Unions organize teachers at Chicago Charter Schools

Unions Move In at Chicago Charter Schools, and Resistance Is Swift

By REBECCA VEVEA- NY Times.

In a trend that worries charter school operators, teachers at 12 of Chicago’s charters have formed unions over the past two years, and the Chicago Teachers Union is seeking to organize all 85 of the schools.

Union leaders say the growing charter movement is changing the landscape of public education and, with its disdain for unions, could leave teachers without a strong voice on issues like working conditions, teacher evaluations and curriculum.

Administrators and operators are battling back, arguing that unionization could undermine the basic premise of the charter school model: that they are more effective because they are free from the regulations and bureaucracies that govern traditional public schools.

Unionization of charter schools is a major step for the Chicago Teachers Union. Though charter teachers in other cities have formed unions, Chicago is one of the first where the public school system’s major union has directed the effort, according to the American Federation of Teachers.

The unions at the 12 charter schools are affiliated with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, which is a joint program of the C.T.U., the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. At eight of the schools, teachers have contracts, at two they are in negotiation and at two they are fighting to be recognized by their school administrations.

“At some point, we would like all the charter schools to be part of C.T.U.,” said Jackson Potter, the union’s staff coordinator.

There were no charter school unions in 2008, when the Chicago Teachers Union formed its Charter Outreach Committee to knock on doors and help charter teachers organize.

Nationally, 604 charter schools, roughly 12 percent, have collective-bargaining agreements. But 388 of those schools are in states where the law dictates that charters be included in existing collective-bargaining agreements with local districts, according to data collected by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Illinois law does not require charter schools to be part of local collective-bargaining units.

Teacher Unions Matter

By Tom Alves, SJTA Executive Director

Unions matter to this country. And teacher unions matter to public education. The panic that is piling up in Wisconsin and other Republican states over whether collective bargaining rights should exist is real.  This is a concerted effort by political lackeys of powerful corporate interests (it’s easy to follow the money on this) to step on the throat of unions by framing the false message that collective bargaining is the culprit of the current economic woes.  Corporate profiteers have created this diversion to take our eye off their own culpability for the 2008 crash and the subsequent greed of corporate leaders that profited from the federal bailout.  The latest shiny ball-like distraction is that public sector pensions are the major cause of the current economic woes.  This is manipulative messaging at its finest as it shifts one’s eye off the irresponsible behaviors of corporate leaders and drives a wedge between workers.

Practically speaking, white collar and public sector unionism is all that remains of a middle class movement that has fought to guarantee equity and fairness in the workplace for the past 100 years, that includes the forty-hour workweek, health care benefits, sick leave, safety requirements, and modest pensions.  Only 12.3 percent of today’s workforce belongs to a union as opposed to nearly 35 percent in the 1950’s.  This is not because workers don’t want unionized workplaces.  As Philip Dine writes in his recent book, State of the Unions, polling reveals that 53 percent of non-union employees would belong to a union if they could.  This loss is mostly due to manufacturing and production leaving the country — nearly three million jobs (mostly unionized) have been shipped overseas since 1998.

California will not escape this attack on collective bargaining rights.  Ultra conservative forces are already planning to place an initiative on the 2012 ballot that will gut the collective bargaining law.  Wealthy right-wingers and venture capitalists have targeted their deregulation attack on public education as they advocate for reforms that force school closures, more charters and takeovers by outside organizations, and overly simplistic and flawed assessment systems for accountability purposes.

All unions must begin to transform themselves before it is too late.  They must develop a split-screen mentality, one that continues to nurture its current mission, which is ensuring the rights and protections of fair and democratic workplaces, and one that simultaneously pursues a path of invention and innovation for continuous improvement and more productive workplaces. The industrial model of unionism served its purpose when factories dominated the workplace. But times have changed and unionists need to redesign their vision, refocusing their energies on invention and creative solutions to the challenges ahead.

As a progressive teachers union, we recognize our traditional role of advocacy for our members as well as our transformative role in providing the support to improve student learning.  Both are equally critical to the survival of public schools in this country.  When we focus on the former and ignore the latter, public education suffers.  Look back to 1999 in California when the business roundtables convinced politicians to hijack student assessment from the professionals in the form of the School Accountability Act.  Annual test scores in the form of standardized norm referenced tests became the sole scorecard to judge the merit of our schools. As a result, we now know, this quick fix was an abject failure as the professionals’ judgment was undercut, the curriculum narrowed to straight-jacket approaches in language arts and math, creativity and critical thinking squeezed out, and most importantly, the passion and joy for learning that brings the best out of teachers and students began to disappear.

