Albert Shanker on Merit Pay

Shanker says some interesting and contradictory things in these statements. I raise the issue here to support my theme that in any ways Randi Weingarten has not shifted the position of the AFT/UFT far from where Shanker was coming from, though later in this post you will see Shanker say something that you won't hear from Weingarten.

Meet the Press, May, 1983

Shanker said he was urging all teachers to keep "an open mind" about merit pay. He praised elements of the plan pro-posed by Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander that was blocked by strenuous lobbying by the NEA's state affiliate. Shanker said Alexander's plan would provide "very large rewards" to a large number of Tennessee teachers, who would have a voice in determining who got the bonus pay. He said the plan had some shortcomings, but "meets many of the objections which teachers traditionally have raised."

The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, March 30, 1982

MacNEIL: Are you saying that a teacher cannot by himself or herself make himself better by an act of will in order to gain more pay?

Mr. SHANKER: That's right. If you pay me more money I will not sing any better than I usually sing, and whenever I sing I sing as well as I can, and whenever I teach I teach as well as I can.

MacNEIL: Well, why, if extra pay is an incentive for good performance everywhere else in the American system, should it not be for teachers?

Mr. SHANKER: Well, there are some things where extra pay is an incentive and works, and there are other fields -- for instance, I doubt very much that if you gave a soldier in the middle of a battle more money that that soldier would do any better. And I don't think anybody has ever proposed it. I think that people in battle generally fight as well as they can because they're fighting for their own lives. And I think a teacher in a classroom is fighting for his or her self respect, professional life, and that the -- I would add one other thing. You know, I don't know of any other field where people get punished for being satisfactory, and that's part of this proposal. If you're satisfactory you're punished. I also feel that, you know, whether you're viewed as being satisfactory or superior largely depends on how you stand in relationship or in comparison to your colleagues. And if I'm in a school, and if I know that my evaluation and rating is going to depend on not only how well I do, but [how] everyone else in that school does, I'm not going to help other teachers if I have some professional talents. Instead of cooperating with my colleagues and helping them solve prob-lems, the first thing I'm going to think of is, "Gee, if they've got this same ability that I do, I'm not going to look like I'm superior, because they all have it." So one of the things that this sets up is, instead of setting up a cooperative and mutu-ally supportive atmosphere, it sets up very destructive competition.

This discussion came out of an email from James Boutin, our former NYC colleague now working in Seattle.

Hi NYCers,

It seems we have something similar to E4E sprouting out here in Seattle. The guy below says Al Shanker endorsed merit pay. Anyone know if this is true?

Teachers United is an interesting development to me. They work with Stand for Children, support charters and merit pay, tell stories about how their TFA members raised test scores dramatically at all the schools they ever worked at, and say they support the Washington Education Association and people in the WEA while suggesting that teachers consider working outside the union to get things done....

http://crosscut.com/2012/06/21/k-12/109245/teachers-

James Boutin

Public School Teacher, www.anurbanteacherseducation.


Pat Dobosz suggested some sites:

Ed Notes Online: Merit Pay, the UFT, TJC, and NCLB

Shanker Blog » Revisiting The Merits Of Merit Pay

What Albert Shanker Said About Merit Pay « Diane Ravitch's blog

Jeff Kaufman found some interesting items

Like many issues Shanker’s views on merit pay were nuanced and at times appeared contradictory. I have attached two articles (SEE PDFs BELOW). One, a transcript from the MacNeil Lehrer News Report in 1982 seems to be emphatic in his opposition to merit pay and the second article is about an appearance less than a year later on Meet the Press (but after a then Tenn. Gov Alexander proposal to teacher distributed merit pay) in which he speaks in favor. I have not reviewed hundreds of other statements and articles he is either quoted or wrote about this issue but I am sure there are more nuanced positions in there.

John Lawhead followed up with:

Shanker's openness to merit pay in May '83 followed his endorsement of the Nation at Risk report which was released a month before.  Merit pay was one of its recommendations.  In supporting the report he reversed himself on a number of issues.

In the Kahlenberg biography Sandra Feldman is quoted saying, "We all had this visceral reaction to it. You know, 'This is horrible.  They're attacking teachers.'  Shanker's shift shocked everyone.  He obviously didn't bother waiting for consensus from the rest of the AFT leadership.  For him it didn't work that way.

Here are the pdfs from 30 years ago. Wow. Really interesting stuff. Thanks Jeff.

The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, March 30, 1982
Meet the Press, The Associated Press, May 29, 1983

Here is something Shanker said that some might wish Weingarten/Mulgrew would repeat:

Shanker, asked if his union would defend incompetent teachers against firing, said, "We'd defend them, but we defend murderers in our society, too, and rapists and everybody else. The fact is that you're innocent until proven guilty."

Reagan's Attacks Hurt Teaching Profession, Meet the Press, Al Shanker


Grading Teachers the MacNeilLehrer Report M

Arne Duncan, Segregationist?

Would the first African-American president appoint as an education secretary someone who has led Chicago backwards in terms of integration and percentage of black teachers being employed? George Schmidt has some answers.

Chicago, under Arne Duncan, has finally begun the job it was unable to do back in the days when Al Shanker (in the name of "standards") was sustaining an ethnic cleansing of the teaching force in New York City.

As you know, Chicago was always an anthesis to New York inside AFT. By the 1970s, Chicago had an enormous base of black teachers, and black leadersip at all levels within the Chicago Teachers Union. By the mid-1980s, that leadership was across-the-board. Jackie Vaughn was CTU President, and with massive support from unionized black teachers (and some others, like us here at Substance) Harold Washington had become mayor. By the time Jackie Vaughn died in 1994, the number of black teachers in Chicago's public schools nearly equalled the number of whites (with "other" gaining). By the end of the 1990s, white teachers were in the minority in the teaching force, and the majority of people working (in union jobs) in Chicago's public schools were black.

"School reform" in Chicago has been a sustained attack on those gains for black people. But, like other bourgeois attacks (especially of course the Jim Crow South under the Dixiecrats, the old "Solid South") on unionized workers, the entire class suffers when these divisions take hold.

The most grotesque thing about Barack Obama's appointment of Arne Duncan to be U.S. Secretary of Education is not (as some including former CTU president Debbie Lynch) that Duncan is "unqualified," but that Duncan has successfully led the ethnic cleansing of Chicago's teaching force (via privatization) while simultaneously ignoring Brown v. Board of Education and all federal desegregation rules (including Chicago's deseg consent decree) in a white supremacist way that would have been unthinkable at any time between the 1960s and the dawn
of this century.

1. Chicago has purged the teaching force of 2000 black teachers and principals since Duncan took over in 2001.

2. Chicago has created a segregated separate privatized school system (the charter school system of more than 80 "schools" and "campuses") since Duncan took over in 2001. That school system would be the second largest school system in Illinois were it made outside CPS.

Needless to say (especially for those of us who supported Barack Obama from "back in the day" when we first met him as an Illinois State Senator), the appointment of a segregationist privatizer and union buster to run the Department of Education is more than a bad sign. It's a clear indication of the struggle we will face in the years ahead.

Reading the entire thread about the Kahlenberg book, Sean's take on the underlying lie of 1969, and the Hirsch attack on Norm and Vera*, I'm hoping in the coming months there will be time and space to make a few of these points coherent in the pages of Substance and to our broader audience. Sean's points are among the most important, especially from the point of view of Chicago history.

And, as Sean notes in his material about 1968, our ability to counter a Big Lie with facts will continue to be challenged. After all, it's only been 40 years since "Ocean Hill Brownsville". And that Big Lie still holds central sway, not just because it's being repeated now in "Tough Liberal."

