How Randi Weingarten And Other Union Leaders Help Andrew Cuomo Bring The "Death Penalty" To New York's Public School System

Last year, Andrew Cuomo promised to bring the "death penalty" to "failing schools."

This year, Andrew Cuomo has called the public school system a "monopoly" which he plans to "break" in his second term.

Cuomo doesn't seem to like teachers any more than he seems to like public schools.

Cuomo has promoted a punitive teacher evaluation system that superintendents in the Lower Hudson Valley have said is a disaster that needs to be changed as soon as possible as one of the best in the nation.

Last month, Cuomo said that teacher evaluation system needs to be revised because too many teachers are being rated "effective" or "highly effective" with it.

Last week, a highly-respected 17 year teaching veteran filed suit against the NYSED commissioner after she was rated "ineffective" in this system as a result of her students' test scores - even though her students' test scores were high in comparison with other students' scores around the state.

Last week, Cuomo promised to make the teacher evaluation system that rated a highly respected teacher "ineffective" even more punitive by adding "real sanctions" to it.

Last week, AFT President Randi Weingarten defended Cuomo's "monopoly" comments by saying they were "campaign rhetoric."

Cuomo made these comments twice - he doubled down after the Daily News first reported them - so the comments seem less like "campaign rhetoric," more like campaign promises.

Yet Randi was running interference for Cuomo even as she was also mounting a symbolic battle against TIME Magazine over a cover they ran about teacher tenure.

This wasn't the first time Randi Weingarten helped out her buddy Andy during the election cycle.

Back in the spring, Weingarten, along with UFT President Michael Mulgrew, engineered a putsch within the NYSUT to toss out the old NYSUT leadership when it started to show guts and take on Cuomo over issues and replace them with a more Cuomo-compliant leadership.

Also last spring, union leaders put pressure on the Working Families Party to endorse Andrew Cuomo over Fordham President Zephyr Teachout when they threatened the party with dissolution and financial ruin if Teachout were given the party's ballot line.

You can be sure the UFT was not part of that pressure on WFP without Weingarten's okay.

This September, when internal polling showed Teachout's running mate, Tim Wu, with a real shot to beat Cuomo's banker lobbyist running mate, Kathy Hochul, in the primary, Weingarten joined NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio in making robocalls for Cuomo's running mate, Hochul.

Hochul won her primary - Wu said the momentum in the campaign turned against him when the robocalls started.

This morning on Twitter, Randi Weingarten defended her defense of Andrew Cuomo's comments, saying she had criticized him and what more could she be expected to do?


Well, what she has done is quite clear - and quite helpful to Andrew Cuomo.

To reiterate:

She helped engineer a putsch against the old NYSUT leadership and helped install a new, Cuomo-compliant leadership at NYSUT.

She helped other union leaders push for a Working Families Party endorsement for Andrew Cuomo, a huge thing that meant Cuomo wouldn't have to worry about a third party candidate from the left during the general election (and multiple polls had shown Cuomo losing a lot of support if that happened.)

She made robocalls for Cuomo's bank lobbyist running mate when it looked like she might lose and helped the bankster lobbyist win her primary.

And now she defends Cuomo's plan to "break" public schools by calling the comments (which he made twice) "campaign rhetoric."

As I noted above, Cuomo has promised to bring the "death penalty" to schools he considers "failing" - and from comments he made this week, he seems to think the entire public school system around the state is failing.

When Cuomo "breaks" the school system, when he takes a sledgehammer to the public schools and gives them the "death penalty," that sledgehammer will have the fingerprints of AFT President Randi Weingarten on it.

Taking Cuomo On Over His Education "Death Penalty" Policies

Fred Dicker reported in the NY Post that Andrew Cuomo is looking to avoid "a head-on clash with de Blasio and the “progressive,’’ or left-of-center, wing of the Democratic Party that de Blasio represents."

Dicker says it's because Cuomo knows such a contingent would be crucial to his chances in 2016 if he runs for president.

As Cuomo revs up his "death penalty" for schools policies this year, it is important that opponents paint the Cuomo education policies as the right wing, neo-liberal, pro-privatization policies they are.

This can be done and must be done.

Cuomo is vulnerable - his approval ratings have fallen to below 50% and his re-elect numbers are down too.

He can be taken on and beaten these days.

Let's do it over APPR and the death penalty for schools.

Siena Poll Finds Cuomo Is Below 50% Approval For First Time Ever

Governor Cuomo has bludgeoned his agenda through the legislature the last few years by using his immense popularity in the state (for a while there, he was riding with 80% approval ratings.)

He is facing reelection next year and is rumored to be seeking a very ambitious agenda in order to ease that bid - including a wide range of tax cuts and an education reform package that would include state takeover of "failing" school districts (what he called giving the "death penalty" to failing schools.)

Cuomo needs high approval ratings to get this agenda through an increasingly hostile legislature angered by his Moreland Commission that has targeted members in their so-called anti-corruption probe.

But according to Siena, he no longer has those high approval numbers:

Maybe Cuomo Won't Get His Death Penalty For Schools

Daily Politics has a story out saying members of the state Legislature are angry over the Cuomo administration's treatment of them and may try and sidetrack Cuomo's legislative agenda this session:

Gov. Cuomo’s commission to investigate state government corruption threatens to torpedo his 2014 election-year agenda, legislative insiders warn.

“There’s a lot of anger among the lawmakers and they’re ready to push back," said one legislative official.

“The governor through this commission is threatening to throw away the functionality, the collegiality, that he’s had with the Legislature the last three years,” the source said.

A string of three consecutive on-time budgets and bipartisan accomplishments are now in “jeopardy,” the official said.

