MORE to Talk Friedrichs at Saturday Meeting, Roseanne Sends Mulgrew a Message

Teacher apathy that has worked in your favor thus far may now ironically be a nail in the UFT coffin... Roseanne McCosh in letter to Mulgrew

Most MORE people are very loyal unionists despite the Unity hack attacks that they are tools of anti-unionists for daring to run in a union election. The Unity leadership wants to talk Frierichs at the membership, not with it.

Unity talks Friedrichs

As MORE talks Friedrichs at tomorrow's meeting I think I will be in the minority when I call for reservations to be put on unlimited support for people to stay in the union and continue paying dues without some quid quo pro from Unity towards democratizing the union.

I say this in the context of Roseanne McCosh's letter to Mulgrew below where she lists a litany of failures of the UFT leadership.

Now I tie these fundamental failures to this very lack of having broad areas of opinion in the UFT represented at the top of the pyramid so decisions are not made within the top-down Unity bubble. Having produced Ed Notes since 1997 as a means to create a forum for the very discussions not taking place I know I have pretty much warned the leadership about what was clearly to come when they ignored class size when money was available, when they supported so much of ed deform Roseanne points to below, allowed their principal pals in the CSA to run rampant, killed the seniority provisions that would have protected teachers and schools from the BloomKlein assault.

I'm looking forward to an intense discussion of Frierichs at CUNY on 5th Ave between 34th and 35th (Rm 5409- bring id) starting at noon in case you want to chip in your 2 cents.

Sean Crowley at B-LoEdScene (Union Members -- Who Do You Love?)
touched on the Friedrichs theme related to the AFT Hillary endorsement and the Mulgrew punching himself in his own face for taking away his beloved common core from himself:

this two-tiered sleight of hand used by so called "leadership" has no place in our current modus operandi and will be even more outrageous in the coming landscape of Post-Friedrichs unionism. We all witnessed the disgust and outrage of our colleagues when we learned that Weingarten had slid the AFT endorsement to Hillary when none of us were paying attention.

Here is Roseanne's letter to Mulgrew:

Dear Mr. Mulgrew,
I received your mass email about Friedrich. I am fully informed on Friedrich. Teacher apathy that has worked in your favor thus far may now ironically be a nail in the UFT coffin. You can't continue to protect the testing moguls, the billionaires who want to use tests as a weapon against teachers in order to destroy public education, the DOE and Mayor DeBlasio at the expense of teachers and then expect us to support you. You have done nothing to untie teachers to test scores (that 4 yr moratorium on state tests simply means teachers will sit on death row a little longer before being executed). You have done nothing about abusive administrators who torment teachers and ruin lives and careers. You have done nothing to expose credit recovery schemes and other misdeeds swept under the rug by the DOE. You have done nothing to lower class size. You have done nothing to expose the unreasonableness of Danielson. You have done nothing to highlight the factors beyond a teacher's control that affect students' academic success. You have done nothing to expose the invalidity of the tests being used to harm us (MOSL, State tests etc... ) And yet you have the gall to ask us to save you from the axe looming over the head of UFT/NYSUT and the AFT leadership. 

I wrote the below to Karen Magee and it applies to UFT leadership as well.

Friedrich may offer the disenfranchised an opportunity to starve the unions that refuse to be accountable to their membership. We'll all know soon enough is those chickens do indeed come home to roost. And if they do, you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Roseanne McCosh