Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
mind reading
June 5, 2009
Weingarten’s critics speculate about her mayoral control motives
We’ve reported that people are upset with Randi Weingarten for her school governance position. But we haven’t reported the various reasons they’re suggesting for why the teachers union president is not joining mayoral control’s fiercest critics in their push for major changes to the law.
Arthur Goldstein, a teacher who was recently elected to be the union chapter leader for his Queens school, speculated that President Obama’s preference for mayoral control could have influenced Weingarten. “It could indeed be that Randi sees this is the way this is going and Randi is deciding to go with the flow,” he said. He added, “But it is actually her job to move the flow in our direction,” referring to the teachers Weingarten represents.
Other people I spoke to said the evolution of Weingarten’s position on whether the mayor should control the majority of seats on the city school board could reflect a political calculation intended to improve the union’s position for this fall, when it must negotiate a new contract. The contract variable is unique to the United Federation of Teachers among all groups who have made recommendations about how to improve school governance.
“Nobody else has changed since their initial proposals,” said Lisa Donlan, a parent activist from Manhattan. “But nobody else is in a contract negotiation position.”
Saying that she could live with Mayor Bloomberg’s preferred school board composition might have allowed Weingarten to win something for her members in the new contract, said Lisa North, a union chapter leader from a Brooklyn school.
“I’m hoping she negotiated something for it,” North said. “But it’s really too important of an issue to be negotiated away.”
Another theory is that Weingarten never believed in stripping the mayor of his power to appoint a majority of school board members, and that she only said she did because her members voted in favor of it. After all, said union activist Norm Scott, Weingarten supported mayoral control in 2002, when Mayor Bloomberg first sought to gain it. Earlier this spring, Weingarten sounded like she was in favor of strong curbs on the mayor’s power, but that was just posturing, Scott said.
“Randi will support them all the way,” Scott said about Bloomberg and Klein. “This was just part of the sham, part of the game.”
-
June 7th, 2009 7:21 pm
President Obama’s recent announcement of a forced march to charterization merely reinforces Randi’s support for mayoral control, but it’s not the cause. The reason for Randi’s support of mayoral control is that Randi supports mayoral control. There was never even an infinitesimal chance that she would oppose it in word or (especially) deed.
Randi has never hidden her support for mayoral dictatorship, but she has had to game it as a political issue within the union, since the membership - even that part of it that supports her - opposes it. And well they should: they, along with the students and parents, are the one’s who’ve had to drink long and deep from its bitter cup.
The UFT Governance Committee was a dog-and-pony show, with Randi going through the motions of rank and file participation and democratic procedure, then hurrying to make the Big Men happy, which in the short term at least should work out for her: she’ll be able to appear at press conferences with the oligarchs who are taking over the schools, and be lauded as a new kind of responsible union leader. You know, the kind that has more in common with management than with the members.
The only question for me is, why did she betray everyone so soon, even prematurely: she could have at least shown us the consideration, and the political good sense, of PRETENDING to negotiate some limits to mayoral dictatorship, and then emerged from the pre-ordained disappointing last-minute deal to say she tried her best. But no, teachers and parents - who I believe are the one’s who really feel shocked and betrayed here, since they’re less likely to be be long time observers of Randi - get the thumb in the eye weeks early, almost as an open expression of disregard and contempt, and reflective of the impunity with which our overseers behave.
-
June 9th, 2009 11:13 am
[...] “She made a deal … she traded for mayoral control for …” See here and here and here. Some postulate: a “deal” on the contract, Klein’s [...]
Leave a Reply
Mapping the Budget Cuts
2 Comments
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack