[Educationforall] Article: Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution”

Sat Jul 9 05:55:19 UTC 2011

As an AFT member, I can say that Randi Weingarten does not speak for me and many of the rank and file organizing against/around bureaucrats like her in order to build a genuine fight-back. The article below is from the AFT rank and file's perspective about the emerging movement (from below) developing in the teachers unions in different parts of the country and shows a different perspective than that of the bureaucratic leadership.

-Justin 

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Education Reform: The Real Deal
http://labornotes.org/print/blogs/2011/07/education-reform-real-deal
By Mark Brenner
Created Jul 8 2011 - 1:05pm
by Mark Brenner | Fri, 07/08/2011 - 1:05pm 
Tired of being scapegoats for all the ills of the public schools, 200 teachers from 15 states, Puerto Rico, Canada, and Mexico were in Chicago July 6 for the National Conference to Fight Back for Public Education.

The attendees—and there were more of them than organizers had expected—came for a variety of reasons. All were upset about the attacks on teachers and students. Some were already leading fights against the attacks as reform officers in their locals. Many wanted to find out how fights were being carried out in other cities. Others were dissatisfied with their locals or their national unions.

Rob Panning-Miller, a Minneapolis high school teacher, said he wanted to hear from the horse’s mouth how various “reforms” such as charter schools and new forms of teacher evaluation are playing out on the ground for classroom teachers. What he hears from his union’s national leaders about changes in particular cities, he said, is often quite different from what teachers in that city have to say.

Many at the meeting saw a lack of leadership in their national organizations, the NEA and AFT, which have reacted to the demonization of teachers by endorsing too many elements of President Obama’s “Race to the Top” agenda for schools. That agenda relies on standardized testing, substitutes merit pay for seniority, strips teacher tenure, ousts teachers deemed “ineffective,” and privatizes public schools by converting them into non-union charter schools. 

The effect is to place the many burdens of poor communities at teachers’ feet and to encourage school districts to break the rules to show progress—as scandals over cheating on tests in D.C. and Atlanta have shown.

Panning-Miller ousted a 22-year incumbent when he ran for president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers in 2006. Now an executive board member, he said teachers in the Twin Cities are grappling with the spread of charters. “The district is essentially saying, ‘We don’t know how to educate your children, so we’re giving up and contracting out,’” he said.

No Joy in New York
Kelley Wolcott, a Brooklyn high school teacher, was motivated to attend after seeing the way her union, the United Federation of Teachers, navigated this year’s city budget negotiations. 

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg slashed $1 billion from services—after extracting another $60 million in concessions from teachers. Schools will see 2,600 teaching vacancies go unfilled as well.

Bloomberg had threatened for months to fire 4,000 teachers.

“It was devastating to see how the UFT operated, to see the lack of democracy,” Wolcott said. “They didn’t care about people who had real things to offer.” 

Wolcott came to Chicago after spending two weeks in a tent city, dubbed “Bloombergville,” erected outside New York’s city hall to protest budget cuts. Now she’s convinced activists like herself need to do more to transform the union.

“We want our union to serve the membership and the city as a whole,” she said, adding that union leaders are “more sympathetic with the political agenda in D.C. or Albany than what their members want or need.”

Nowhere was that more clear to attendees than in this week’s headlines. Their conference was the day after the National Education Association’s annual convention, during which the union officially joined the AFT in endorsing a type of teacher evaluations that have led to mass firings in places like D.C.

Although the NEA convention endorsed Barack Obama’s 2012 presidential bid, Rosa Jimenez, a Los Angeles high school teacher, was skeptical that putting more union resources into elections was a winning strategy. “Look at what’s happening in California,” she said.

The state returned to Democratic control with Governor Jerry Brown’s victory last November, but Brown won’t close corporate tax loopholes or tax the rich, and signed a budget that trimmed $3.4 billion from education.

“We put so much money into elections and it isn’t working,” Jimenez said, advocating more money from the national unions to the locals to train teachers to be organizers.

Inspired by Reform Victories
Wolcott said she was inspired by reform efforts inside union locals in cities like Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago, where the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) [1] swept elections for top office in the Chicago Teachers Union last year. “It’s a real ray of hope, that we can fight back from the grassroots against this campaign to destroy us,” Wolcott said. 

CORE hosted the conference, organized together with Progressive Educators for Action (PEAC) [2], the reform caucus inside the Los Angeles Teachers union.

