It's Time To Fire "Bad" Union Leaders Like Randi Weingarten

Randi Weingarten led the attack on firing "bad teachers" yesterday, giving more ammunition to the "Bash Teachers" movement by saying that teachers who are ineffective at their craft do not deserve to be defended and should be fired.

She said teachers should turn on each other in schools and hound out the "bad" educators, further helping the "Bash Teachers" movement by setting up a divide and conquer atmosphere in public education.

And yet, as NYC Educator points out here, the new teacher accountability mechanisms Weingarten champions are error-riddled garbage, so essentially any teacher can be labeled "bad" or "ineffective" under these systems.

Theoretically, this is the kind of thing the head of a teachers union ought to be protecting her teachers from, but instead Randi Weingarten has fully embraced not only the frame of the "Bash Teachers" movement on this issue but also the rigged accountability mechanisms the movement plans to use to fire as many teachers as they can as fast as they can.

We've seen this kind of thing before from Randi Weingarten.

Weingarten, after all, is the union leader who gave us the Teacher Data Reports, accountability mechanisms in NYC that had margins of error as high as 87% for ELA teachers, as high as 75% for math teachers. 

Teachers rated "failing" under this system had their names published in the papers and were hounded by the tabloid press.

Both the NYCDOE and the New York City press labeled these teachers as "bad" and "failing" and Weingarten did little to protect them, so busy was she basking in the love of the corporate education reformers whose love, support and, most of all, money she craves.

Sure, she mouthed some platitudes about respecting teachers and not exposing them to humiliation in public, but ultimately those teachers were indeed exposed due to Weingarten's TDR deal with the DOE and Weingarten was unable or unwilling to stop that exposure.

There are few figures in education today as damaging to the teaching profession and teachers as the corrupt, self-serving Randi Weingarten.

Isn't it time we fire a "bad" union leader like Randi Weingarten, the kind of union leader who sells teachers out on high stakes testing, value-added measurements, Teacher Data Reports, tenure and other cherished work protections for her own political and financial expediency?