Mercedes Schneider Emails Randi Weingarten

I believe that you really do want to support public school teachers. However, I think that in general, you have lost our confidence and our trust.  Just read the comments associated with numerous posts tagged using your name on Diane Ravitch’s blog. The negative sentiment is undeniable. Your choices have provoked this loss of our support... Both letters are below, first mine;  then Weingarten’s response. My letter is pointed and confrontational. It honestly captures my concerns about Weingarten and AFT. In it, I ask Weingarten to consider taking three specific actions... Mercedes Schneider at The Chalkface

Mercedes was in touch with me, asking about Randi's teaching history. I sent her the links to ed notes that dealt with that issue. In her response Randi states the reasons she started teaching, none of them the real reason: that she was the hand-chosen successor to Sandy Feldman. I heard that news as early as 1989 or 90 when my chapter leader, a member of Unity Caucus, told me how upset people were that Randi was being jumped ahead of the popular Allan Lubin as a successor - that in fact she had to get a teaching credential. Friends at Clara Barton knew when she showed up that she would be the next UFT president. And she misleads in the Shanker illness story. In fact he got cancer in the early 90s - coinciding with Randi's move to teach -- it was clear that Sandy would have to move up at some point in the next few years and so they rushed to get Randi ready.

Randi makes reference to me and Ed Notes a few times. The UFT a thriving democracy?

Diane Ravitch wrote about it here:

An Open Exchange Between Mercedes Schneider and Randi Weingarten 

 

Diane urges people who are allies to not divide. I left this comment.

They key question is whether Randi is really an ally when she has led the union into so much support for the enemies of public education. I can give multiple examples from brokering contracts in so many cities to support for merit pay, the common core, Bill Gates at the AFT — I’ll let others complete the very large list. Here in NYC one of the major battles has been over co-locating charter schools in public school buildings. Yet the UFT has had its own 2 charters (started by Randi) co-located in 2 public school buildings for years. One of the schools was the George Gershwin JHS (where I went as a kid) in East NY, Brooklyn. That school was deemed a failure and is closing, due in part from having the UFT charter in the building people there who opposed the closing told me. This year the Bloomberg controlled Panel for Educational Policy allowed the UFT to move the school into another public school. Parents came out to oppose that as it does exactly to that school what charters have been doing – take away valuable space, etc. So tell me how Randi is an ally? Just because she sometimes says “the right thing?” Here is a mantra I learned a long time ago. Watch what she does, not what she says because she will say anything at any time to anyone if she thinks it will help her agenda. What is her agenda? it is not one that favors teachers — the people she represents — or the future of the public schools. When the only large scale organization does not come down squarely on the side of real reform or does not reject completely the ed deform agenda or does not put all its resources into the battle (instead of trying to sell common core) then we have been left to fight these battles on our own.
One last example — we – a bunch of NYC teachers and parents – made the definitive response to Waiting for Superman, a film that has gone far and wide, due in no small part to the efforts of Diane. One would expect the union to use its resources to make that film available to every teacher as a way to battle for public education. The UFT/AFT has refused to acknowledge the existence of the film and in fact has an effective boycott. Why? Because those involved have been internal critics over the years. The mantra has been for Randi and her allies — keep power at all costs even if the union ends up weaker and possibly ultimately destroyed... Norm Scott

Below the break is the cross post of Mercedes' exchange.

 

An Open Exchange with AFT President Randi Weingarten

November 4, 2013 by deutsch29 Leave a Comment

On October 26 and 27, 2013, I exchanged a number of emails with American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten. I had planned to write a post about Weingarten, which I did on October 27. My post took the form of an open letter to her. I sent it to her for her response in hopes that I might publish both together as a discourse. She agreed and responded to my letter on November 3. I told her that whatever she decided to write I would post.

Both letters are below, first mine;  then Weingarten’s response.
My letter is pointed and confrontational. It honestly captures my concerns about Weingarten and AFT. In it, I ask Weingarten to consider taking three specific actions.

Rather than offering any comments on Weingarten’s response, I wish to simply allow readers to read both letters and form their own opinions. I invite reader comments at the end of this post. Readers might disagree, even strongly, with me or with Weingarten; however, I ask that comments be written using civil language.

And now, for the letters.

I offer mine first:
October 27, 2013
Randi,
Yesterday, I committed to my fellow bloggers on our bloggers network to write a post on you. A primary question I have regards your teaching credentials. I am also concerned about your interactions with notable reform philanthropists Bill Gates and Eli Broad and your unyielding dedication to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).