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

*NY Teacher Reporter Responds to Our Shanker Book Review

Related: Duncan's Last Move: Close 25 Schools

NY Teacher Reporter Responds to Our Shanker Book Review

Last year Vera Pavone and I reviewed Richard Kahlenberg's "Albert Shanker: Tough Liberal" for New Politics (A Journal of Socialist Thought) (http://www.newpol.org/.)

We titled it "Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon." (Get the pdf on the ICE web site.)

We tried to cover a lot of ground in our review of 40 years of UFT history. We tied the role Shanker played in the alliances with business starting in the early 80's with the catastrophe that has befallen public ed based on so much of where Shanker really stood. While some people think Randi Weingarten shifted the union in another direction, in fact she has only continued the policies set by Shanker.

We also dealt with Shanker's sell-out in 1975, a precursor to what is to befall schools in today's crisis - listen to Randi's words carefully and you will get the picture. Then there was Shanker's role in undermining teacher unions around the world based on his anti-left ideology.

Michael Hirsch, on the editorial board of New Politics, has responded. Hirsch is a reporter for the NY Teacher and employed by the UFT. Think he has a dog in the race? He does fess up in his comments that Randi Weingarten is his boss while at the same time claiming he is not responding because of that.

Interesting that at the end of his response, he is identified this way:
MICHAEL HIRSCH is a New York-based labor journalist and is a member of the editorial boards on New Politics and Democratic Left.

Not exactly truth in advertising. In Hirsch's first draft he ended with a mild criticism of Shanker, which in a follow-up he removed. Call that being careful. Very careful.

We were given half the number of words (800) that Hirsch used in our response. Thus, we were severely constrained in responding to his red-baiting and attacks on us as members of ICE where he tries to marginalize as the lunatic fringe by distorting the election results.

This comment is particularly revealing:
"But surely the point of view of habitual dissidents whose union caucus garnered just 7 percent of the vote in the last presidential election, and who remain a null factor in union politics is itself a telling critique. These were the wrong reviewers to take on Kahlenberg."

For a null factor, Weingarten and Unity spend a hell of a lot of time addressing our nullness, something Hirsch who is present at DAs and Ex Bd meetings has known full well. This goes beyond distortion into the realm of outright lies.

Hirsch also confuses the ICE position with that of TJC when he talks about strikes. As a matter of fact he seems to completely confuse the positions of ICE and TJC.

He totally misrepresents the '68 strike. And to disclaim any responsibility for the leadup to NCLB on the part of Shanker by saying he died years before the law was passed is to ignore the entire last third of Kahlenberg's book.

And for a supposed socialist, Hirsch spends a lot of time red-baiting. The very first words of his commentary? Leon Trotsky. And he makes sure to throw in Rosa Luxembourg and Lenin for good measure. Doesn't Hirsch know I'm still (barely) a capitalist?

Both responses are posted at the New Politics web site. It is worth checking out. http://www.newpol.org/. The hard copy will be out in a few weeks. I'm now a subscriber and it is a pretty serious looking journal. I'm looking forward to reading Jack Gerson's,"Where Will Obama Go?" (Jack was briefly with Coalition of NYC School Workers, a precursor of iCE, in the early 70's before he went on to bigger things. Just about every left wing teacher teacher in NYC passed through our group back then.)

I posted Hirsch's piece on Norms Notes for ease of access.

Hirsch Responds to Pavone-Scott Review of Shanker Book

Our response is also on Norms Notes. Ira Goldfine joined us in the response.

Scott/Pavone/Goldfine Response to Hirsch

Here were some comments on ICE-mail

Woodlass says:

Great response to Hirsch review.

In addition to all you've come back with in the limited space, and particularly that line you
quote below where he talks about ICE: "But surely the point of view of habitual dissidents whose union caucus garnered just 7 percent of the vote in the last presidential election, and who remain a null factor in union politics is itself a telling critique" —

Hirsch makes it seem that ICE has been around for as long as Unity has, being composed all these many decades of "habitual dissidents" who could in all this time only garner 7% of the vote. So on top of the election analysis you laid out in the response, it's also important to note that ICE is a fairly recent development in the history of this union. It's a caucus with no money, no headquarters, no access to new members, no computers connected to DoE statistics, restricted speaking time at union meetings, and in general very few ways to do any garnering at all. That it has been able to take on the Unity machine at all these past six years — and have people like Weingarten, Casey and even Hirsch take so much note — is a result of its dogged commitment to teachers and kids and a keen eye for the abuses of imperial unionism.

J says,
I think its a measure of how strong your critique was that he doesn't even attempt to defend the book.

Accountability?

Think it costs too much to reduce class size and provide other services to kids and parents in urban school systems? Create a phony one way accountability and standards movement to ignore and disparage small class size while putting the burden of accountability on teachers, schools, students and parents.

Susan Ohanian points to this article by William Greider in The Nation, Aug. 18, 2008:

Read this important article in the context of what the corporate politicos--Republicans and Democrats--have done to attack, demean, and deprofessionalize teachers--in the name of accountability.

Greider writes:

Talk about warped priorities! The government puts up $29 billion as a "sweetener" for JP Morgan but can only come up with $4 billion for Cleveland, Detroit and other urban ruins. Even the mortgage-relief bill is a tepid gesture. It basically asks, but does not compel, the bankers to act kindlier toward millions of defaulting families.

A generation of conservative propaganda, arguing that markets make wiser decisions than government, has been destroyed by these events. The interventions amount to socialism, American style, in which the government decides which private enterprises are "too big to fail." Trouble is, it was the government itself that created most of these mastodons--including the all-purpose banking conglomerates. The mega-banks arose in the 1990s, when a Democratic President and Republican Congress repealed the New Deal-era Glass-Steagall Act, which prevented commercial banks from blending their business with investment banking. That combination was the source of incestuous self-dealing and fraudulent stock valuations that led directly to the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed.

The central bank tipped its monetary policy hard in one direction--favoring capital over labor, creditors over debtors, finance over the real economy--and held it there for roughly twenty-five years. On one side, it targeted wages and restrained economic growth to make sure workers could not bargain for higher compensation in slack labor markets. On the other side, it stripped away or refused to enforce prudential regulations that restrained the excesses of banking and finance.

The only force capable of making a stand were the unions. Yet we have seen in our own UFT and AFT that they are part and parcel of this process. Have you heard one word from Randi Weingarten pointing to the disparity of the money spent for wars and bailouts compared to a true package of urban education reform? Thus, her calls for community schools without making the money connections, are just words.

But there is a long-time precedent in predecessor Al Shanker, who in 1975 used teacher pension funds to bail out the city as 15,000 teachers were laid off in a devastated the school system for over a decade with schools being left in disrepair with some closed and sold on the cheap (think they would be useful in today's overcrowded situation.) And the Tier 3 and 4 pension systems too.

Shanker followed up with Act II in the 80's when he allied with a very anti-labor business community to create the very phony accountability and standards movement that has led to today's devastation of urban public schools.

I expect capitalists in the business community to function the way they do. Just as I expect Joel Klein and Mike Bloomberg to go after teachers and the union. But the "cooperative" and "collaborative" role unions, in particular the AFT/UFT tough liberals, have played when they should have been the last line of resistance, is what has helped make all their dreams come true.

