A Labor Day Pledge: Let's Work To Remove Our Corrupt Union Leadership At The UFT

As we return to school tomorrow in NYC, we face three separate nightmares.

First, we face the Danielson observation plan that will see us evaluated with a rubric that uses more criteria than minutes in the class period.

It is a rubric that has been devised to give administrators the tools to give any teacher an "ineffective" rating at any time in any school for any reason.

Next we have the state and, in some cases, the "local assessments," that we will have to give so that we can be evaluated using test scores.

20% will come from the state tests, 20% from the local measures, the state and the city have not yet told us how they will calculate the growth scores but if the past is any guide, we can expect very high margins of error in these calculations.

Finally, they will put the Danielson observation scores with the state test scores and local measures scores and calculate our evaluation score in a system called APPR.

It is based on the rank-and-yank employee evaluation system some corporations, including Microsoft, use that has been described as poisonous and destructive to both the employees and the companies.

This kind of evaluation system sets workers against each other, divisions against each other, everybody against everybody else in some Darwinian "sink or swim" system that is guaranteed to make already hostile environments in NYC schools even more hostile.

And just how did this poisonous and destructive system come to be?

The leaderships at the UFT and the NYSUT agreed to it!

Yup, the folks who are nominally supposed to be in charge of protecting teachers agreed to the most destructive and poisonous evaluation system imaginable.

When critics have pointed out problems with the system, the UFT has sent out attack dogs to attack those critics rather than to try and fix the problems in the system.

When the state tried to increase the test score component in the evaluation system beyond what was written in the legislative law, the unions successfully sued to stop the state, the state appealed, but then dropped the lawsuit at the behest of Governor Cuomo.

Had the unions continued to fight the state on the changes to the testing component of the law, the evaluation system might have already falled apart under court scrutiny, but alas, we shall never know because they dropped a case they were winning.

Finally when Bloomberg put the kibbosh on an APPR deal between the UFT and the DOE, the UFT leadership cheered when Cuomo placed NYSED Commissioner John King as the "independent arbitrator" to impose a system on NYC teachers.

As you would expect somebody with an education reform agenda would do, King imposed a punitive evaluation system that goes for the longest period of time of any evaluation system in the state and the union, rather than pointing out the problems with the system imposed by King, hailed the system as giving teachers "additional protections" when it actually does nothing of the kind.

At every juncture when the UFT could have protected teachers from the ravages of the education reform movement, the UFT leadership has sold its members down the river, perhaps for political expediency, perhaps for future ed deform largesse in the form of grants and cash envelopes (think the former D.C. union head working for Students First...)

So on this Labor Day, as we celebrate the idea of unions, the history of unions, the rights and benefits unions have brought workers, let us remember that the current UFT leadership, indeed the leaderships at the NYSUT, the AFT and the NEA, are not protecting us.

They are instead negotiating the terms of our exploitation, joining together with education reformers like Bill Gates to sell us out on testing, the Common Core, teacher evaluations, merit pay and the like.

The leadership at the UFT, which has been particularly egregious in their sell-outs, has compounded the matter by joining together with Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to try and elect Bill Thompson mayor of NYC.

Can you imagine a union leadership joining together with the Regents Chancellor who once stated that the public hates teachers but will come to love them once an "objective" evaluation system that uses test scores is in place?

I can - it's called Michael Mulgrew and the UFT leadership, along with Randi Weingarten herself.

I've seen an awful lot about labor history and unions today on the Internets.

But you know, I have to say that the labor songs don't ring true for me so much anymore.

When I first started teaching, I used to believe my union leadership had my best interests at heart.

Experience quickly disabused me of that naive notion.

Now I know they have their own, and only their own, best interests at heart.

Only Karen Lewis and the CTU leadership have the best interests of the membership in their hearts, and that's because they are from the rank-and-file themselves, real teachers who taught in real schools rather than union functionaries with token teaching gigs and/or sellouts looking to get out of the classroom and into cushy union positions.

We have an insurgent rank-and-file group that is looking to replicate the victory the CORE people had in taking over the CTU - they are called the MORE caucus.

Indeed, one of the most prominent members of that caucus, Julie Cavanagh, has written a terrific piece explaining the new APPR system to teachers and how best to navigate a complicated, dangerous system meant to divide teachers and harm both teachers and schools.

It would have been nice if Michael Mulgrew or someone in the UFT leadership would have written such a document, but they're too busy defending the Common Core curriculum from opponents and critics to bother informing teachers about the complicated and dangerous new evaluation system that they helped the state impose on us.

And so, as I enjoy the last day of summer vacation, Labor Day, and read the various tributes to labor and unions around the Internet today, all I can think about is that UFT election three years hence, when Michael Mulgrew and his cronies will be running for re-election, having to defend three years of APPR, Danielson, Common Core tests and the like.

They are a corrupt leadership who have been entrenched in power for over 50 years.

They care nothing for the rank-and-file, they care nothing about protecting teachers, they care nothing about schools or public education.

They care only about themselves.

At my school, teachers who have been "u" rated have felt abandoned by the UFT.

Our chapter leader has said he gets no help from 52 Broadway in protecting these teachers and, indeed, isn't so sure they aren't actually undercutting him in their dealings with the principal.

These are the actions of a corrupt and rotten union leadership that does more harm to its members than good.

It is time to remove these people and send them to their Gates Foundation gigs or Students First jobs and get them out of the UFT leadership.

Even though the election is three years away, the fight to send the current UFT leadership packing starts in earnest tomorrow.

Danielson and APPR, the sellouts brought to us by the UFT leadership, have ensured that.

After three starts years of the ravages brought upon us by Danielson and APPR, the ground is going to be fertile for change - real change.

There is a lot of work to be done before that day but the evaluation system our union leadership helped impose on us is going to help us greatly in this fight.

The UFT leadership has rigged the elections so that retirees, a reliable UFT leadership voting bloc, can vote.

Plus many current teachers are so demoralized or apathetic that they don't even bother to vote in the UFT elections.

But the ed deform juggernaut that is APPR may change all that.

Quite frankly, the worse things get, the more likely people are going to want change.

In my school, people who once were apolitical have come over to the side of the MORE after seeing what Common Core, Danielson, APPR and the like were going to do to them.

The UFT leadership have planted the seeds for their own demise by agreeing to and hailing the APPR system.

We will use that against them like the bludgeon it is.

It is going to be a rough few years and unfortunately there are going to be people hurt by this mess.

But maybe, just maybe, we can bring about the change we need at 52 Broadway so that we can get a union leadership that protects its members, cares about the interests of its rank-and-file.

That, to me, would be great material for a 21st century Labor Day song.

Happy Labor Day everybody.