Even where reformers have won power, they haven’t been able to beat back all the attacks that hurt teachers and students, as both PEAC and CORE members testified.

Chicago’s mayor just rescinded teachers’ scheduled raises, while state legislators passed a bill weakening seniority, advancing performance evaluations that could be tied to student test scores, and erecting high hurdles before teachers can strike. The Los Angeles teachers union agreed to a contract this month with four furlough days. The schools will lose 2,000 library aides and counselors.

Where to Find the Money
But the Chicago Teachers Union is engaged in a campaign with potential. The union is targeting the financial sector, saying that rather than take advantage of deals made in flush times, Bank of America and other big banks should renegotiate financing contracts that are costing the school system $35 million a year.

After the conference, participants rallied with the CTU at Bank of America. The union held a march and rally after meeting with the banks the day before.

The union is also demanding that the city reshape its spending priorities. Chicago drains $250 million yearly from schools and doles out cash to politically connected developers and big banks through a “tax-increment financing” scheme, which was supposed to subsidize development in blighted areas but instead handed out millions to build luxury housing and big-box retail stores.

“There are over 100 schools that don’t have stand-alone libraries because Chicago’s elected officials are spending millions on political patronage and calling it economic development,” said Jesse Sharkey, CTU vice president.

The union has rallied teachers, parents, and community members to mount actions, including taking over the showroom floor of one of the largest TIF recipients, a Chrysler dealership in Chicago's tony Gold Coast. A CTU-sponsored People’s City Council Meeting—a community town hall—drew 1,200 parents, teachers, and students and 15 council members yesterday for a listening session.

From: Norissa Gastelum 
Sent: Thursday, July 07, 2011 11:24 AM
To: educationforall at lists.aktivix.org 
Subject: [Educationforall] Article: Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution”

Possible discussion article for the next meeting. 
-Norissa

" Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who addressed the 2010 AFT national convention, has given the union millions of dollars. In return, the AFT has helped implement joint labor-management “teacher effectiveness” projects across the country, which include performance-based “merit” pay and other tools to further victimize teachers.......To say that the AFT is in the pocket of the corporate and financial aristocracy in the United States is no figure of speech. Having seen the loss of dues income—resulting from their complicity in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of teachers’ jobs—the union executives have secured new sources of revenue from billionaire opponents of public education. In return, the AFT has assumed the role of a labor syndicate, disciplining teachers, opposing any struggle, and guaranteeing school districts and charter schools a supply of highly exploited, cheap labor."

Head of US teachers’ union decries danger of “revolution”
By Walter Gilberti and Jerry White 
21 June 2011
Earlier this month, the president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Randi Weingarten, visited Detroit to meet with local union officials. The AFT-affiliated Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT) has increasingly faced opposition by teachers for its complicity in the destruction of their jobs and living standards and in plans to privatize the public schools.

DFT President Keith Johnson, who barely won reelection in a January vote that was widely believed to be rigged, worked closely with Weingarten, then-Detroit schools Financial Manager Robert Bobb and Detroit Mayor Bing to ram through a contract in 2009 that cut teachers’ pay by $10,000, destroyed seniority and tenure protections, and integrated the DFT into the process of firing so-called “underperforming” teachers.

Like Johnson, Weingarten is a thoroughly discredited figure. She has collaborated with the Obama administration’s attack on public education on a national scale and overseen the destruction of the gains won by educators over decades of struggle. She has cultivated the closest of ties with the bitterest opponents of public education.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, who addressed the 2010 AFT national convention, has given the union millions of dollars. In return, the AFT has helped implement joint labor-management “teacher effectiveness” projects across the country, which include performance-based “merit” pay and other tools to further victimize teachers.

At a meeting of roughly 100 school-level building representatives at the DFT headquarters, Johnson introduced Weingarten with the comment, “We are a school district and profession in crisis.”

The AFT leader began her comments with a demagogic attack on “anti-union, anti-teacher, anti-government people [who] are attacking public education by dividing, dehumanizing, delegitimizing and de-funding.” The union, she said, was the “force against the power of evil” and the only organization that “fights at the bargaining table and the ballot box.”

Her remarks were aimed at presenting the Republicans as the sole opponents of public education, while whitewashing the role of the Obama administration and the Democrats. The AFT backs the Democrats at the ballot box not because they defend teachers. They do not. The AFT does so because the Democrats carry out their anti-teacher attacks with the assistance of the unions, thereby preserving the institutional and financial interests of union executives like Weingarten and Johnson.