Shameless Plug:
Read Vera Pavone's and my New Politics review of Albert Shanker: Tough Liberal

Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon - Review by Vera Pavone and Norman Scott in New Politics

New Politics web site
The review has not been posted at the NP site yet but you can get it at the Indepent Community of Educators web site.
Get the pdf
http://www.ice-uft.org/ruthlessneocon.pdf

Kahlenberg on Shanker: He's Baaack

Vera Pavone and I reviewed Kahlenberg's "Tough Liberal" for New Politics and you can download a pdf or click on the link at the top of the sidebar on the right. We focused on the education reform aspect of Shanker's policies and how it has been destructive of teacher unionism. We reminded people that his book was funded by the likes of Eli Broad, who has been in the forefront of blaming teacher unions for education failure.

That the AFT and UFT has widely promoted Kahlenberg should be a clue as to where they are ideologically.

In How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War, Kahlenberg continues his theme by offering a middle ground between what could be termed the Richard Rothstein and Klein/Sharpton view of education:

....a major new fight has broken out between competing factions in the liberal education-policy community. One group argues that poverty should not be used as an excuse for failure and sees teacher unions as a major obstacle to promoting equity through education reform. The other group says education reform by itself cannot close the achievement gap between rich and poor and black and white without addressing larger economic inequalities in society. The battle, which can broadly be characterized as one between portions of the civil-rights community and teacher unions, is a movie we've seen before -- most explosively in the New York City teacher strikes of the 1960s -- and it doesn't end well. Sen. Barack Obama should follow the lead of legendary teacher-union leader Albert Shanker and recognize that both sides in the debate need to bend.


Kahlenberg raises the old "we should hold students accountable" argument. You know - hold them back. Maybe water boarding. Or shoot them.

But what about holding government and the business community accountable?

When he says Shanker never said unions should be blamed, he leaves out the fact that by going along with the accountability movement without ever talking about conditions - like the words "class size" have been banished from just about anything Kahlenberg writes - just as they were from much of Shanker's later writings - the AFT and UFT have abandoned the fight for the funding needed to truly have an impact. Read "Tough Liberal" and you will see that Shanker had no such compunctions about unlimited funding for defense budgets and wars.

He says Shanker wanted the unions to fight for better health care. But Shanker put real energy into fighting for merit pay and a standards and accountability movement that without other aspects in place, distract us from a progressive ed reform movement.

I'll leave it to Susan Ohanian's comments below to nail where this gang is coming from. But beware the empty words emanating from the final day of the AFT convention in Chicago and follow the Broad, Rotherham, Haycock, Romer, Klein, Clinton, Sharpton, Weingarten alliance. (Wars of words between Klein and Weingarten are just that - words.)

How the Left Can Avoid a New Education War
Richard D. Kahlenberg
American Prospect 2008-07-09
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=8106

Ohanian Comment:
When people are in the pockets of corporate raiders, it doesn't matter whether they call themselves liberals or conservatives in matters of education policy. As I have pointed out before, with great foreboding, these so-called liberals/progressives at The Center for American Progress wrote Barack Obama's education policy a few years back. Here's more, if you can stand it. And more. Take a look at whom Kahlenberg calls "sensible education reformers": Andrew Rothertham, Kati Haycock, and Roy Romer. And then there's the oddity of labeling teacher unions as "left" and "liberal." The whole emphasis on "bad teachers" is a red herring. Yes, there are some inadequate and even "bad" teachers, but what is rarely acknowledged these days is that they are so far outnumbered by the good ones. . . or at least there were until teachers started following the scripts shipped in from Reading First.

Russo also had a comment on the Kahlenberg piece at TWIE:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/2720236/31045894

Shanker Blows Up the World

The review Vera Pavone and I wrote, "Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon" of Richard Kahleberg's "Albert Shanker: Tough Liberal," is appearing in the summer edition of New Politics and is a good corollary to the article below since it focuses on the educational aspect of Shanker's actions and how it has done so much harm to teacher unionism. The review will be available shortly.

A must read by Thomas Sugrue in the November 12, 2007 edition of The Nation.
A lot of the background of democratic party politics - super delegates, the McGovern impact, the fractures of '68 being played out today are laid out. And Al Shanker and Richard Kahlenberg on Shanker are part of the structure of today's debates. (It was no accident the book came out last summer and was funded by the likes of Eli Broad and other regressive ed reformers.)

The article also goes a long way towards explaining the philosophical underpinnings of the UFT/AFT and their alliance with the Clintons that goes way back to the early 80's, before Randi Weingarten ever set foot in the UFT.

A choice nugget (amongst many) from Sugrue:

...the new Democratic orthodoxy evoked a wholly fictitious American past. The Democrats needed to turn the clock back to the antediluvian moment--that is, before 1968--and restore the economic opportunity, colorblindness, family values, law and order, and personal responsibility that supposedly reigned before hippies, rioters, anti-American activists and multiculturalists took over.

The man named Albert Shanker did not drop the bomb on liberalism. But he was no small part of a political and intellectual Manhattan Project that exploited the fractures of New Deal and Great Society liberalism and empowered the New Right to rebuild from the rubble.

Kahlenberg pines for a Shankerist political order. If only the Democrats had listened to Shanker. If only they had adopted a "tough liberalism" that jettisoned pesky identity politics for the neat politics of class interest; if only they had embraced meritocracy rather than harmful racial "quotas"; if only they had stood up to the dual menaces of communism abroad and rampant crime at home; if only they had rewarded merit and hard work rather than capitulating to the fashions of multiculturalism and "extreme bilingual education," then they could have thwarted the Republican juggernaut.

The full aticle is at Norms Notes.

Obama, Clinton, the UFT, Shanker, Kahlenberg

Boy, that's a mouthful.

With today's primaries promising to be somewhat important (my belief is that Obama has been damaged to such an extent, he will be hurting badly by tonight) I wanted to comment on a bunch of stuff related to the Democratic party and the splits going back 40 years to 1968.

Remember that year? Assassinations, the crazy Demo convention in Chicago, the UFT 3 month strike in Ocean-Hill Brownsville - all events that have major impact on today's events. Richard Kahlenberg's "Tough Liberal" spends a lot of time justifying Shanker's actions and blaming the New left, the New Democrats, the limousine liberals, etc for the problems the party has had.

As I read it I kept saying- this book came out at this time as justification for Hillary Clinton to be president. Do many of the attacks on Obama point back to 40 years of splits? Do the wounds of the '68 strike still play a role in the Obama-Clinton split? These are issues worth exploring and we'll take a shot at it at some point this week - if I can force myself to open up Kalhlenberg's book once again.

By the way, a review of Kahlenberg's book (funded by Eli Broad and other foundations that just love the ed reform teacher attack movment) written by Vera Pavone and myself will be published in New Politics summer edition. Interestingly, Michael Hirsh, a writer for the NY Teacher and a member of NP's board, will write a response in the following edition. Hmmm. Will Shanker/Kahlenberg come up smelling like roses? A funny thing, but the NY Teacher edition following our submission of the review had an article by Kahlenberg "explaining" Shanker's real position on charter schools.

Al had a lot of splaining to do that goes way beyond charter schools.

Seniority Be Damned!

When you get on an airplane, peek in the cockpit. Do you feel better or worse if there's a gray-haired gent sitting in the pilot's seat? How would you feel if you saw, say, a 22 year old? How do you feel about seniority now?

NYC Educator today raises an interesting point in his "They Should be Shocked! Shocked!" piece (Claude Rains, where are you?)

It's funny to read in the UFT paper that they've filed a discrimination suit against the city. Apparently, the Absent Teacher Reserve is largely composed of senior teachers. Amazingly, principals, who now have to pay salaries out of their own school budgets, prefer to hire newer teachers for half the price.