Based upon our email exchange yesterday, I believe that you really do want to support public school teachers. However, I think that in general, you have lost our confidence and our trust.  Just read the comments associated with numerous posts tagged using your name on Diane Ravitch’s blog. The negative sentiment is undeniable.
Your choices have provoked this loss of our support.

I really want to think better of you, Randi. My disappointment is not superficial. It is not based upon your position as a union president. I am not anti-union. Far from it. I have been a member of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers (LFT) since my post-Katrina return to southern Louisiana and to the public school classroom seven years ago. Moreover, in this past year, I have participated in two expert panels in public meetings sponsored by LFT and the Louisiana Association of Educators (LAE).

This post is my effort to re-establish my own trust in you as my national union president. I hope to bring scores of disillusioned colleagues with me.  Thus, I will ask you to consider following through on three requests.

1.  Clearly outline your classroom teaching experience in your (American Federation of Teachers) AFT bio.

This might seem to be a ridiculous request given that you have been AFT president for over five years now. However, we are in the throes of a nationwide corporate reformer gloss over nebulous credentials. Opportunists outside of teaching are seizing our profession. Their true professional identities are in other fields. I understand that your primary professional identity is that of lawyer. This is no secret. However, I am asking you to be transparent regarding the details of your actual classroom experience.
As it stands, this is your classroom experience as noted in your AFT bio:

A teacher of history at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood from 1991 to 1997, Weingarten helped her students win several state and national awards debating constitutional issues. 

Not enough information.

In the current privatization environment, unclear credentials and experience breed mistrust. On several occasions, I have been involved in online conversations in which teachers debated your teaching experience, especially as such concerns your full time teaching experience. I have read some articles that claim to offer such details, but I do not consider these articles as solid enough for me to cite, neither here nor as part of my book. That is why I presented the question to you in an email.

I do not teach in New York; however, I have been able to determine from both the EngageNY website as well as from former United Federation of Teachers (UFT) contracts that teaching five classes in a semester is considered “full time.”

Randi, in our email exchange yesterday, you provided information enough for me to write to some degree regarding the number of your full time semesters versus the number of your part time semesters of classroom teaching experience at Clara Barton. Instead, I would like to offer you the opportunity to provide such information in your own words as part of your response to this post.

I ask that you provide similar clarification in your AFT bio.

2.  Return the Gates funding still in AFT possession.

Bill Gates is purchasing American education and fashioning it according to his whims. On September 21, 2013, Gates made the comment, “It would be great if our education stuff worked, but that we won’t know for probably a decade.”
Education stuff?
I am tired of being Bill Gates’ laboratory mouse.
I am distressed that my national union president willingly participates in the experimentation.
Since January 2009, AFT has accepted over $11.3 million from the Gates Foundation, $5.4 million of which is earmarked for CCSS.
Randi, I am asking you to return Gates’ money. And I am asking you to halt the chummy alliances with Gates and other philanthropic reformers bent upon selling off my profession, such as Eli Broad. Accepting money from privatizers is akin to selling your office. Such actions compromise your position as a union president. Plus it just looks bad to your constituents.

3. Drop support for CCSS.

You publicly support CCSS, and you maintain that 75 percent of teachers also support CCSS.
If this were true, then teachers speaking out in favor of keeping CCSS would outnumber dissenters three to one.
Where are all of these scores of teacher supporters for CCSS now?
“Overwhelming” CCSS teacher support isn’t happening. What is happening in states across the nation is an “overwhelming” rejection of CCSS– and not just the tests: rejection of the entire government-corporate-and-nonprofit-arranged CCSS.
My own school district, St. Tammany Schools (Louisiana) both drafted and approved an anti-CCSS resolution this month. From the outset, St. Tammany did not approve of CCSS but had no say in the matter; only two signatures were required for an entire state to “adopt” CCSS as a requirement of Race to the Top funding: the governor and state superintendent.
Sounds pretty “top-down” to me.
I’m tired of having my classroom controlled from the outside.
I ask that you read the posts on Diane’s blog regarding CCSS reception. Read my post on the CCSS memorandum of understanding. Consider carefully what you have read. Then please publicly drop CCSS.