Perhaps the last straw was a recent round of letters asking individual lawmakers making more than $20,000 in outside income to provide info on their work, including a list of clients if they are lawyers.

The letter raises serious questions regarding the separation of powers, legislative sources said.

“It’s almost as if they are assuming everyone is guilty and ask questions later,” the first official said of the panel.

Insiders say the commission sent the letters because it feared a judge would rule it was overstepping boundaries if it issued subpoenas. The letters make it easier for the commission to publicly shame the Legislature if lawmakers don’t comply.

The Senate and Assembly have each hired outside lawyers to coordinate their pushback.

Cuomo created the commission in July to root out government corruption after the Legislature rejected his calls for ethics reform following a spate of lawmaker arrests.

“Resisting the investigation and creating an environment of gridlock and dysfunction in the Legislature doesn’t really sound like a winning election-year strategy,” a Cuomo administration source said.

Now I'm not in favor of letting the crooks in Albany get off scott free.

But as we've shown here at Perdido Street School, one of the biggest, if not the biggest, crooks in Albany is Governor Cuomo.

He's taken campaign donations from real estate interests and handed out $35 million in tax breaks.

He's taken millions in campaign donations from overseas gambling interests and expanded gambling in the state.

He's refused to reveal who donated to the Committee To Save New York, Cuomo's PAC thinly disguised as a public interest group that bludgeoned voters around the state with Cuomo's "pro-business" (i.e., anti-union agenda) ads.

In fact, he shut CSNY down rather than reveal who donated to it.

Cuomo says the Moreland Commission can look into his donations too, but so far,  the pattern has been to target Assembly members and State Senators and ignore the Cuomo administration's own criminality.

Which is what you would expect since this is Cuomo's commission.

Therefore, since Cuomo has already made the anti-corruption commission into sham justice, here's hoping Assembly members and State Senators do stick it to Cuomo this year on his agenda.

One item Cuomo plans to push through is the "death penalty" for schools - he wants to give the state the power to take over "failing" school districts or force districts to close down "failing" schools and reopen them as charters.

About the best thing that could happen here is if the Assembly and State Senate, angry over the Moreland Commission, stick it to Cuomo and make sure the state doesn't get those powers.

We'll see how this goes - Cuomo has a way of bullying everybody to give him what they want and the legislature has caved to his influence and interests before.

But I think it is an improvement if we can get an Assembly and a State Senate so angry at the governor that they refuse to work with him.

Given the the "accomplishments" Cuomo claims over the past three years - APPR, tax breaks for real estate interests and other corporations, the property tax cap that starves school districts even as Cuomo ratchets up the mandates - that's about the best gift we cold get this election year.

Andrew Cuomo Declares War Against Public School Teachers

Why did Andrew Cuomo say he believes "failing" public schools deserve "the death penalty"?

At first, when I read on the Internet that Cuomo had this, I thought the writer meant he said something close to it in a hyperbolic way.

But no, Governor Cuomo actually said it:

“There is going to be have to be a death penalty for failing schools . . . where we say the children come first, before the bureaucracy,” Cuomo told reporters during a stop in suburban Buffalo late Thursday. “If the school fails, the school has to end.”

Cuomo said options for failing schools include a takeover by the state or a takeover by a charter school.

“I don’t want Albany to sit there and tell communities how to run their schools but I do feel comfortable sitting in Albany and saying failing schools is not an option,” Cuomo said.

Such an interesting phrase to use - "death penalty" - when talking about schools.

Why not ""failing schools deserve to be closed"?

Or "failing schools cannot be allowed to continue to fail"?

I would take issue with the simplicity of those statements, since there are many reasons why schools "fail" that often have nothing to do with the schools or the teachers teaching there.

But at least the language would be less inflammatory.

To say that "failing" schools deserve "the death penalty" amounts to a declaration of war by this governor against public schools and public school teachers.

Folks, he wants to exterminate some of us.

Seriously - just look at the language he used.

Language always gives you away and the language Little Andy chose here gives him away as a  pro-charter, pro-education deform, anti-teacher, anti-union corporatist who wants to destroy the public school system and the teachers in it.

That he's purposely using language that once defined something his father was famously opposed to - the real "death penalty" for convicted criminals - is even more concerning.

It's his way of saying "I am not father, I am not Hamlet on the Hudson, I am no liberal commie pinko - I am a tough guy with tough policies who plans to get tough on 'failing' schools and put them to death."

In the short term, this language and this statement is aimed at Buffalo.

As I conjectured a month and a half ago, it seems obvious that Governor Cuomo and NYSED Commissioner King plan a state takeover of the Buffalo school district.

Cuomo and King have been pissed at Buffalo ever since that side deal the district made with the union over APPR and now they plan to get even by taking over the district, killing off the public schools and opening up charter schools either run by or patronized by their hedge fund cronies.

In the long term, though, it is a declaration of war by Governor Cuomo against teachers.

APPR was of course a strike against teachers and schools in NY State.

Forcing an APPR system on NYC teachers was a strike against NYC teachers.

But Cuomo has ratcheted up the level of animosity and hostility here by using such inflammatory language.

It is high time we return the favor.

If Governor Cuomo thinks it is time some schools be given the "death penalty" for struggles that are often beyond their means to fix, then it is time for teachers of all political ideologies to get together and help pull the plug on the 2014 Cuomo re-election plan and the Cuomo 2016 presidential plan.

Andrew Cuomo is a thug and a bully and a crook, that we've known for a while.

Now, after the "death penalty for schools" statement, he is also a war criminal against public schools.

It is time to put an end to his Reign of Terror.

How in heaven's sake he ever thought that "death penalty" was a proper phrase to use when talking about schools, students and teachers is beyond me.

But it does give you insight into the violent man he is in his heart.