Clearly no one in the UFT anticipated this when they agreed to Klein's third reorganization. This was the reorganization that made principals pay salary lines out of their own budgets. UFT bigshots are shocked that principals snap up newbies at half the price while senior teachers are left to rot in the ATR brigade.

Weingarten and Klein both gain from the attack on senior teachers. The more years people teach, the more they see how the UFT and the DOE operate and the better chance some of them will become resisters. Just look at the experienced core that is built around his blog. Many only became resisters in recent years.

A younger crowd without a memory of an active union helps Unity keep power. Unity talks the game on seniority - they've been finagling these law suits for years, for PR purposes. People who have been tracking them know just how they've made sure to file these things in a way that will take as long as possible - the idea is to shut people up and say - "See, we're doing something." Ignore what they say, but watch what they do.

Even Mike Mendel's attack on Klein's tenure manipulations bragged about how many ways principals have to deny tenure. The UFT unofficial position on the non-tenured is to say "wink, wink, do what you will." That was the basis of his outrage. "We are letting you do anything you want and you still want to make a political deal out of this?"

It works for Klein too in the same way - fearful and manipulated, new teachers will ignore even the union rules they have. Like a duty free lunch hour, one of the basic rights in the contract, is being ignored all over the place, especially in elementary schools where it is considered unpatriotic to refuse to attend "working" lunches.

The UFT has been part of the attack on senior teachers - underground by agreeing to gut the contractual protections, starting with going along with Klein not to allow seniority transfers. Klein used this as his opening salvo when he took over, claiming these people were all incompetent. I even saw Randi at a City Council meeting not defend these transfers but brag how we were cooperating. These were maybe 600 people a year and they were attacked like this was the cause of educational failure.

One of the ironies is that Klein also attacked these transfers because "they were removing needed experienced teachers from the ghetto schools that needed them." What bull, considering how the DOE turned this around. Klein said the same thing in the last reorganization, claiming the "white" schools got more money because of higher teacher salaries. That is how he sells his program to the black and Hispanic communities. Playing the race card.

I knew many excellent teachers who after 20 years got tired of battling with struggling students and wanted to end their careers working with a different population. Principals always resisted these transfers and for years managed to hide openings - just check all the young kids teaching in Staten Island for many years while teachers who were residents and working in Williamsburg waited years for a transfer.

But many of my friends found it so much easier to teach when they got to these schools because discipline was easy as pie. They were often looked at within a year or two as one of the best. Were there some rotten apples? Of course. But these were magnified by Klein and others who spread stories about them - check Sol Stern's book about the awful math teacher his kid at Stuyvesant ended up with after transferring from Seward Park. He built his rep with the right wing anti-teacher crowd on the back of that teacher.

The UFT, always not wanting to appear to be defending bad teachers, is willing to allow good and bad to go to slaughter, so they can claim "we are a union of professionals" that help remove poor teachers. This is not just a Weingarten thing, but comes directly from Al Shanker - some of his quotes will make your hair stand up. From merit pay to seniority to the use of a testing regime.

I just finished working on a review of the Kahlenberg book on Shanker and that has provided a deeper understanding of how and why the UFT has made the moves it has. They have not been outfoxed by Klein. Philosophically, they've been there before Klein ever set foot in Tweed.

In fact, there's a defense of seniority, with all the attending ills. I taught for 27 years in a school in a poor neighborhood and most people spent their careers there. New teachers were absorbed every year a few at a time and working next door to senior teachers always had people to rely on. Of course, the cushy positions were filled by seniority. In some ways that worked. After all, you spend 10 or 15 or 20 years in the all-day classroom, maybe it's better for the teacher and the kids for you to do a less intensive job.

Ok. I know the argument that new teachers shouldn't be throw into the fray right away. My first year and a half, I lucked out and was an ATR (they had them in '67 and '68 when they overhired) and I went through hell. But I learned without ruining a class, other than the day I had them. By my 2nd year I felt like a semi-pro and when I took over my first class midway through that year, I really knew what I was doing.

So my solution is to either set up an internship program and/or make the new teachers ATR's instead of the senior teachers, a massive waste of talent and money.

Was the Nation Really At Risk?

... Twenty Five Years Later

Richard Rothstein has done some work on "A Nation At Risk" report which started the current ed "reform" movement. Standards and one-way accountability (for schools and teachers only) followed. Many of us in the anti-standardista movement (see Ohanian) have suspected all along this was a business/political plot to begin the private take over of the public school system. And they seem to be doing pretty well. Unfortunately, our own union, the AFT/UFT have played an integral role in their success.

Richard Kahlenberg's "Tough Liberal" bio of Shanker states:
Diane Ravitch called it the most important education reform document of the twentieth century. And Al Shanker's role in the report's reception was pivotal."
Shanker stated his support for the report in a major speech at the NY State United Teachers convention on April 30, 1983. Teachers should not dismiss reforms they had long resisted, so long as reforms are tied to higher teacher salaries and infusion of new funds in education. (Kahlenberg, p. 276). Of course, Kahlenberg, funded by Eli Broad, the Century Foundation, etc. thinks Shanker's support was an even better thing than white bread.

Shanker's embrace... represented an enormous departure from past AFT policy. Here was a major labor-union leader endorsing a report that said public education was in trouble, proposed merit pay, had the strong backing of business, deemphasized the inportance of labor's equality agenda, and put emphasiss on all kids rather than the poor." (p. 278.)

Voila- No Child Left behind.

The whole idea was explained by Shanker as a way to forestall vouchers. As was his charter school idea. But we'll go into that another time.

The problem was that Shanker spent the rest of his life pushing the reforms without the funding (again, class size reduction is nowhere in the equation.) Not that we believe the reforms being pushed would ever work, even with more funding.

Note that teacher salaries have risen, but in exchange for contract givebacks and longer days and school years, not a raise in most books. To Shanker (and Weingarten) being able to claim teachers make more was OK. In their world, the professionalization of teachers (an idea which separates them from other unions - like, horrors, the idea of a general strike with other workers is oh, so left) means making teaching more of a full-time job in exchange for money. Many teachers do not agree.

When Al Shanker signed onto the results in 1983, he created the alliance with the business community and doomed the teacher movement to follow along. Call it "reform without funding." It cemented what many of us teaching in NYC since the late 60's saw happening - the UFT had already given up the ghost of fighting for the serious level of funding needed for reforms that would work - especially lowering class size, an issue we in the opposition were constantly raising.

We heard all sorts of arguments why this couldn't happen. The "no space" case was laid to rest when the UFT sat by without a whimper as schools were closed and sold off after the 1975 fiscal crisis. At least three in my district (14) were handed to the Hasidic community and they're still in use.

You know the drill. It's all about low expectations and lack of standards and lack of quality teachers. Fix those and "voila" the so-called achievement gap will be closed. (We agree there's a gap, but this expression has been misused.)

The nation-wide mania for ed reform has turned public schools into a forced factory model with federal mandates forcing states local school districts, schools, school leaders, and teachers into a rigid test-driven agenda where they will be rewarded and punished according to how they carry out these mandates.

This model includes high stakes testing, frequent and heavy-handed monitoring, forcing specific educational programs on schools, closing down public schools, hiring and firing teachers and supervisors based on student achievement, forcing school systems to adopt longer school days and years, punishing senior teachers, shifting students to private schools and hiring private contractors to take over functions that were formerly done through the public systems.

The stated rationale is that our education system is failing too many children and only a top-down overhaul will change this. A corollary to this is that only disinterested researchers (rather than experienced educators) can determine how to make the system work. Teachers are the enemies of reform because instead of caring about children or education, they put their own self-interest first: protecting their jobs, high salaries, and work rules that make life easier for them.

