There has been some speculation concerning tonight's UFT Exec. Bd meeting over some kind of agreement with Tweed urging principals to hire ATRs. Will the union leadership, which had been forced by a vote of the October Delegate Assembly into holding a rally (now a candlelight vigil), announce an agreement and cancel the rally?
Will the DOE exempt the school from being charged for a higher priced teachers by suspending the fair school formula that penalizes a school for hiring more senior teachers?
And if so, for how long? What good would it do if it was only for one year?
And what of the teaching fellow RTRs due to be fired on Dec. 5?
If there is an agreement, look under the rug for the bugs because Tweed gives nothing away for nothing. But there is pressure with budget cuts coming to get the ATRs placed. Maybe a face-saving gesture on both sides.
The UFT will trumpet it as a big victory. But if there is any victory, it would be due to the activities and pressures put on the union by the Ad Hoc committee for ATRs and RTRs.
We'll have reports tonight.
3 comments:
Every time Randi negotiates with Joel Klein, the teachers get screwed!
can't picture her as a good lawyer. She probably knows it herself to have given up her law career. Just like many principals became a principal coming from their bad experiences as a teacher in the classrooms.
A bad lawyer still rises above 80,000 good teachers.
There won't be any move to force the ATR's out until after Mayoral control is voted on in Albany and Bloomberg wins re election. In the meantime the UFT leadership bows and scraps before the Bloomberg coup and tells the members that now's not the time to fight with the city council over term limits. Bloomberg spreads the money around and the liberal non profits dissimulate and difuse popular indignation, defusing the stirrings of an electoral revolt, once again with the assistance of the UFT leadership. The poor old TWU, racked by internal struggles, punished with the loss of dues checkoff for having dared to strike is forced into survival mode with not a whiff of support from the largest union local in the USA, the UFT, fat with dues, perks and privileges. And what will all this bowing and scraping by the leadership bring in the way of a new contract for UFT members? As Weingarten said in her DC Press conference after being introduced by Bloomberg; "everything is on the table."
What's the strategy? What is the alternative to decades of Shankerism?
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