The AFT president soon got around to her most important point: the attack on public education was provoking massive opposition in the working class, which could escalate into a threat to the entire corporate and political order.

Weingarten said she did not want a “Les Mis strategy” or “to see kids fighting a revolution.” The AFT, she said, knew “the right way to fight,” pointing to the 2009 contract in Detroit as the “foundation to stop this attack.”

In the context of the bitter struggle to defend education that teachers, parents and youth confront, Weingarten’s reference to “revolution” and “Les Mis”—the award-winning musical based on the famous work Les Miserables by 19th century French novelist Victor Hugo—is telling.

Hugo’s work tells the story of the initial revolutionary struggles of the French working class, lower-middle classes and urban poor in the 1830s against the retrenchment of monarchial rule following the disintegration of Napoleonic Europe. It focuses on the life of Jean Valjean—a laborer imprisoned for 19 years for stealing a loaf of bread who ends up fighting on the barricades during the June 1832 rebellion in Paris.

In her association of the current struggle with these earlier revolutionary upheavals in Europe, Weingarten expresses fear of the growing radicalization of teachers and other sections of the working class. She is aware of what is being said by teachers and workers--the disappointment and anger over Obama and his complete support for Wall Street. The words “capitalism,” “revolution,” even “socialism” are increasingly heard. Workers see the upheavals in Egypt, Greece, or Wisconsin, for that matter, and express solidarity and a desire to emulate these struggles.

The metaphor of the street barricade--which commonly divided the revolutionary elements from the forces of reaction in so many struggles throughout 19th century Europe—is particularly apt. Weingarten is well aware that in the coming upheavals she and her fellow labor executives will be with the ruling elite on the other side of the barricades.

Like other officials within the AFL-CIO hierarchy, Weingarten is part of an increasingly wealthy upper-middle class stratum whose incomes are out of the reach of ordinary teachers. According to the Wall Street Journal, Weingarten received total compensation of more than $600,000 for 2010, including $194,188 accrued from New York City’s United Federation of Teachers before she left to become president of the AFT. Her counterpart in the National Education Association, Dennis Van Roekel, received $397,721 in salary and benefits.

These sums were amassed while the unions signed contracts robbing underpaid teachers of thousands of dollars each year and sanctioned the destruction of their jobs. At the same time, the union officials sit on corporate and political boards where they aid and abet corporate interests and the Obama administration in the destruction of public education.

During the course of the Detroit meeting, one building representative asked Weingarten why the AFT accepted $6.3 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which, under the name of school “reform,” was spearheading the attack on teachers and the spread of charter schools.

Weingarten’s answer should be posted above every under-served and overcrowded classroom in the Detroit Public Schools: “I am proud of getting money from Gates,” she said. “The more money we get from Gates, the less we take from union members. I refuse to be demonized by billionaires. If they want to give us money--fine.”

To say that the AFT is in the pocket of the corporate and financial aristocracy in the United States is no figure of speech. Having seen the loss of dues income—resulting from their complicity in the destruction of hundreds of thousands of teachers’ jobs—the union executives have secured new sources of revenue from billionaire opponents of public education. In return, the AFT has assumed the role of a labor syndicate, disciplining teachers, opposing any struggle, and guaranteeing school districts and charter schools a supply of highly exploited, cheap labor.

At the height of the mass demonstrations of workers and students in Wisconsin earlier this year, Weingarten was attending a conference with Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, charter schools advocates and billionaire foundation representatives in Denver, Colorado. The topics of discussion centered on how best to institute Obama’s “Race to the Top” education agenda and insure the removal of the “incompetent” teachers supposedly infesting the education system.

Weingarten’s praise for Gates was apparently too much even for the generally friendly crowd of DFT representatives. Replying to a few moans and groans from the audience, Weingarten pointed to Johnson and said, “Don’t call this man a sellout or me a sellout. We can’t win by screaming--I’ve fought Giuliani and Bloomberg--we’re in a different time now.”

In her 14 years as president of the UFT in New York, Weingarten collaborated with the mayor’s office. Nevertheless, her reference to “a different time now” makes it clear that the union executives have thrown in their lot entirely with the corporate and political enemies of public education, asking only that they be made junior partners.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2011/jun2011/wein-j21.shtml

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