Ultimately, the focus is on teacher unions - that they are a major obstacle to reform: Work rules limiting class size and time in the classroom, protection of incompetent teachers, inflexibility in regard to teaching methods.

Eduwonette asked: Has "A Nation at Risk" Done More Harm Than Good?

Why? First, Rothstein argues, the report wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. The report mistook the changing composition of SAT test takers for a half a standard deviation decline in SAT scores since the 1960s. Second, Risk placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. While education surely plays a part in economic growth, he shows that our economic vicissitudes are driven by factors much larger and more complex. Third, he writes, Risk ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

Rothstein concludes:

A Nation at Risk was well-intentioned, but based on flawed analyses, at least some of which should have been known to the Commission that authored it. The report burned into Americans’ consciousness a conviction that, evidence notwithstanding, our schools are failures, and a warped view of the relationship between schools and economic well-being. It distracted education policymakers from insisting that our political, economic, and social institutions also have a responsibility to prepare children to be ready to learn when they attend school.

The full Rothstein report from the Cato Institute is here.

That Shanker bought into it was significant and ultimately sold out teachers. The Democratic party joined in, with the Clintons and Shanker forming an alliance. What's needed today is a counter attack by progressive reformers, who have been termed "status quo defenders" by the regressive ed reformers, who have misused the language of the civil rights movement, with Mayor Bloomberg actually comparing some of his work in NYC ed reform to Martin Luther King.

See Leonie Haimson here and Dan Brown's commentary here and Elizabeth Green's report in the NY Sun, where whe quoted Bloomberg: "We are doing the things, I think, that if Dr. Martin Luther King was running the New York City school system, he would have done. And I think that if you were running the New York City school system, you would have done."

Unfortunately, many in the black community have bought into this argument. Our job is to reacapture the language and policies of true reform. Come to our Teachers Unite forums on April 15 and May 8 to join the debate.

Randi and Al

Update: Some audio and video of a Kahlenberg "Tough Liberal" appearance at NYU on April 1 is posted at David Bellel's blog.

Education Notes has been exploring some of the roots of the alliance of the business community and the teacher unions. It did not begin with mayoral control in Chicago or New York. It began in the early 1980's and the leading advocate of much of what we are seeing today was AFT/UFT president Albert Shanker. The monster has grown in a way that has undermined the very teacher union movement in which he played a major role.

It is no accident that Richard Kahlenberg's hagiography of Shanker, Tough Liberal, was released in this climate as a way to justify Shanker's leadership of the educational reform movement that has so devastated teacher unionism at the basic level and reversed so much of what was won. (See NYC Educator on the NY Times article on Weingarten for a superb summary of these losses.) This weekend we will begin publishing excerpts from the book as a way to examine some of the deeper connections between teacher unions and the "reform" movement and to demonstrate that the ball started rolling down the alley long before Weingarten came into power.

"What would Al do today?" This is a refrain we often hear, with the hint that we wouldn't be in this pickle if he were around. I don't buy it. I have been a critic of Weingarten, but was also a critic of Shanker for many of the same reasons. One difference between them is that Shanker dismissed critics like they were fleas, whereas Weingarten often takes things personally. After one particularly acid email exchange with her in which she practically accused me of abusing her, I responded with "It's politics, not personal. Al always understood that. You don't."

Weingarten's attitude towards criticism and her consequent attempts to make it appear she is appeasing everyone is one of her major flaws. "Like water rolling off the back" is not a phrase that is part of her vocabulary. Some say, "She just wants to be loved by everyone." Maybe. But it runs deeper than that. Shanker was not only a political animal, he was also a severe ideologue. Weingarten has a very broad, flexible ideology that always seems up for grabs. For instance, she has changed from support of the Iraq war to opposition. Shanker would still be out there. But then, the AFT/UFT is so tied to the Clintons, a relationship that was started by Shanker in the 80's when Clinton was governor, maybe Shanker would have modified his position in relation to Hillary's campaign. I somehow doubt it. (He believed the US should never have withdrawn from Vietnam.)

At the AFT, Weingarten will stay within the broad guidelines Shanker laid down and continue to cooperate with the very people looking to destroy teacher unionism at the ground level. By this, I mean in the schools. The institution of teacher unions controlled by massive bureaucracies is only being attacked by the right wing. The UFTs' partners are Democratic party people and they understand the need for the union structure to be there to help sell "the plan" and control the rank and file membership.

The AFT is in many ways is a lighter job than being president of the UFT. Doing both is a challenge. A major danger Weingarten faces is that water that just won't roll off her back.

Quack! Quack!


Ed Note: Come to hear Lois Weiner explain a lot of this background and put things into context at the Teachers Unite forum at Julia Richman HS complex (67th and 2nd Ave) on April 15 at 5 PM.

Message from TAG: Weingarten - Failed Labor Leader

UPDATED April 2

The message below was sent from Teachers Advocacy Group (TAGNYC). They blame Weingarten, perhaps not realizing the longstanding position of the UFT regarding people branded fairly or unfairly as "bad" teachers. The UFT has always been concerned about being seen as protecting teachers who have been labeled as "poor" for fear of negative publicity. The Richard Kahlenberg Shaker bio reports that as far back as the 1969 contract, "...a provision for the development of objective criteria of professional accountability" was agreed to by Shanker, who said, "those who can't be improved and who are functioning at a very poor level [what are the criteria?], we're going to have to have the courage to sat that...you may be good at some other thing, but you're not good at this."

Notice the use of the word "we're." Who, me kimosabe? All in the name of what I consider a phony professionalism. Don't get me wrong. Under proper conditions, teachers could play such a role and I would be all for teachers making these decisions - if they had control of the school environment. (I'll get into what I mean by this in a future post.) But they don't. Therefore, the union's job is to defend every teacher rigorously and leave it to some other agency to take care of incompetent teachers. I would favor a body independent of the DOE and the UFT.

Again from Kahlenberg (p. 288): Peer review was common among professors, doctors, and lawyers, who police themselves.Shanker said: "it would be the first time in the history of American education that teaches would govern themselves."

How does Shanker equate peer review of teachers with these professions, which have a higher level of control than teachers ever could have? And by the way, how many doctors have you heard of being "peer reviewed" out of the profession? In the early 80's Shanker said, "a lot of people who have been hired as teachers are basically not competent." Shanker was selling peer review as an alternative to threats to abolish tenure.

The "bad teacher and the unions that protect them is the cause of all the ills of urban public ed" argument is a bogus one. How do you explain the achievement levels in right to work states like Florida where unions have so much less control?

How about your own education experience? Think of your own teachers. How many extraordinary teachers did you have? How many horrors? How inspired or damaged were you by either end of the scale of teacher quality? Somehow many of us survived the bad teachers. I saw some kids in my school have one excellent teacher after another and those that would do well did and those that wouldn't do well didn't.

Teachers guts and experience tell them this is all a crock. Some young teachers just starting out see some impact in the early years. It took me about a decade to see the long-term results as kids started drifting back as they grew up. That's how you get some perspective.

The public seems in much more danger from incompetent police, doctors, lawyers and politicians (see one George Bush) than from incompetent teachers - the worst of whom are often driven out of teaching by the daily failure of facing kids' scorn. Or they just go into administration and abuse teachers who actually can do the job.

Though at times it may make your skin crawl, I recommend reading the Kahlenberg 400 page apology for Shanker's actions. That Al Shanker and the AFT have been promoting this claptrap surprises even veteran NYC teachers. Weingarten is just following a script laid out a long time ago.

