Bloomberg Brags - We Got It All And We Gave Up Nothing In Contract Negotiations

Just in case you're susceptible to the UFT spin, here's what Bloomberg said today:

“New York City now has the strongest teacher evaluation system in the State, bar none, and we didn’t have to give up anything in contract negotiations to get it. That is almost unprecedented. So it’s great news for our students and our schools. And I will say, if I said we were going to have this when I came into office 11 and a half years ago, you probably would have started thinking about laughing. Nobody, nobody thought we could remotely get here and yet here we are. And it’s just wonderful for our kids.

“It gives New York confidence that our schools will be able to give the kids the education they will need going forward. When I came into office back then it was next to impossible to remove bad teachers from the classroom. We didn’t even have measures in place to determine who was succeeding and who wasn’t. And I’m proud to say that now we will, and we will in no small measure because we have consistently fought for reform, even in the face of powerful and entrenched opposition. And even in the face of monies that were dangled in front of us to make us yield, but it was unattractive for our students. We’re not going to do that and we didn’t have to.

“The evaluation system that Commissioner King detailed yesterday, while it’s not everything that we wanted, will help us build on this work, and the beneficiaries will be kids, their families, and our city’s future. This really is a landmark achievement on behalf of our students, and it’s wonderful. And I want to thank Commissioner King, as well as Commissioner Walcott and his team with the Department of Education for their hard work on this issue.”

They gave up nothing in contract negotiations.

Nothing.

Here's how one commenter put this into context:

I read your statement on the UFT web site and no matter how you try to spin it, you were beaten big time by a Commissioner of Education who knows nothing about education and a multi billionaire mayor who has systematically destroyed the school system and as part of that destroyed decades of work by your predecessors to protect teachers. They have taken away tenure protection. They have substituted the use of pseudo science for true evaluations. They will now eve let third graders play a role in evaluating teachers. And all the while you sit around and do nothing but try to tell your memebers how the untion preserved their rights. Please.

When the teachers' head start rolling and you do nothing about it, perhaps some brave member will have to put up his or her own money to get a lawyer to fight this...Of course there's always the hope that you can negotiate back the teachers' protections with the next mayor; but I wouldn't count on it...

That pretty much sums it up.