In Closing

Randi, thank you for considering my requests. And thank you in advance for responding to my post.
I hope that my words move you to act.
Sincerely,
–Mercedes Schneider

And now, for Weingarten’s response:
November 3, 2013
Mercedes:
As I told you in emails last week, I would spend some time this week trying to respond to both your open letter and your other requests.
The questions on the Common Core are important, which is why I have devoted another one of my Sunday New York Times and Huffington Post<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/randi-weingarten/will-states-fail-the-comm_b_4206013.html&gt; columns to address both the reasons we support its potential and our solidarity with the educators and parents and others who are disgusted and demoralized by the botched implementation and the ongoing testing fixation.
As to the standards, just like you’ve weighed in, teachers have also weighed in on the other side. Just recently, teachers of the year in both Montana and North Dakota, two merged AFT-NEA states, announced their support for the Common Core. And I speak to teachers and parents constantly, like the educators I saw in Long Island last weekend; in Gary, Ind., on Thursday; in Baltimore on Friday; and in New York City today. People are frustrated, but like the polls of educators that the AFT, the NEA, Scholastic and others have conducted show, teachers believe in standards, with caveats—they want the time and tools so they are prepared, they want our students to have the necessary supports, they want the standards to be developmentally appropriate, and they want this testing fixation to end. I also wonder why you would continually criticize random sample polling by a reputable pollster, which is what the March 2013 AFT poll was based upon, yet at the same time you conclude the comments on Diane Ravitch’s blog are a far better sampling.
As to the Gates Foundation funding, we’ve always been open about the funding we’ve received. And we’ve never shied away from being critical of the Gates Foundation or others. And while it’s far from perfect, I believe our engagement has actually made the Gates Foundation more open to the challenges teachers face.
The funds we’ve received have been used to support projects like the AFT Innovation Fund, which has awarded grants that have enabled our affiliates in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland and elsewhere to create teacher-developed lessons that are now available to all educators on Share My Lesson. Additionally, all too often, districts and policymakers roll out new policies and tell teachers to just do it. These funds are used to help rank-and-file members have access to training and tools that help them address what is seemingly a new “requirement” every day.
As to the questions you asked about my professional life, I thank you for disclosing that much of what prompted your questions came from two New York City UFT bloggers who were involved in different union caucuses (political parties) than the one I belonged to. The UFT has a thriving democracy, where lots of allegations are bandied about—particularly around union elections. Ironically, the third source you cite, Wayne Barrett, was the one Joel Klein used to smear me when he went to war with the union.
I’ve made a lifetime commitment to the union movement and to public education. It stems from my mother’s own teaching experience—including bearing witness to the six week strike she and her colleagues in Nyack, NY waged in the mid 1970s, and watching her devotion to the kids she taught, her love for her colleagues and her commitment to make a difference in the world. For me, the labor movement and public education are linked as the essential building blocks to a strong middle class and a path to the American dream. It’s why I went to Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations as an undergrad and then to law school. It’s why I tried to find a job at a union-side labor law firm when I first graduated from law school—but the doors were shut because they wanted lawyers with experience. It’s also why I left practicing law at Stroock and Stroock and Lavan, where I was on the path to become a partner, to become Sandy Feldman’s counsel when she became president of the UFT in 1986. And it’s why I started teaching high school social studies in 1991, at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights Brooklyn a few weeks after the Crown Heights riots.
I taught from 1991 to 1997, full and part time, at Clara Barton High School. High schools in New York City are organized on a semester basis, so for one semester I taught five periods and did lunch duty. During the other five and a half years, I taught one, two or three courses, as I was also the counsel and chief negotiator for the UFT. This was similar to other UFTers who also held union responsibilities. For several years during this time, Dr. Leo Casey and I led our students in the “We the People” civics debate competition.
When I began teaching at Clara Barton, I did so both because I wanted to teach—as my mother had—to make a difference in kids’ lives and out of a desire to better understand the experiences and the trials and tribulations of New York City educators, in order to better represent them. I had enjoyed teaching law school students, and I looked forward to the challenges of teaching high school students in an inner-city high school. It was harder—a lot harder—and a lot more rewarding than anything I had ever done.
In 1991, when I started teaching, Al Shanker was in his prime as AFT president, and Sandy Feldman was hitting her stride as UFT president. It was not until 1996/1997, when Al’s untimely illness and passing led Sandy Feldman to take on the position of AFT president and resign as head of the UFT, that I was asked to consider running for UFT president.
At Clara Barton, I taught students who were predominantly immigrant, all minority, mostly female, and entirely from working-class and poor families. I learned that with the right supports for students and teachers, it was entirely possible to teach critical thinking, analytical reasoning, problem solving and the comprehension of difficult texts to students who did not come from privilege. I watched my students become confident about learning and about themselves, and learn how to navigate challenges in their lives. It wasn’t easy. There were lots of starts and stops—no straight-line trajectory that today’s market-based and test-fixated “reformers” would have you believe.