The major lesson to be learned from the NCLB experience is that we can’t be absent from the debate. The local knowledge, judgment, and skills of the professionals and practitioners and their inherent desire to reach students personally and impact their learning dramatically is still the foundation of a great public educational system.  And unions must elevate and meld their members’ voices into revitalized broad-based movement. This will not only keep the balance of power that collective bargaining offers in place but can become the source that revitalizes the public schools to become the self-improving, innovative, and sustainable system our democracy deserves. 

 

Then they came for the trade unionists

 On this day, it behooves us to remember the words of Martin Niemoller. "First they came for the communists," he wrote, "and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me." I am a trade unionist, and Wednesday in Wisconsin, they came for me. They came for you. They came for every working person in America, and their intent could not be more clear.
William Rivers Pitt

Teacher Layoff plans in Los Angeles

NYT. Jennifer Medina.

LOS ANGELES — Last year, when the school district here handed out thousands of layoff notices, Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Central stood to lose half of its roughly 150 teachers. Now, with the district planning to lay off as many as 4,500 teachers under what school leaders call a doomsday budget, the school could have been even worse off.

With districts in California likely to issue as many as 30,000 layoff notices to teachers in the next two weeks — state law sets a March 15 deadline for the notices to go out — and school systems across the country facing huge budget cuts, the battle here will be closely watched. And parents and advocates in other cities could file similar lawsuits.

In many ways, some advocates see the battle between politicians and unions leaders as a distraction. More important, they say, is the fact that after years of budget cuts the students who have the greatest need for stability in school have become the least likely to have it.

“It is really cynical for the political vultures to make this about a victory against the unions,” said Michelle Fine, a professor at the City University of New York who testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the case. “This is really just about how we distribute the pain. The remedy itself is very sad.”

But under a court ruling, not a single teacher at the school would be let go. Instead, Gompers and 44 other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be exempt from any layoffs at all.

The ruling, which ratified a settlement agreed to by plaintiffs and the school district, is being appealed by the teachers’ union. And even as it plays out in a state where schools are facing the prospect of devastating layoffs, it could have implications for districts across the country facing similar cuts. The lawsuit has the support of, among others, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who once worked for the teachers’ union here.

Last spring, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups sued the school district on behalf of parents, saying that their children’s right to an education, guaranteed in the State Constitution, would be violated by the layoffs. Like most districts in the country, Los Angeles has long had an agreement with the union that layoffs are based primarily on seniority, so that the most recently hired teachers are the first to go. That left schools like Gompers, already saddled with high teacher turnover, the most vulnerable.

Lawyers for the parents argued that the layoffs would disproportionately affect poor, black and Latino students, who are more likely to attend schools that are difficult to staff and have a high proportion of inexperienced teachers.

If the ruling is upheld for the seemingly inevitable layoffs this summer, Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, will be among the first to dismiss teachers using criteria other than seniority.

“It’s simply crazy to say that we have to do this based on when people were hired,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview. He has spent considerable effort attacking the union’s policies in recent months and said that the lawsuit was just one of many steps he hopes will overhaul the way hiring and firing is done in the city’s schools.

“This is really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “But we have to start somewhere. We haven’t had any other kind of real change, and this clearly opens the door to more.”

But Julie Washington, the vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said that the ruling was “gutting seniority” and that the new layoff process would wreak havoc in the city’s schools. In the last several months, Ms. Washington has received dozens of calls from union leaders in other parts of the country who worry that they could soon be fighting similar lawsuits.

“You could have a senior teacher who is a nine-year veteran and has spent thousands of hours training and getting better here lose her job,” Ms. Washington said. “All of that is just disregarded with one swoop.”

In essence, the ruling put the rights of students above the job protections that teacher unions widely consider sacrosanct.

“These students deserve the best of what we have promised them,” said Catherine Lhamon, a lawyer with Public Counsel and one of the lead lawyers in the case. “If you have students who are going to see 17 different teachers in a year because so much is churning, they are not getting that. This puts districts on notice that they cannot do that, no matter what the budget circumstances are.”

With districts in California likely to issue as many as 30,000 layoff notices to teachers in the next two weeks — state law sets a March 15 deadline for the notices to go out — and school systems across the country facing huge budget cuts, the battle here will be closely watched. And parents and advocates in other cities could file similar lawsuits.

