In 2002 I Warned the UFT About Evils of Mayoral Control and they still only want Tweaks as Hochul calls for 4-year extension

Ed Notes, Sept. 2002: When UFT leader Randi Weingarten floated a proposal to give the mayor control of the school system in May 2001, Education Notes took strong exception, arguing that giving politicians control would only result in a system of education by the numbers in a corporate style system. Did Weingarten sell out our educational interests for a pot of gold? The next few years will allow people to judge for themselves.

I did some satire on UFT capitulation:

Late breaking news: Bloomberg says he needs to take over UFT (some say he already has) to make school system work and will ask the state assembly (a UFT subsidiary) for control.

Well, in essence it was not satire as for most of his tenure the UFT put up a faux resistance, while fundamentally agreeing with most of the Bloomberg ed deforms: high stakes testing, closing "failing" schools, charters, etc. Their support for the horrendous 2005 contract enabled the Bloomberg assault.

You judge given the past 22 years of mayoral control. I love to say I told them so. And I will continue to do so. Ed Notes was warning them about the consequences in the first tabloid edition which had a print run of 10 thousand after I retired in 2002.

 

But they never learn. Or rather they don't really care about the impact on members and students. What they care about is power and their allegiance to center/right Democratic Party allegiances. And big cities with mayoral control are often run by Democratic mayors who want the power of control over the schools - and the patronage it brings. What does the UFT get out of mayoral control? They only have to lobby and deal with one person instead of messy alternatives, like elected school boards. Plus who knows what else? Well actually we do know but I leave you to guess.

Knowing the membership is not happy with the job done by any of the mayors who controlled the NYC schools so far - Bloomberg, de Blasio and Adams -- UFT leadership maintains a fiction they want change, when all they want is minor tweaks.

They're full of bullshit, as reporter Sue Edelman points out:

EONYC calls them out in response to the governor's proposal to extend MC for 4 years:

Politico: 

Hochul also wants to use the budget to extend Mayor Eric Adams’ control of New York City schools for four years. Legislators blocked that when she proposed it as a budget item in 2022, dealing with it later in the year.

“You all know how I feel about policy in the budget,” Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie said when asked about mayoral control on Tuesday. The Assembly has long been critical of governors’ attempts to shoehorn bills that don’t deal with finances into the state spending plan.

Other critics popped up. John Liu is one of the few politicians to stand up. Legislators object to including mayoral control in budget negotiations - City & State New York

Don't expect any real changes unless there is massive public pressure on an issue most people are not tuned into. There are hearings going on as Leonie points out:

The final hearings on Mayoral control are scheduled for this Thursday night in Manhattan and Jan. 29 on Staten Island. More info here. Though the registration list is already full for Manhattan, at the last three hearings anyone who showed up was allowed to speak. Check out the video and some of the compelling statements of parents and teachers who spoke at the Brooklyn hearings last week, 95% of whom were opposed to allowing Mayoral control to continue.

If you do show up to speak at the hearings, please mention the failure of the last three Mayors to lower class size, even though both Bloomberg and de Blasio promised to do so during their campaigns. Meanwhile, Adams is openly resisting compliance with the class size law. I will also offer talking points soon if you’d like to submit written comments to the state on Mayoral control; deadline Jan. 31. Thanks!

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters

See Leonie blog on the hearings: 

• Amazing hearing in Brooklyn last night on Mayoral control; here are a few excerpts

Below I reprise the articles from that first full tabloid edition of Ed Notes in Sept. 2002 and that was not the first time I warned about the impact of MC. Bloomberg took power in Jan. 2002 and had control by the summer while I was screaming at the UFT leadership to throw its energy against giving him control. Instead Randi raved about the possibilities. I retired that July and hosted the great George Schmidt from Chicago who regaled a group of future ICE people on the evils of mayoral control. See down below for his April 2002 letter to UFTers warning us.

Howie Schwach, my future editor at The Wave , the local Rockaway paper (I took over his School Scope column a year later), chimed in with an editorial:

Does Anyone Have A Clue?
From the Editorʼs Desk “The Wave”
by Howard Schwach (www.rockawave.com) May 25, 2002
Schwach had just met with members of the City Council Education Committee

Of course, the question of education came up over and over again. I asked them if they really believed that education in New York City would be improved should the mayor take over without reforming what happens at 110 Livingston Street.

