Half of city students are in overcrowded classrooms, according to a new report. (Post)
Randi Weingarten offers suggestions for a freer PEP that’s still controlled by the mayor. (Post)
“This is big,” the Post says about Weingarten’s school board composition concession.
School construction is lagging, with 10 planned schools without even broken ground. (Daily News)
Kids from schools closed because of the flu are spending their time in parks and malls. (Times)
Parents at Brooklyn’s PS 153 want their school shut after 20 percent of kids were out sick. (Daily News)
A bill was introduced, apparently in error, that would unionize all charter school teachers. (Post)
Governor Paterson signed a law making e-mail and text message alerts available to parents. (Post)
Comptroller William Thompson found that parents have been shut out at the DOE. (Daily News)
Mayor Bloomberg is urging calm on swine flu, even as more schools close. (Daily News)
Schoolkids in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, want more security near their schools. (Daily News)
Media mogul Mort Zuckerman says technology could save our schools. (Daily News)
Angry townspeople in a California town voted to recall their entire school board yesterday. (Times)
Ed Sec Arne Duncan is responding to reports about dangerous special ed discipline. (Washington Post)
A review of scores and spending at California charter schools had mixed results. (L.A. Times)
http://www.accountabletalk.com Mr. A. Talk
Half of students are in overcrowded classrooms, and the other half is home with swine flu.
Pogue
Boy, does Randi back down with the best of them, or what? She oughta take some serious lessons from Leonie Haimson, Patrick Sullivan, and the hardworking NYC public school parents who are standing up and truly fighting back against this terribly managed DOE. With union leaders like her, who needs a union.
Michael Fiorillo
As a UFT Chapter Leader and member of the union’s governance committee – which I participated in despite my certainty that it was a sham – I can assure you that there was never any question that Randi would support mayoral control. The fact is, there would be no mayoral control without Randi Weingarten. The 2002 law giving the mayor dictatorial control over the schools could not have passed without support from the UFT, and Randi was happy to provide it. She believes in mayoral control, and has made no efforts to hide that fact. Any critical noises she has made have been little more than triangulation and theater for an increasingly intimidated and demoralized membership. Notice how she took a dive when Bloomberg decided to renege on his position regarding term limits, despite the fact that this mayor has been a catastrophe for teachers, students and public education in NYC, just as she will take a dive in this November’s election.
In fact, it is my understanding that in 2002, Sheldon Silver had a a weaker mayoral control bill, with some checks and balances, ready for submission to the Legislature, and RW was the who pushed for the law as we currently know it. Previously, the UFT has successfully blocked mayoral control legislation, and was in a position to do so in 2002, choosing not to.
The sad reality is that RW is mostly about cutting deals that benefit her ambitions to be seen as a “responsible” labor leader, in other words, one who will sacrifice the interests of her members so that she can receive a pat on the head from the likes of Rod Paige (who, after calling the NEA a terrorist organization, singled her out for praise), Eli Broad, Bill Gates, etc. On issues ranging from high stakes testing, merit pay, the weakening of teacher seniority, to the expansion of charter schools and parent input into school policy, she can be counted on – tactical derriere-covering rhetoric notwithstanding – to side with the neoliberal project to fragment and undermine public education. Just as long as the dues machine keeps chugging. In the end, she will be seen as having been too clever by half, for once the privatizers have gotten what they can from her, even the dues machine will be threatened.
Public school parents, among whom I am one, should discard any illusions that the UFT as currently constituted can be relied upon to support their interests. It’s all PR and cheap theater.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.