But the case also points to a split among the advocates who are pushing for the changes. Many political and school leaders say that seniority-based layoffs are antiquated and should be abolished entirely. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have crusaded against so-called “last in, first out” policies for years. For them, the court ruling is Los Angeles does not go far enough.

In many ways, some advocates see the battle between politicians and unions leaders as a distraction. More important, they say, is the fact that after years of budget cuts the students who have the greatest need for stability in school have become the least likely to have it.

“It is really cynical for the political vultures to make this about a victory against the unions,” said Michelle Fine, a professor at the City University of New York who testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the case. “This is really just about how we distribute the pain. The remedy itself is very sad.”

The plan would most likely mean teacher layoffs in middle-class areas that are accustomed to having the same teachers come back year after year. So while Sonia Miller, the principal at Gompers, will have less turmoil this year, the churn will be passed on elsewhere.

“You cannot emphasize how hard it is to teach at a place like this, and to have teachers who want to be here walk out the door is devastating,” she said. “What I want is for my kids to have a fighting chance, and that’s all I really care about. This ruling will by no means make equal education across the board, but at least we will have a chance.”

LOS ANGELES — Last year, when the school district here handed out thousands of layoff notices, Samuel Gompers Middle School in South Central stood to lose half of its roughly 150 teachers. Now, with the district planning to lay off as many as 4,500 teachers under what school leaders call a doomsday budget, the school could have been even worse off.

But under a court ruling, not a single teacher at the school would be let go. Instead, Gompers and 44 other schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District would be exempt from any layoffs at all.

The ruling, which ratified a settlement agreed to by plaintiffs and the school district, is being appealed by the teachers’ union. And even as it plays out in a state where schools are facing the prospect of devastating layoffs, it could have implications for districts across the country facing similar cuts. The lawsuit has the support of, among others, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who once worked for the teachers’ union here.

Last spring, the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights groups sued the school district on behalf of parents, saying that their children’s right to an education, guaranteed in the State Constitution, would be violated by the layoffs. Like most districts in the country, Los Angeles has long had an agreement with the union that layoffs are based primarily on seniority, so that the most recently hired teachers are the first to go. That left schools like Gompers, already saddled with high teacher turnover, the most vulnerable.

Lawyers for the parents argued that the layoffs would disproportionately affect poor, black and Latino students, who are more likely to attend schools that are difficult to staff and have a high proportion of inexperienced teachers.

If the ruling is upheld for the seemingly inevitable layoffs this summer, Los Angeles, the second-largest district in the country, will be among the first to dismiss teachers using criteria other than seniority.

“It’s simply crazy to say that we have to do this based on when people were hired,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview. He has spent considerable effort attacking the union’s policies in recent months and said that the lawsuit was just one of many steps he hopes will overhaul the way hiring and firing is done in the city’s schools.

“This is really just the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “But we have to start somewhere. We haven’t had any other kind of real change, and this clearly opens the door to more.”

But Julie Washington, the vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles, said that the ruling was “gutting seniority” and that the new layoff process would wreak havoc in the city’s schools. In the last several months, Ms. Washington has received dozens of calls from union leaders in other parts of the country who worry that they could soon be fighting similar lawsuits.

“You could have a senior teacher who is a nine-year veteran and has spent thousands of hours training and getting better here lose her job,” Ms. Washington said. “All of that is just disregarded with one swoop.”

In essence, the ruling put the rights of students above the job protections that teacher unions widely consider sacrosanct.

“These students deserve the best of what we have promised them,” said Catherine Lhamon, a lawyer with Public Counsel and one of the lead lawyers in the case. “If you have students who are going to see 17 different teachers in a year because so much is churning, they are not getting that. This puts districts on notice that they cannot do that, no matter what the budget circumstances are.”

With districts in California likely to issue as many as 30,000 layoff notices to teachers in the next two weeks — state law sets a March 15 deadline for the notices to go out — and school systems across the country facing huge budget cuts, the battle here will be closely watched. And parents and advocates in other cities could file similar lawsuits.

But the case also points to a split among the advocates who are pushing for the changes. Many political and school leaders say that seniority-based layoffs are antiquated and should be abolished entirely. Michelle Rhee, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia schools, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York have crusaded against so-called “last in, first out” policies for years. For them, the court ruling is Los Angeles does not go far enough.

In many ways, some advocates see the battle between politicians and unions leaders as a distraction. More important, they say, is the fact that after years of budget cuts the students who have the greatest need for stability in school have become the least likely to have it.