Anyway, here's the message from TAG.

Weingarten: Failed Labor Leader

Randi Weingarten is looking to her new career as head of the AFT. That much larger pool of teachers must understand what they are getting. A failed labor leader. Randi, through her position, is in an excellent position to advocate for children and to negotiate health and welfare benefits for her membership. How well she performs either of these two functions demands future critical evaluation. What we address here is her inability to function as a labor leader. Make no mistake. Teachers are members of the labor force. We are not independent contractors or consultants able to individually control our own terms and conditions of employment. And the most important condition of employment is the right to remain employed. Remain in the profession we chose. Ms. Weingarten does not want to be seen as the protector of teachers' job rights: The press and the public would label her a "protector of incompetents." But the teachers who are being forced out of their jobs- the ATRs, the whistle-blowers, the questioners, the teachers who dared to exercise their transfer rights, and the teachers who make too much money - are not incompetents. These teachers are the scapegoats being used to further Bloomberg, Klein, and yes, Randi Weingarten's political ambitions.

Weingarten has proven she does not have the stomach to advocate for teachers' rights to their jobs. She has colluded in turning NYC teachers into at-will employees. Her defense for doing so- "The UFT was not strong enough to fight."

Questions TAGNYC has for Randi Weingarten:

1. Why did you not educate your membership about the implications of the givebacks in the 2005 contract? You and your lawyers knew the possible if not probable consequences. You can't blame the membership for running to take the money since you did not do your job in educating the membership. Labor leaders don't invoke the adage "Buyer beware" when the `buyer' is the membership.

2. Will you admit that you feared for the careers of the more senior teachers in the wake of the 2005 contract and the empowerment of principals? Will you admit that you communicated this fear to your district reps? You hoped Bloomberg-Klein would go easy on the senior teachers. You lost and we lost. Labor leaders should never "depend upon the kindness of strangers."

3. Why did you not rally the members to make a stand against Bloomberg-Klein? 80,000 plus teachers in your corner and you did nothing to get them on the street (strikes weren't necessary- why not mass protests during rush hours, etc)? Oh, right, you were and are afraid of antagonizing the public. Too cautious to be a labor leader.

4. Why do you tell your members "Wait until 2009?" You see 2009 as a time when friends of `labor' come back into office. How courageous! Who can't `lead' when times are good and ears are sympathetic. You failed to lead in tough times. Too many of NYC teachers- the competent teachers- have, and are suffering the devastating consequences of your failed leadership in the run-up to 2009. Will many of these teachers be employed in 2009?

5. Why do you hide behind the 3020a process? Rather than using the law as the pretext for not intervening, why are you not railing against the farce of the 3020a process?

6. Why don't you state publicly what is said privately by district reps, chapter chair people, and OSI: Frivolous charges of incompetence, verbal, corporal, and sexual abuse are being used by principals to remove competent teachers from their schools?

7. Why have you not led your members in vocal, body-on-the line protests against the absurdity of turning competent teachers into ATRs? Why won't you admit loudly and publicly that the ATR paradigm is the road to unemployment for high salaried, competent teachers?

8. Why have you not led your members in vocal, body-on-the-line protests against the willful destruction of competent teachers' careers by incompetent, insecure, and unethical principals?

9. Who is defending your teachers in the schools? Do you know that most of your chapter chair people and district reps have abdicated the duty to advocate? Do you know of the despair being felt by teachers who know they don't have a union willing or able to defend them within the schools?

10. How do you reconcile your claim to be an advocate for the students when their teachers- new hires and senior teachers- are stampeding out of the NYC school system?

11. On a NY1 news show last week, in criticism of the budget cuts, you chastised Klein and advised him to "Show some leadership in tough times." Ms. Weingarten, how have you shown leadership in protecting your competent teachers during the tough Bloomberg-Klein times?


Teachers are urged to email Ms Weingarten with any of these or other questions. IT IS PAST TIME FOR HER RESPONSE. Not an opt ed piece but a question and answer format where Ms. Weingarten does not control the floor, or the questions asked, or the time allotted to each response.
rweingarten@uft.org

Shuffling the Deck on the UFT Titanic

"He won't last 6 months." Thus spoke an observer upon hearing Jeff Zahler was replacing the affable and capable Michael Mendel as the UFT's Staff Director at the end of the last school year. "He doesn't have the temperament for the job," she said.

And so it has come to pass, as Zahler, noted for his red-baiting attack on Kit Wainer during the 2007 election campaign amongst other lovable things about him, will be leaving the post next week, but will remain as the head of Unity Caucus. Oh, those deck chairs.

His replacement will be Manhattan District High School rep for small schools, Leroy Barr. Barr will be the 4th staff director since strongman Tom Pappas left the post a few years ago. Under Weingarten, the staff director position has lost some of its dominance as she is a hands on micromanager (or meddler to some) and there is not a clear chain of command with so many political appointments who can go right to Weingarten over the head of the staff director.

With her expected move to the AFT Presidency next July, Weingarten must firm up the home front just in case a serious opposition should emerge. The brilliant move of buying off the long-time opposition, New Action, can only last so long as their support in the schools dwindles to microscopic levels. (Is New Action Really a Caucus?)

The staff director has often been viewed as the 2nd in command – Sandra Feldman held that position before being elevated to UFT Presidency when Albert Shanker finally gave up the position after holding both AFT and UFT positions for 11 years. She appointed Pappas, who was considered by some a possible replacement for Feldman at one point. But Feldman and Shanker had their eye on Randi Weingarten as a better choice than the rough and tough Pappas, who has run the all-important Retirement Chapter since he gave up his post as staff director. At that time Weingarten handed the position to Queens Borough Rep Elizabeth Langiulli, which quickly turned into a disaster. Then came Mendel who seemed to be doing fairly well (he always seemed to be available) before he was kicked upstairs. Maybe he was too popular.

So, has Leroy Barr suddenly jumped into the race as a possible successor to Weingarten when she moves to take over the AFT this July? We think not, certainly at this time. The leading contenders to take over for Weingarten one day have been Elementary School VP Michelle Bodden (who is rumored for reassignment), the up and coming Vocational HS VP Michael Mulgrew and Mendel. None of these choices really work for Weingarten's purposes, though Bodden is considered the most "presidential."

Ed Notes' position has long been that Weingarten will hold on to the UFT Presidency as long as feasible, but to do so she needs to strengthen the home front to cover for her while she is traipsing around the country. The next election in 2010 will be the telling factor. If she planned on not running at that time one would think there would be a clear successor who could use the next 2 years to make himself/herself known to the members. Barr's appointment only further muddies the waters.

I remember Shanker running through a few successors - Herb Magidson was one around 1975 before he was kicked upstairs to NYSUT – before settling on Feldman, who some people thought would have a tough time filling Shanker's shoes, but in retrospect, managed fairly well. I find it interesting the number of people who tell me they miss her after dealing with Weingarten, which is surprising considering she was not Miss Warmth. But there was a certain "what you see is what you get" with the late Feldman that would be refreshing today. It is hard to imagine she would buy off New Action, especially with Shulman, whom she had no respect for as the leader. And with his old left background, Feldman's right wing Social Democrats USA (SDUSA) party ideals would curdle in her stomach.

Feldman also had a "teacher" mentality even though she did little teaching. But she trained as a teacher and was a socialist with a trade union background. (I was at the AFT convention in Washington in 2004 when she made her farewell speech and was very impressed as she focused on her activities in the civil rights struggles of the 50's and 60's.) Actually, despite the condescending arrogance that at times came from her and her inner circle, I sort of miss her too.

