NYSUT President Magee Claims MaryEllen Elia Appointment Is A Victory For NYSUT

Boy the Vichy, er, I mean victories just keep coming from the NYSUT braintrust:

NYSUT President Karen Magee counts the scuttling of the education tax credit as well as changes in the Board of Regents and installation of a new education commissioner as victories for the statewide teachers union.

...

NYSUT didn’t get everything it wanted this year. Gov. Andrew Cuomo successfully pushed through changes to the state’s teacher evaluation law that link the performance reviews to testing and in-classroom observation as well as a stronger tie to tenure, which is now harder to obtain.

Teachers deemed to be poor performing over several years can be fired, regardless of tenure, under the changes.

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At the same time, Magee touted “shifts” in the membership of the Board of Regents – ostensibly appointed by the Democratic-led Assembly – as well as the state’s education commissioner. Mary Ellen Elia this month officially took over for John King, a charter school supporter who went to work for the Obama administration. Yesterday was her first day on the job.

“Those are positives, because we look forward to having real conversations about education,” Magee said.

Ah, yes - the Elia appointment to replace John King is a victory despite Elia's rep as a thin-skinned, vindictive boss who set up a "culture of fear" in her last position, developed a teacher evaluation system that looked to fire 5% of teachers every year, and refused to take responsibility for the deaths of students under watch is a positive

God help us.

Weingarten And Mulgrew Look To Take Us Backward

If and when the pro-Andrew Cuomo forces backed by UFT President Michael Mulgrew and AFT President Randi Weingarten take over the NYSUT this weekend, the fight that NYSUT President Richard Iannuzzi and others in the NYSUT leadership have shown against Andrew Cuomo, SED Commissioner King and Regents Chancellor Tisch in recent months will disappear, replaced by complacency with the education reform status quo.

That's what this internecine fight in NYSUT, pushed by Mulgrew and Weingarten at a time when teachers and the the unions are most vulnerable across this state, is about - the "collaborationist" union leaders at the UFT and AFT wanting to turn the clock back to a time when the union went along with whatever Andy Cuomo, John King, Merryl Tisch and the plutocrat who owns us all, Bill Gates, want in their education reform agenda.

The way the votes are calculated in this election, the Mulgrew and Weingarten forces of surrender have the upper hand and are expected to win pretty easily.

Given the track record of Mulgarten at the UFT and AFT, that's a very bad thing indeed.

Just recently we watched Randi Weingarten and Michael Mulgrew do NOTHING as Andrew Cuomo took Bill de Blasio to the woodshed over charter school expansions.

The NY Times reported that the de Blasio had no allies in the fight, not even the unions, and soon lost everything to Cuomo and the charter entrepreneurs.

Weingarten issued some muted jive on Twitter about how she criticized the budget, but the truth is, Weingarten and Mulgrew could have mobilized their respective unions to fight these charter giveaways that amount to an absolute right to expansion for charter entrepreneurs on the city's dime, but chose to remain effectively quiet in the fight - a fight literally created by Andrew Cuomo as a payback to his campaign donors.

Michael Fiorillo summed up the AFT/UFT response to Cuomo and the charter entrepreneur putsch like this:

Does this (mis)leadership ever fight anything?

So, the APPR deal, which never should have been agreed to in the first place, will be tweaked - which would have happened anyway, since the admins are being crushed by it - in exchange for allowing charters to run wild, which is guaranteed to reduce UFT membership substantially in the coming years, as the charter cap is enlarged or eliminated altogether.

I have said that the UFT is a dues collection agency, but I was obviously wrong, since a real dues collection agency would have a better sense of self-preservation.

Cuomo and his backers from Hedgistan must be laughing among themselves when they observe the rubes from the UFT; it's no wonder that, behind their occasional condescending remarks, they think of us as chumps.

And:

These people are bought and sold. 

Weingrew thinks that the members will be mollified by a (five year late) contract - obtained while stabbing De Blasio in the back - despite the unending concessions (Common Core, APPR, VAM, charters run wild, etc) that he has made.

Are these people deluded, actually thinking they will organize charter schools? Or is something else allowing them to agree to the public school's and the union's eventual destruction?

That's the leadership we now have poised to take back control of NYSUT after Iannuzzi and others in the NYSUT leadership starting fighting back against the corporate education reform forces by issuing a no-confidence vote in SED Commissioner King, withdrawing support for Common Core and calling for an end to the "Sit and Stare" policies meant to harm children who opt out of state tests.

The Mulgarten forces of surrender aren't very good at protecting teachers because they don't care anything about that - they care only about maintaining their own power and privileges, maintaining their "seat at the table" with Andy Cuomo, Barack Obama and the plutocrat behind those functionaries, Bill Gates.

It's a shame that just when the NYSUT leadership started to show real fight against the corporate education reform forces, Weingarten and Mulgrew decided they needed to take the union backward.

But it shouldn't be a surprise to anybody who is a faithful reader of this blog or Norm Scott's Ed Notes Online, James Eterno's ICEUFT blog, Arthur Goldstein's NYC Educator blog, or Chaz's School Daze blog.

That's what Weingarten and Mulgrew are in power to do - to make it look to members like they're fighting for teachers while in reality they cave on issue after issue after issue.

In my 13 years as a UFT member, I have seen my union "collaborate" to give up seniority rights, tenure protections (make no mistake, APPR does JUST that) and teacher autonomy while agreeing to a new test-based evaluation system so complex no one can explain it (and brag about how good it was!) and Teacher Data Reports that saw teacher's error-riddled test score-based ratings end up in the newspapers with their names attached.

That's the track record of the AFT/UFT Mulgarten forces of surrender and that's what they are about to ensure comes back to the NYSUT again.

God help us all if and when they succeed.

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?