“It is really cynical for the political vultures to make this about a victory against the unions,” said Michelle Fine, a professor at the City University of New York who testified for the plaintiffs as an expert witness in the case. “This is really just about how we distribute the pain. The remedy itself is very sad.”

The plan would most likely mean teacher layoffs in middle-class areas that are accustomed to having the same teachers come back year after year. So while Sonia Miller, the principal at Gompers, will have less turmoil this year, the churn will be passed on elsewhere.

“You cannot emphasize how hard it is to teach at a place like this, and to have teachers who want to be here walk out the door is devastating,” she said. “What I want is for my kids to have a fighting chance, and that’s all I really care about. This ruling will by no means make equal education across the board, but at least we will have a chance.”

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Join the Wisconsin uprising

Stand With Wisconsin Workers

WISCONSIN WORKERS ARE UNDER ATTACK! 

TUESDAY, FEB. 22, 2011 STATE CAPITOL, SACRAMENTO 5:30 PM

Support Workers’ Rights!Join us for a Candlelight Vigil in solidarity with Wisconsin workers.

Date: TUESDAY, FEB. 22, 2011

Time:Meet at 5:30 pm 

Vigil at 6:00 pm

Location:

WEST STEPS 
STATE CAPITOL
SACRAMENTO, CA

Democracy, academic freedom, and the need for teachers' unions

Democracy , Academic Freedom and the need for teachers’ unions.

Recent events and controversies  such as the banning of Ethnic Studies classes in Arizona have again shown   the need for teachers’ unions.

In 2009  far right wing politicians and activists have passed legislation  such as Arizona House Bill 2281 authored by Tom Horn  to prevent the teaching of U.S. history to Mexican American students that includes the history of the Mexican American people in Arizona .

We first need to address the issue of perspective to clarify these issues.  There is a political spectrum of views from Right to Center to Left.  When someone is on the extreme Right- such as Tea Party advocates- anyone on the other end of the spectrum is portrayed as dangerous and even un-American.  Recent political campaigns calling President Obama a socialist- which he is not- and the legislative assault on immigrants in Arizona and 20 other states point to the deepening political divisions in our society.  A group of Republican activists have filed to place an Arizona type law SB1070 on the California ballot.  It would go even further than Propositions 187 and 227 already passed by the California voters.

When you stand on the far right others to your left can be seen as dangerous.

Right Wing
           When you stand on the far left everything to your right ( including the political center) can be seen as potentially fascist.

            In this situation, accusations of extremism get distorted.  Teachers, particularly history and social studies teachers came under attack when they promote a democratic exchange of ideas.

At times  in my teaching  I have been accused of being a communist or a Marxist-Leninist, which I am not.  A recent post on a newspaper web site accusing me of being a communist since I wrote to support teachers raises related issues.  Usually you can’t clarify these issues.  Such conflicts  events push teachers to avoid angry controversy be teaching only an “approved” version of history.

            After decades of political participation, I have arrived at a perspective that I would describe as democratic socialism  - a part of the long tradition of democratic socialism and social democracy in the U.S. from John Dewey,  Jane Adams, Michael Harrington, Cornel West  and including Martin Luther King Jr. among others.

            I have been fortunate to work within this tradition for over 35 years at a public state university.  My primary task was preparing young people to become History and Social Science teachers for k-12 schools usually in the Sacramento region.  I have also mentored a number of people to get their doctorates and to teach in universities and community colleges.

            I have developed my own views on the appropriate role of democracy and advocacy in decades of research and dialogue.  You can see these ideas in detail in my most recent book, Choosing Democracy: a practical guide to multicultural education. (4^th. edition) 2010.   Working within the democratic socialist perspective and with the assistance of many I have developed some expertise in political economy, racism, and the history of the Chicano/Mexican American people among other topics.  In my classes I taught about these issues, I did not impose them.  

            At times I encountered students from a right wing perspective who found my views too extreme and they told me so in various venues including student evaluations of faculty.  These students, and some faculty members, challenged my views and at times sought to de-legitimize my position including seeking my dismissal from the faculty.  

 These conflicts  with democratic teaching are similar to the conflicts being imposed on faculty in the La Raza Studies program in Tucson Arizona at present.

            There was little or no room for debating our differences because the accusers were not interested in debate nor clarity, they sought to delegitimize my teaching and  at  times to get me fired.  In other cases we had a lively time of debate and both sides reconsidered some of their positions.  Over the years I was probably accused of extremism more about issues of race and racism than about issues of political economy.

