School Scope: I Don’t Get It - Norm in The WAVE

Submitted for publication, November 30, 2018, www.rockawave.com

School Scope: I Don’t Get It

By Norm Scott

I don’t get it: That the opposition caucuses in the UFT can’t seem to come together to run against the ruling party of the UFT – Unity Caucus – which as controlled the union since its inception almost 60-years ago. So unless there’ s a change, three groups will be competing for the roughly one quarter of those who bother to vote against Unity in almost every election, though in the high schools the opposition vote is generally over 50%, which has allowed the opposition to win the seven high school executive board seats. UFT elections every three years are stacked in favor of Unity, especially due to the potential votes of retirees, who are happy campers who have left their classroom concerns far behind. They might as well not waste their time running at all, which perfectly suits me. The UFT is fundamentally a one-party system and we should treat it that way.  I say boycott the elections, which by the way, 70% of the members do anyway by not bothering to vote in the first place. Hmmm, maybe they figured it all out way before I did.

I do get that hundreds of UFT retirees threw themselves into the midterms and made a difference in a number of Democratic Party victories, with some of the biggest coming in the NY State Senate which flipped away from the Republicans. We can only hope we see some of the education deforms that both parties have supported begin to slip away. The charter industrial-complex tossed loads of money the Republican way, hoping to get the current cap on charters in NYC lifted. If the Dems end up selling out on this issue (like de Blasio sold out softly to charters after running against charters in his first election) they will pay a stiff back-tracking price.

I don’t get it that 90% of Republicans support Trump, whose 45% popularity is at its highest. It seems that 75% of the people on the west end of Rockaway voted for Trump. I looked around the crowded polling station when I voted straight Democratic ticket for the first time (well, almost straight. I couldn’t vote for Cuomo so I went for former Syracuse Mayor Stephanie Minor). I ran into some fellow liberals who looked around furtively and showed  me their crossed fingers. I watched the issues raised by local Republicans in recent campaigns and I wonder about Republican values. Did any of them even talk about climate change to those who live on the very edge of threatened communities? Or do they support the fossil fuel industry’s profit grubbing at the expense of all of us? Do they talk about the fundamental anti-union positions of the Republican Party, which supports the idea that corporations are people too and it is a fair fight to have the individual worker have to stand up against them without the institutional support of a union? And as you can tell by my opening, I’m not a union acolyte.

I don’t get the 85% evangelical support for Trump over the issue of the unborn when he clearly doesn’t give much of a crap for the born.

Norm’s column will be born again next week while he keeps blogging at ednotesonline.com

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