And that experience made crystal clear why teacher preparation and experience—not simply passion and love—is so crucial to creating a good environment for teaching and learning—something you have spoken about. But it is also why I disagree with you about standards. They are not the silver bullet that Arne Duncan and the “reformers” make them out to be, but they are an important piece of equity and leverage in the struggle to ensure that students like the ones I taught and loved at Clara Barton receive a quality education that opens up for them the opportunity to live out their American dream and become full, productive citizens leading lives of meaning and purpose. It’s also why I personally fight so hard for a pathway to citizenship and to fix, not close neighborhood schools, like we did when we had a Chancellor we could work with , Chancellor Crew, in establishing the Chancellor’s District in the late 1990s.
I stopped teaching in June 1997 because I had been appointed Sandy Feldman’s executive assistant when she was elected the interim president of the AFT upon Al Shanker’s death earlier that year, while continuing as UFT president. I didn’t think I could carry out both my teaching and union responsibilities well—particularly whether I could be present for my students and classes given all the emergencies and exigencies that occur daily in New York City. Public school teaching was the best job in my life, and I miss it today. I am still a teacher on leave with the New York City Board of Education, and hope one day to teach high school again.
Your earlier emails suggested issues I will clear up as well. Contrary to what you’ve been told, I had a long relationship with Clara Barton High School, dating back to its 1987 asbestos crisis. The faculty sued the Board of Education for its failure to contain asbestos, and I was assigned by the union to help. That is where I met Leo Casey. I negotiated an asbestos protocol, which evolved into a health and safety program for the city’s students and teachers. Barton was the tip of the iceberg—the public schools in New York City were closed for more than a week in September 1993 as a result of the discovery that many of the AHERA reports, like the ones we discovered at Barton in 1987, were not correct. The union’s work in health and safety was credited as the basis for fully opening schools safely for students and staff that September and for the resources that went into repairing and maintaining and ultimately building new schools, after a lawsuit I brought as UFT counsel in 1994 challenging the horrible physical conditions of the New York City schools.
As to my preparation to teach, again contrary to what you’ve been told, I took every course and credential the state and the Board of Education required to be certified as a teacher. I was an alternatively certified teacher, as were thousands of teachers pre-TFA that came in through the alternative route. We were “per diem” teachers, which is why the school records referred to in theVillage Voice article coded me as such. I experienced what other professionals working for the city Department of Education experienced. I used to joke that it took me longer to get my permanent certification as a teacher than to go to law school and be admitted to the bar.
I was also not the only lawyer/teacher/union official in UFT history. Jules Kolodny, a former officer of the UFT who was tragically killed in an accident in Europe, was a lawyer, and like me, used those skills extensively in the service of the members and our students.
As to the rumors about me, I am sure there were many—as there always are. Unfortunately, the ones I heard were about the fact I was young, gay, that I was more left than others in the union, and that I wanted to open up the lines of communication with many of the other caucuses, which one of your sources applauded at the time. This was and is rooted in a deep belief in democratic unionism—and ensuring our members have a real voice. And while I was UFT president we expanded many committees—including the bargaining committee—to include a variety of voices. This included members of all the union’s caucuses. The rumors meant something else to me than your sources suggest—it meant just like teachers must do with their students, I had to earn the trust of my members. Trust is earned. And I try to earn it every day by finding ways to listen to our members and the communities they and we serve. That’s why I am in schools and other worksites in which our members toil, throughout America, every week as I used to be in schools in NYC when I was UFT president three times a week. That’s why I answer many emails and other correspondence personally—as I have here—a practice I started while I was UFT president. And that’s why I show up personally whenever I can to fight the fight against austerity, privatization and deprofessionalization and to reclaim the promise of public education.
Finally, the allegation against Leo Casey is grossly inaccurate. Leo is an extraordinary teacher and union activist—and also a doctor of political philosophy. I am proud to call him a mentor and colleague and friend. Others saw his brilliance and compassion and talents, which is why he was asked by John Soldini, then the UFT vice president of high schools, to work for him in a part-time capacity. Leo never wanted to stop teaching, and I had to beg him to work for the union full time. I am honored that I could convince him to take the helm of the Albert Shanker Institute, where he is doing an exceptional job—as your fellow bloggers who follow the Shanker blog can attest.
I’ve always been open and honest about my life’s work. I am honored each and every day to serve the members of our union who work every day to make a difference in the lives of children and others. To reclaim the promise of education and to ensure that children not only dream their dreams but achieve them. That is our calling and our mission. And that is the work that the AFT will continue to pursue.
In common cause,
Randi