            It was important for me to have a union during these conflicts. I could usually rely upon my union to defend my right to hold my position and to teach and to defend my academic freedom.  There were  times in my career when I  was denied tenure and promotion and needed precisely this  union protection for my rights to teach my own experiences about race and political economy.

            What did I actually do that offended these critics and caused some to get me fired?  Well, outside of my teaching  I wrote pieces, I spoke out and gave speeches, I registered voters and I campaigned for candidates and issues.  These are the behaviors which my critics found not acceptable.  They are basic democratic activities.

            After decades of conflict I prevailed, prospered, and retired.  In addition to times of severe conflict there were many more times when I was advised to conceal my positions, to not take a stand, to conceal my political philosophy or to not make it obvious.  Without a union to defend my positions I would have  more likely  been driven back to intellectual compromises to avoid conflicts on issues such as both racism and the political economy such as describing the current economic crisis.

What do these critics  of democratic participation and intellectual freedom favor?   In 2003, U.S. District Judge Richard Posner wrote

“Few citizens have the formidable intellectual and moral capacities (let alone the time) required for the role that [popular democracy] assigns to the citizenry..." The theory of popular democracy, Posner said, "hopelessly exaggerates the moral and intellectual capacities, both actual and potential, not only of the average person but also of the average official (including judge) and even of the political theorists who seek to tutor the people and the officials.”

Posner is a well-respected leading  conservative intellectual. His views  reflect much of the thinking in the Republican Party and corporate U.S.  political life today.

For more on this topic see, “ Do Americans Believe In The Wisdom of the Public?

The Promise of Popular Democracy.” Glenn W. Smith 2008.

            I have a union.  I helped to create this union.  The union assisted me in protecting my academic freedom and defending my right to teach about racism, economics, and an accurate history.    In doing so it also permitted me to research, explore, and write about diverse viewpoints.  This academic freedom also encouraged me to clarify my own positions on the values of free and open inquiry and the role of the intellectual in our society.

            For the good of our society, this academic freedom must be protected and extended- and teachers’ unions are one of the few institutions protecting open and democratic inquiry.

Anti Teacher Union efforts and Waiting for Superman

           I have posted here several critiques of  the film, “Waiting for Superman,” so I do not need to repeat these criticisms.  The most fact based criticism is here What Superman got wrong. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/what-superman-got-wrong-point.html

My goal in the following is to share my own reaction to the film.

 First, it is an important film and I encourage people to see it.  It illustrates to a rather uninformed public  several of the important issues including the budget crisis in schools and the importance of having quality teachers.  

In October the film, “Waiting for Superman” dominated the television talk shows, forums, and press with a message that public schools are failing, the teachers’ unions are to blame, and that charter schools are the answer to the problems of public schools.   Superman is not only a film about schools, it is also a part of a wider sophisticated assault on unions and particularly public sector unions.  In the Fall 2010  election in California  Meg Whitman extended the criticism of the teachers union and made it  a major issue in her  $160 million dollar self financed campaign  for Governor.  The film and the Whitman campaign  illustrate how corporate funding produces a political narrative.  The corporations and the foundations involved  are distinct, but the process of corporate or oligarchy funding to shape the political and economic dialogue are similar.

The film  Waiting for Superman is a part of the effective  strategy of corporate take over of education policy and corporate victories in framing the issues of education reform . Historian Diane Ravitch describes  this corporate take over in her well written  book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System; How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education. (2010).  There are several specific criticisms of the  facts and the framing in the film including  Ira Shor of the City University of New York saying  “Overall it benefits the hedge fund billionaires now bankrolling charter schools and conservative politicians,”  on the site http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org/

             Prominent education historian Diane Ravitch, formerly an Under Secretary for Research in the Department of Education during the Reagan Administration, criticizes the film  as propaganda citing  substantial evidence that charter schools do not have a record of producing better achievement than public schools . ( NYReview of Books). ). [ full disclosure.  This writer has long criticized Ravitch for her positions on multicultural education and particularly for her role in writing the California  History/Social Science Framework, the document that shapes whose history is taught in California school textbooks.]  Ravitch argues  that Superman  is a propaganda master piece blaming unions for the many problems of public schools including the budget crises and  alleged problems recruiting and keeping  quality teachers.

