UFT Stands For - Utterly Failing Teachers

James Eterno posts that he received the following note from a teacher passing along an administrator's demands to the staff for Danielson walk-throughs:

Dear Staff,

Please note that I will be looking at the following in a walk through tomorrow.

Please have these items labeled in a central location where I do not have to interrupt instruction.

Student folder
Display of work inside and outside of room
Comments on work
Date on work

Conference notes
Lesson plans
Student desks
General environment
Outside bulletin board
Leadership binders
Scaffolding of learning - charts
Rubrics
All assessments posted on line and analyzed
Inquiry binder for each grade - grade leaders
Inquiry notes for your struggling students
Discipline chart
Writing process chart

James asks where the UFT is when the administration can get away with asking for all of these mandates, but it's a rhetorical question.

The UFT is doing little-to-nothing to stop this insanity, in fact was still defending this nonsense in emails to teachers as of last September, saying stuff like this:

As you all are aware, this new system was the result of binding arbitration presided over by state Education Commissioner John King when we could not come to an agreement with Mayor Bloomberg on a teacher evaluation system required by state law. Mayor Bloomberg never wanted an evaluation system that could help teachers. He only wanted a system to beat up teachers

But the state teacher evaluation law is clear in its intent to support the work teachers do inside the classroom, and that is exactly how we plan to see it used in New York City.

The UFT claims to be grieving various overreachs by the DOE, as Pogue notes in a comment at ICEUFT:

Oh, the UFT has 17 grievances currently on file. They're on file, that's a crumb to throw the rank and file to keep them out of our hair.

So far, nothing has changed at the school-level, however. Pogue says:

Thank you, UFT leadership, your useless announcements keep us heartened you're "thinking about" NYC teachers' well-being.

Utterly
Failing
Teachers (citywide)

I see various UFT and UFT-allied figures on the Twitter backing up the UFT-allied slate in the coming April NYSUT elections, claiming that the current NYSUT leadership has done nothing to protect teachers from the ravages of reform and a change is needed.

The "change" will be the slate backed by the folks at 52 Broadway who have allowed this kind of thing happen to NYC teachers (a list so insane that I repeat it once more):

Dear Staff,

Please note that I will be looking at the following in a walk through tomorrow.

Please have these items labeled in a central location where I do not have to interrupt instruction.

Student folder
Display of work inside and outside of room
Comments on work
Date on work

Conference notes
Lesson plans
Student desks
General environment
Outside bulletin board
Leadership binders
Scaffolding of learning - charts
Rubrics
All assessments posted on line and analyzed
Inquiry binder for each grade - grade leaders
Inquiry notes for your struggling students
Discipline chart
Writing process chart

That's the kind of "protection" the UFT has provided for NYC teachers - and now they want to bring that same kind of "protection" to teachers around the state. 

UFT - utterly failing (NYC) teachers, soon to utterly fail teachers state-wide.