It was well known before Weingarten ever set foot in a school that she was the chosen one. She never taught and rose through the ranks but was a lawyer who was given a part-time teaching position while also working at the UFT so she could claim legitimacy as a teacher as Feldman's successor. Give both Shanker and Feldman credit in that they defined clear successors. Weingarten is too insecure to have her own Weingarten-like successor and this lack of talent near the top will have a long-time impact.

The UFT, the largest local in the world with almost 200,000 members, controls the NY State United Teachers which recently merged with the NEA in NY state (the idea of a national merger is on hold) and thus controls the AFT. That is why Weingarten is assured of being elected AFT Pres.

But there are serious dangers for Weingarten's power base if she turns the reins over to a powerful and ambitious successor as she was. Stories abound of friction between her and Feldman when the latter tried to tell her what to do. Weingarten quickly moved to replace Feldman/Shanker loyalists with her own people. What would stop a successor from doing the same no matter how much she felt she trusted that person? The reins of power are the reigns of power and we know how power can make people so light-headed they become blind.

Maybe Weingarten is trying to trisect – a troika, or quadrisect – a "quadrumvirate"- the leadership so no one person gets too much power or gets too popular with the rank and file.

Both Bodden and Barr are African-American. Weingarten has diversified the UFT Executive Board ethnically and racially, though certainly not politically, as all members, including the 8 New Action members who received the "gift" from Weingarten, adhere rigidly to the Unity line. Ed Notes has long maintained that a politically diversified EB not dominated by people on the UFT dole and that reflected the realities in the schools, would have a positive impact on the union.

Watch to see who emerges as a major spokesperson when Weingarten is not around. It will be very interesting if it does turn out to be Barr, who from my own limited contact seems a decent guy. In his performance as District Rep I've heard generally good things with a few minor complaints. Everyone in the union benefits with a responsive staff director. We wish him well in his new position.

Triangulation 2 from George Schmidt and a Question on Shanker and Democracy

This is a video of a statement/question I made at the Century Foundation breakfast in November sponsoring the Kahlenberg book tour which was taped by CSpan. Weingarten was on this panel defending the UFT charter school and pointing to how the only group in the business community that supported her was the Broad Foundation. I guess that was some response to attacks on the ties between the UFT/AFT/Shanker /Weingarten and the anti-union business community.

I pointed out there was another view on Shanker overall and on democracy in particular and asked why the business community was only interested in ed reform on the cheap - ABM - Anything But Money - but plenty of time blaming the teachers - I didn't get to talk about the "culture of low expectations" or the answer being lots more professional development, but never class size.




George Schmidt on ICE-mail in response to the triangulation post a few days ago:

12/25/07
Colleagues and friends:
Merry Christmas.

It's been the same here in Chicago for some time. And the same story could be written today about Barack Obama as he triangulates his way towards the same policies as the Clintons, only with some New Age charisma added. We know what the Clintons have wrought through corporate "school reform". Let's keep a close eye on what the Obamaites will bring under the same ideology.

AFT and the Chicago Teachers Union also use the Hart polling firm to shore up their prejudices. Rather than leading, they "traingulate," as the NYT story reported Sunday.

But here is one to remember. Four years ago, in December 2003, I sat with the staff of the Chicago Teachers Union while people reported on a Hart poll of the unioni's 35,000 person membership. That data formed some of the basis for Debbie Lynch's 2004 election campaign (as opposed to having a grass roots organization in each of the city's 600 schools). A month later, insult was added to injury when Jan Schakowsky's husband, Bob Creamer (of the same "triangulation" crowd in the Democratic Party) became Debbie's "campaign consultant." Creamer didn't even know that the union's rules precluded a caucus from getting the home phone numbers of voting members to do massive phone banking (one of the stocks in trade of that type of election planning), nor was there any plan for a GOTV push the final week.

Result #1? Debbie lost the election in two phases, first by not getting a clean majority in a four-way race in May, then by losing by 500 votes in June. After a flurry of media events, Stewart took over the reins of the CTU in August 2004. It's been downhill even more quickly since then, as recent numbers show.

Result #2? The Chicago Teachers Union, under the new leadership of Marilyn Stewart, has a sliver over 30,000 members, and is declining faster than anyone can count in the face of school closings and charterizations here in Chicago.

Irony #1. A recent Hart poll showed that the members of the CTU are completely confused on such basic issues as whether Mayor Daley is good for the public schools or not, or whether Arne Duncan (our "CEO", as Klein is your "Chancellor") is, too.

That's leadership for you.

Let's not forget that "triangulation" in the 1930s left the USA unarmed at the time of Pearl Harbor. One of the books handed down to me by my family was a thing called "Common Sense Neutrality", a collection of essays by a bunch of isolationists and pro-Nazis.

My Dad, who was in the U.S. Army in 1941 before Pearl Harbor, talked about using wooden "rifles" and "machine guns" during the massive maneuvers in Louisiana two months before Pearl Harbor. The "tanks" they had to fight with and against were often decorated Model Ts or souped up jeeps. That's one of the reasons why GIs were massacred at places like Kasserine Pass during the early days of combat against Germany.

And, it's still possible that had Hitler not declared war on the USA after Pearl Harbor, a declaration of war against Nazi Germany might have been difficult in the U.S. Congress.

Triangulation has a long and ugly history in this country. Many of our comrades were hounded in later years (after the Nazis had been defeated) for being "premature anti-fascists." I'm glad to have been working with all of you premature anti "school reform" people while Rani and Ed dither around looking for a center that is really way out there on the right (just as, it later turned out, "Common Sense Neutrality" was partly subsidized by the Nazis Fifth Column on the East Coast).

Best for the holidays,

George Schmidt
Editor, Substance


George,
One of the themes of the Kahlenberg book is that Shanker was fighting off the anti cold war "isolationists" on the left who wanted to lighten defense spending and focus on the problems here at home. He pretty much gives Shanker credit for the fall of the iron curtain – the glories of "tough liberalism."

One the ideas behind our forum this Thursday is to look at the reasons this book is being promoted at this time and by whom: Century, Broad, Chester Finn. Reading that Times piece on Sunday tied some things together -- the tough liberal concept is part of the Clinton campaign for the presidency.

If you can stand it watch the c-span program at this link . The panel had Bela Rosenberg, Eugenia Kemble, Diane Ravitch, Randi. I got to ask one question near the end but they cut me off.

Here is a link to a video of the short time I got to speak.

The speaker after me was Velma Hill who headed the earliest efforts to organize paras into the UFT (one of the good things). The old gang gathers.

Kemble is an ideologue in the Shanker mode who wants to kill democracy in order to save it from communism, which to them included anyone on the left or anyone who opposed their "enlightened" policies. Thus they are entirely justified in their minds in changing and manipulating union rules to keep power. Rosenberg wrote many of Shanker's "Where We Stand Columns."

New Century has put up short segments on you tube of each speaker. A pretty intensive effort to get the word out.

Norm

I put up The Nation's piece "Shanker Blows Up the World" here at Norms Notes.

Here is a direct link to my "question" which was in response to Eugenia Kemble's claim that the UFT was democratic and that complaints about democracy came only because the opposition lost all the time. I pointed out that when they did win the high school VP election they changed the rules.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haB1X2HXkhM

The entire cspan video is at: http://www.booktv.org/program.aspx?ProgramId=8957&SectionName=&PlayMedia=No

The Roots of UFT Policy Forum

Thurs. Dec. 27 11-2pm in the Midwood section of Brooklyn.

We are running a forum this Thursday at 11 am in Brooklyn that will delve into the UFT's response to the major issues facing NYC teachers.