            Waiting for Superman  makes two glaring claims that were  political assertions by anti union advocates  such as Joel Klien and Michele Rhee  when the film was made but  now are  objectively wrong.  Superman  claims that the teachers union leadership in Washington D.C. would not allow the union contract proposed by  Michele Rhee come to a vote of the teachers.  Since the film was made the contract was submitted to a vote and it passed.  That is Rhee got the contract she wanted- which the film claims was made impossible by union obstruction.  In September Rhee was encouraged to leave her position as Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools.  The film  further supports its claim that incompetent teachers are difficult to remove  from teaching by citing the extreme case of the New York City room, called by the press the “rubber room.”  It is a compelling story.  However, the so called “rubber room was eliminated last year by the very union contract which the film makers claim was protecting incompetent teachers.

            The film, and the  general assault on teachers unions is a part of a media savvy campaign by pro charter groups including Democrats for Education Reform and the groups which Ravitch in her new book  calls the ,”Billionaire Boy’s Club including the Gates, Olin, Bradley and Broad foundations among others.

Unfortunately  Waiting for Superman distorts the needed discussion of school reform by developing only one side of the debate- that of the corporate  foundations  and their well funded spokespersons.  The film producer, David Guggenheim,  decries the teachers unions as a special interest while the film  promotes  the views of the  Bill Gates, the Olin Foundation, the Bradley foundation, the Broad Foundation, and the entire raft of very conservative economic interests by providing articulate spokespersons such as Michele Rhee, Joel Klein,  Goeffrey Canada , Arne Duncan, among others.    Several of these  foundations’  declared interest is  to shrink the public sector – as in public schools- and to spend less money on tax supported institutions.

 A frequent line from the  film narrator is “reform experts agree “ when in fact they do not agree.  The narration recognizes only the corporate sponsored reform  direction  and does not acknowledge  the  viewpoint of literally hundreds, perhaps thousands, of persons who have been working  in the trenches for substantive school reform for decades.

Randy Weingarten, President of the AFT is seen in edited and clipped statements in the film.  In  August at the AFT convention she described the corporate sponsored  “reformers”   this way,

 “Never before have I seen so few attack so many, so harshly, for doing so much—often with so little.

I don’t know if I should call the people attacking us, quote, “reformers,” as they like to be known—or performers, which might be more accurate. Because many of them seem more interested in engaging in political theater than constructive conversation.

So I’ll just call them the “blame-the-teacher crowd,” and even though many of them have set their sights on all public institutions, I will focus on the institution that has gotten the most abuse—public education.

The blame-the-teacher crowd would have Americans believe that there is only one choice when it comes to public education: either you’re for students, or you’re for teachers.

That is a bogus choice.

When a school is good for the kids, it’s also good for the teachers, and vice versa. “

The Michele Rhee, et al  well funded charter advocates  define themselves as the reform movement and the media generally echos their claim.   Teachers and union leaders seeking equity based reforms have not been able to break through the foundation funded “consensus” and media punditry.  

 I urge readers to see the film and to enter into the debates about the nature of schools and schooling in the U.S. We need a well informed dialogue on the quality of public schooling in our society and how we could improve that quality- but we are hearing from only one side of the debate.  An excellent alternative  to the corporate promoted view of schools in general is found in Mike Rose’s, Why Schools?  Reclaiming Education for us all.   Policy alternatives to Rhee, Duncan crowd  blaming of teachers is well documented in the Broader- Bolder Approach documents found at www. http://www.boldapproach.org/

The  school systems in many of  our cities are currently at a crisis  point and the school reform agenda has been hijacked by corporate sponsored  “reformers” who  have taken  millions from the schools while promising future improved  achievement.   To follow the money I urge you to read,  “the Ultimate $uperpower: Subsidized Dollars Drive Waiting for Superman Agenda,” ( October 20,2010) at http://www.notwaitingforsuperman.org

There is a problem with the great majority of real school reformers spending their time combating the charters/boy’s club groups.  Battling the media frenzy takes time that could be spent improving schools.

However, the battle must be engaged.  The charters/ boy’s club group, including the Democrats for Educational Reform, Bill Gates, etc., have successfully captured the Obama administration policy apparatus under the leadership of Arne Duncan.  Their policies, known as Race to the Top, are the funded, active policies.

         As the film well illustrates, many schools serving urban and impoverished students  need fundamental change. These schools do not open the doors to economic opportunity. They usually do not promote equality. Instead, they recycle inequality.  The high school drop out rates alone demonstrate that  urban schools  prepare less than 50 percent of their students for entrance into the economy and society. We cannot build a safe, just, and prosperous society while our society  leaves  so many young people behind. Among our tasks as progressives is to raise the voices of parents and teachers in the school reform debates leading up to the Congressional attempt to re-authorize No Child Left Behind this Spring.

