Deeply read the infamous Albert Pike's book
for starters. Get beyond the 'benevolence'
trick, see between the lines to the innate
elitism, Darwinism and 'benny violence'
implicit in his 'dogma'.
"AS every red indian knows, 'charity'
is the wihte man's most insidious
poison."
D H Lawrence
essays
INDEED--------------------------------------------