Many people think Randi Weingarten has turned the union in a new direction from its roots.
Is this really true when the UFT/AFT has a certain history that goes back to Al Shanker on many of the push button issues of today?
Why does the UFT support mayoral control?
Certain types of merit pay?
High stakes testing?
Reducing teacher due process rights?
The end of seniority?
Charter schools - deals with Green Dot?
Why does the UFT have a basic mistrust in its own members?
Why is the UFT leadership so restrictive of democracy?

The roots of many of these policies go way back to before Weingarten ever set foot in the UFT building. In fact I surmise there was a talent search to find someone with her skill set to assure a continuance of these long-term policies. For those of you who think recent contracts are a result of her being bamboozled by BloomKlein, she has continued most UFT policies with great skill while controlling the membership. Someone said to me that Unity always bought off people who had flirted with the opposition (ie. people like Leo Casey and Lynn Winderbaum as just 2 examples.) But Randi's brilliant innovation was buying off the entire New Action Caucus. Now, there's creative management.

One of the issues we will explore is what areas has Weingarten has changed the direction of the UFT, if any.

Examining these issues will bring some clarity in understanding certain basic issues.

We hope to continue the discussion in future sessions (possibly during the midwinter break in Feb. and the spring break) and to publish something afterwards.

I was asked why this is important at this time?

My immediate response was that ideology, not individuals drive AFT/UFT policy. Thus, when Randi Weingarten eventually (and not too soon I would bet as the home front of Unity in terms of capable personnel is not exactly firm) gives up her position as UFT president, there might be hope her replacement will take the UFT in another direction. Don't bet on it. Weingarten is trying to shape up the top level of Unity to keep things in line while as AFT president she races around the country to try to elect Hillary. (Of course if Hillary is not the nominee, that might have an effect.)

One might ask why such a big push for the Richard Kahlenberg Shanker bio, which justifies almost all of Al Shanker's policies, especially his alliances with the business community that has led to many of the destructive policies that have put public schools under such attack? Why is the concept of "Tough Liberalism" which includes a major attack on the left, being shoved in people's faces? Why is the New Century Foundation and the Eli Broad foundation back this book?

Lots of questions. We hope to find some answers.

Thurs. Dec. 27 11-2pm
There is still room.
Contact me at normsco@gmail.com if you are interested in attending and I will send you details.

Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB

This is the first piece of 23 parts (so far). Kathy Emory attended the high stakes testing conference John Lawhead and I attended in Birmingham Al. in 2003. Here, Emory "detailed the convergence of two heretofore unconjoined worlds: the world of big business, and the world of educating kids."

We hope to examine the considerable role Albert Shanker and the AFT/UFT played in this conjoining at our upcoming conference on December 27.

All parts accessible here:
http://www.diatribune.com/bush-profiteers-collect-billions-nclb

Bush Profiteers collect billions from NCLB

Much was said about George W. Bush’s fundraising prowess in 2000 and 2004, when he created labels like "Bush Pioneers" to identify those who shook down donors and bundled the lucre for his campaigns. But hard on the heels of his inauguration, he might’ve just as appropriately created a new label, "Bush Profiteers," to identify those who first turned his decayed ideologies into law – inventing new spigots through which Bush’s businessmen-backers could suck federal funds – and who then vacated public service to collect their own lucre as lobbyists for those businessmen and their companies.

If you needed a perfect example of this model of lawmaking-turned-moneymaking, you might consider Bush’s vaunted No Child Left Behind. And if you needed a perfect example of the Bush Profiteer, you might consider the first "senior education advisor" he imported from Texas, the architect of NCLB himself.

I offer a simple thesis: Several large corporations and their lobbyists have profited from Bush’s NCLB by tapping billions of dollars in standardized testing and in "supplemental education services" funds since its passage in 2001. They’re lining up now to expand their profit margins for the next six years as NCLB is being re-authorized. And the one man who stands to personally profit the most this year isn’t Bush himself, but advisor-turned-lobbyist Sandy Kress, the architect of Bush’s old high-stakes testing model in Texas and the overhaul of ESEA in 2001.

As Bush himself might put it, "Heck of a job, Sandy." Ahem: http://www.whitehouse.gov/...

KATHY EMERY KNOWS something about educating kids. Her resume, found here http://www.educationanddemocracy.org... , documents a 30-year career as a history teacher-turned-education researcher. Credentials impeccable. She’s published and presented and given workshops and been interviewed on testing and assessment and good education practices, so she’s got skills. And she writes, "When Ted Kennedy and George Bush agree on something, one needs to worry about who the man behind the curtain is. After doing research for my dissertation (which is now a book) it became clear to me that the men behind the curtain are the members of the Business Roundtable."

In a speech given in January 2005 to the San Francisco State University faculty retreat in Asilomar, California, she detailed the convergence of two heretofore unconjoined worlds: the world of big business, and the world of educating kids. The convergence was given birth in the passage of NCLB, she says, but the pregnancy was more than a decade long. Its unsuspecting mother was the Education and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), first adopted under Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1965 in partial fulfillment of John Kennedy’s domestic agenda. Its father? "...a bipartisan bandwagon of standards based advocates – a bandwagon built in the summer of 1989 by the top 300 CEOs in our country."

The Richard Kahlenberg Shanker bio details this event in detail. Now we are hearing the "Big Oops" from Shanker apologists. "This is not what Al intended." Gee! How come people in those years somehow knew what would be the outcome? Oh, what have they wrought!

Randi Weingarten's Greatest Skill

NYC Educator reports on a NY Sun article today that "one of the city's oldest independent educational watchdog groups - the Educational Priorities Panel - is closing because Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have created an environment where criticism of their educational policies is not tolerated."

The Sun has a quote from Randi Weingarten:
The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said EPP's dissolution is a punishment for speaking plainly. Reports from the group have objected to the Department of Education's new per-student funding formula, criticized its move to empower school principals as treating them too much like private contractors, and characterized claims that the city is pushing more money into classrooms as overstated. "They actually spoke truth to power, and I think they got hurt for it," Ms. Weingarten, said.

Prompting NYC to comment:
There's something ironic and sad about Randi Weingarten discussing "speaking truth to power." Isn't that supposed to be her job, at least somewhat?

and Reality-based educator to say:
No - her job is to receive kisses and hugs from Big Brother Bloomberg after conceding days, time, grievance/seniority/Circular 6R rights, merit pay, and a half dozen other work protections.

Leading to some of my thoughts about Randi's true role as a union leader:
RW has gotten away with saying one thing and doing another for 10 years. Being so closely involved since she even before she became UFT Pres., it is so obvious to me. But looking back I realize I was also snowed for a long time and believed what she was saying - I have lots of emails saying how she agreed with me and I initially felt, like, hey, people in power are actually listening. It took old naive me about 4-5 years to "get it." I was even accused by the quasi opposition, New Action, of being funded by Weingarten - Oh, Ironies of Ironies!

People who denigrate her skills as a union leader are missing the point that that is her greatest skill. Our definition of a union leader is different the people at the top. She was chosen to lead not because of her skills in defending the membership but because of her ability to misdirect, deflect and mislead the members. She has proven to be a master.

As to the motivation behind it all: the UFT with its philosophy of the place unions hold in society, is not capable of leading a militant fight, so the option is to do what RW does.

Reading the Kahlenberg book on Al Shanker - though it is totally endorsing his philosophy, still exposes the underbelly if you read through the lines. ICE is going to hold a meeting during Xmas break on the roots of UFT policy from shanker to RW and beyond to try to start untangling these root so people can see more clearly what is going on.