Published in Democratic Left, Winter 2010. as Facts are Kryptonite to Superman.

Teachers' Unions as an agent of school reform

Baltimore teachers union is the hero, not a villain

By Harold Meyerson

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

After that, the new Davis Guggenheim movie "Waiting for Superman," which merely asserts that teachers unions are to blame for the deficiencies in American education, is almost a letdown.

 In the world of "Waiting for Superman," every public school is a disaster, every charter school is a rigorous (but nurturing) little Harvard or Oxford, and the blame for the plight of public schools and the paucity of charter schools can be laid entirely on the unions' doorsteps. You'd never know from the film that charter schools produce test results that aren't any better than those of public schools, or that the teachers at a number of charter schools -- including charter schools that do produce high test results -- are, horror of horrors, unionized.

Still, the narrative that education reformers and teachers unions are eternal and implacable enemies is a hardy one, and one that Washingtonians in particular may well believe after four years of pitched battle between Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and the D.C. teachers union. The intensity of the local battle might blind them to the experience of cities where the school district and the union have jointly embraced a reform agenda, even including a version of merit pay. And yet, such an agreement -- an impossibility, if we are to believe the conventional narrative -- was reached just two weeks ago in the faraway city of Baltimore.

The Baltimore contract, on which teachers will vote Oct. 14, bases pay on a combination of professional development training, joint management-teacher evaluation and measured student achievement. The criteria by which teachers will be judged will be aligned with state standards that Maryland is developing in which 50 percent of a teacher's score will reflect student achievement.

The best teachers under this contract could make more than $100,000. That's chump change for one of those brilliant young Goldman Sachs associates who creates wealth by peddling toxic paper to rubes, but it's nonetheless a step toward reconciling recompense with our social needs.

"Contracts are a good way to make systemic change," says Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT. "In Baltimore, we've established a career ladder with different lanes and aligned compensation with it." Teachers will get more say over what's taught in their classrooms -- and be rewarded for positive results.

While Baltimore's contract is groundbreaking, the AFT, by Weingarten's estimate, has contracts that include elements of the Baltimore deal in 50 to 60 districts around the country. Representing more than a million public school teachers nationwide in the current system while working to change that system is no easy task, but it's one that the AFT is increasingly trying to perform.

That probably won't diminish the scapegoating of the union by those who believe that unions can't possibly back reform or that we can't afford decent teacher pay or pensions in an age of budget deficits. Blaming teachers for the dysfunction of inner cities and the decline of American industry lets a lot of other, more culpable, parties off the hook. But if our goal is to improve education, and not just exculpate ourselves for our social and economic decline, we should be applauding the Baltimore contract and the reformers, in think tanks, district offices, classrooms and, yes, unions, who seek to better our schools and our country.

meyersonh@washpost.com

This post is edited. Read the entire post here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/05/AR2010100503832.html?wpisrc=nl_opinions

Along with Dolores Huerta, Eliseo Medina, Cornel West, and Barbara Ehrenreich, he is an Honorary Chair of Democratic Socialists of America. www.dsausa.org. You have to watch out for those democratic socialists.

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The Blame the teachers crowd

by Randi Weingarten 

The blame-the-teacher crowd would have Americans believe that there is only one choice when it comes to public education: either you’re for students, or you’re for teachers.

That is a bogus choice.

When a school is good for the kids, it’s also good for the teachers, and vice versa. And if our leaders fail to recognize this, and fail to create a positive vision for our schools, we must lead the way.

Excerpts.

I never thought I’d see the superintendent of a major city’s public school system call public education, and I’m quoting here: “crappy.”

I never thought I’d open a major newspaper to see us described as (again I’m quoting): “selfinterested adults trying to deny poor parents choice for their children.”

I might have expected to hear the House Republican Leader say that preventing teacher layoffs is a scheme to, quote, “Pad the education bureaucracy.”

But I never thought I’d see a Democratic president, whom we helped elect, and his education secretary applaud the mass firing of 89 teachers and staff in Central Falls, R.I., when not a single one of the teachers ever received an unsatisfactory evaluation.

And I never thought that I’d see a documentary film about helping disadvantaged children in which the villain wasn’t crumbling schools, or grinding poverty, or the lack of a curriculum, or overcrowded classrooms, or the total failure of No Child Left Behind.

No, the villain was us.

Look, I can take it. It’s part of my job.

But taking abuse shouldn’t be in the job description of more than 3 million public school

teachers who work hard every day to do right by their students.

Brothers and sisters, never before have I seen such attacks on public employees, teachers and the unions that represent them.

Never before have I seen so few attack so many, so harshly, for doing so much—often with so little.

I don’t know if I should call the people attacking us, quote, “reformers,” as they like to be

known—or performers, which might be more accurate. Because many of them seem more interested in engaging in political theater than constructive conversation.

So I’ll just call them the “blame-the-teacher crowd,” and even though many of them have set their sights on all public institutions, I will focus on the institution that has gotten the most abuse—public education.

The blame-the-teacher crowd would have Americans believe that there is only one choice when it comes to public education: either you’re for students, or you’re for teachers.

That is a bogus choice.

When a school is good for the kids, it’s also good for the teachers, and vice versa. And if our leaders fail to recognize this, and fail to create a positive vision for our schools, we must lead the way.

II. INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

I know of no other institution that has lifted up so many, so advanced our democratic principles, and instilled in all of us something beyond the three Rs—a limitless sense of possibility.

That sense of possibility is under assault as never before. Public education is facing a perfect storm so severe that even some of our allies are seeking refuge in cheap and easy approaches.

For starters, we are still reeling from the effects of the worst recession since the Great

Depression.

We appreciate that, in last year’s stimulus bill, Congress and the administration created a $100 billion investment that blunted the crippling cuts that were looming last year.

And you saw the results. In K-12 education, the stabilization fund kept the worst effects of the recession from being played out in children’s classrooms.

The investment in Pell Grants kept students in college.

The investment in FMAP allowed public hospitals to stay open and public services to continue.

But even with last year’s help, this year’s outlook is bleak—and that’s despite the Herculean efforts of AFT members like you, and the efforts of members of Congress as late as last week to find the funds to mitigate the continued devastation from state and local government cuts.

We are grateful to the House of Representatives for once again leading the way, and to Chairman Obey and Speaker Pelosi in particular. But look what’s happening: Already, more than 120 school districts across the country have shortened the school week to just four days.

Higher education has been hit hard, too. At the University of California last year, while tuition increased a staggering 32 percent, our affiliate reports that 10 percent of the contingent faculty members were either laid off or not renewed. And the chancellor of the California Community Colleges System estimates that 140,000 students were turned away from the system’s 112campuses this academic year, a trend he expects to continue.

Others are “solving” budget crises by cutting art, music and physical education, slashing

prekindergarten programs and help for students who fall behind.

Many of you are taking furlough days both to prevent the interruption of core services so many depend upon and to save a colleague’s job.

Many of you have agreed to other cost savings—in pensions and benefits, salary freezes,

increases in class size, and other shared sacrifices.

Randy Weingarten.  President. American Federation of Teachers.  July 8,2020. 

Keep teachers working- end the lay offs

Hope In Sight… Keep Our Educators Working Act

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) introduced legislation, the Keep Our Educators Working Act, that would provide local communities with $23 billion to help avoid massive layoffs of teachers and other cutbacks in public education. A subcommittee of the US Senate Appropriations Committee held hearings on the prospect of new federal money intended to stave off the layoff and/or non-hiring of some 250,000 public school employees this fall. NEA produced short videos on the hearings:

·        4-minute story about the hearings

·        Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education

·        Joe Morton, State Superintendent – Alabama

·        Chris Bern, President – Iowa State Education Association

·        Ramon Cortines – Superintendent of Schools, Los Angeles Unified School District

Still Left Behind – ESEA Reauthorization Needs Changes

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) enacted in 1965 was a piece of legislation that infused federal money into the nation’s schools, established programs like Head Start and provided educational resources for under-served communities. It was reauthorized and re-named “No Child Left Behind” in 2002 and did just that… leaving children behind focusing on high-stakes testing and underfunding the very resources that would help.

We are now faced with the Obama Administration’s ESEA plan, which still continues with more one-size-fits-all testing, blaming teachers and labeling schools as winners and losers. 

CTA’s principles for ESEA Reauthorization support the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) and offer CTA’s “Reach for the STARS”, our five-point reauthorization principles which include Students, Teachers, Accountability, Resources and Innovation and Systems.

What you can do:

·        Email your member of Congress to oppose this ESEA reauthorization

·        Check out CTA’s latest radio ads in English and Spanish

·        Share your story

·        Take the NEA survey on how you and your students are affected by this legislation