Without imposing strict rules for student behavior and strict punishments for improper behavior. Without changing the fact that supervisors without any expertise in a subject area often supervise teachers who are experts at that subject. Without changing the fact that teachers are forced to pass students who do not deserve to pass and are sanctioned by administrators for failing too many students.

They looked at me as if I were from another planet.

Those who do not work in the system do not understand why the system is failing in many schools and succeeding in many others. The system cannot be fixed by people who do not understand what is broken. If you donʼt know the questions, you will never get any of the right answers.
Giving the mayor control of the schools will not change much of what is going on in those schools; not unless some systemic changes are made at the same time.

Ed Notes cited historic teacher

Deborah Meier on mayoral control

Deborah Meier has been a hero to those who wanted to see change in the NYC public school system. Meier seemed to have rational solutions to complex problems. As a teacher she ran open classrooms, started the small schools movement in NYC, and set up a progressive system at the Park East complex in Dist. 4. She finally gave up on the system and moved to Boston to set up a school. Now 71 she was the first public school teacher to win the “genius” MacArthur Foundation grant. Excerpted from NY Times, 9/3/02, Jane Gross, author

"I can't imagine anything they can do that would make a substantial difference," she said, except bucking a nationwide trend of more and more standardized testing. "If the only thing you want is better test scores, it poisons the game."

Ms. Meier said that the current "mania for accountability," with rewards and punishments for students, teachers and administrators, was borrowed from the corporate world. "It's like Enron," she said, pointing to all the ways that educators can cook the books to make attendance, graduation rates and test scores appear better than they are. "When the goal is the numbers," she added, "it leads to distortion of the data. The connection to reality gets problematic."

Here is the George Schmidt letter, which I first distributed at a UFT Ex Bd meeting back in April 2022. He pretty much covers many the evils of mayoral control. The CTU election of 2001 tossed out the old guard and brought in a reform movement that lasted 3 years before the old guard regained power from 2004-2010 when a new reform caucus called CORE won and has maintained power and in many ways has had a major influence on the revival of the union movement in this country. George Schmidt was a founding member of CORE in 2008. Unfortunately, a union reform movement against the collaborationist UFT has not had success and remains fractured.

Mayoral Control in Chicago Disaster for Union by George Schmidt, Editor of Substance www.substance.com
(reprinted from Education Notes, 4/02)

Dear Brothers and Sisters in New York,

No teacher union should support mayoral control of the school system -- especially justify that control. Chicago's version of urban school governance based on a supposed "business model" of how things should be run is actually the major form of "deregulation" aimed at the heart of public education (and the unions representing teachers and other school workers) in the urban north. More than vouchers, charters schools, or the antics of Edison Schools Inc., the "CEO model" for urban school governance is an attack on democracy, on public school teachers, and on the unions that represent the men and women who work in public schools. Despite the massive propaganda (including regular reports in The New York Times) praising Chicago's version of "School Reform," the model is based on shoddy public relations and relentless attacks on democratic public schools and democratic unions.

In 1995, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law (the Amendatory Act) which gave Chicago's mayor complete control over the governance of the school system. At the time of the legislation, the Republican Party's most conservative wing controlled both houses of the Illinois General Assembly and the governor's seat. Thanks to the legislation he wrote with the Republicans, Chicago's mayor was able to abolish the old (appointed, but with many guidelines) school board, appoint a five- member "School Reform Board of Trustees", and appoint a "Chief Executive Officer" to replace the credentialed superintendent of schools. The legislation also prohibited collective bargaining on class size, abolished tenure, and took away other rights which Chicago teachers and other union workers in the city's public schools thought had been secured forever.

The Chicago system immediately went into an orgy of union busting, privatization, and teacher bashing. In July 1995, Mayor Daley appointed his former budget director (Paul G. Vallas) as Chief Executive Officer of the school system. Vallas, a career bureaucrat with no private sector experience, had no teaching experience and no other credentials to run the newly deregulated school system. President of the School Board went to Gery Chico, a lawyer who had most recently been the Chief of Staff for the mayor.

The key to the "success" of the Chicago "CEO Model" was control of public relations. From the very beginning of the Vallas administration, a careful campaign of slander and disinformation was launched against the unions representing those who worked in the public schools. Thanks to a sweetheart contract with the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, by the fall of 1995, the mayor's propaganda people made the false claim that the new "CEO" (Paul G. Vallas) had ended what was claimed to be a $1 billion "deficit." The "deficit" had actually been created on paper by inflating estimated expenses and deflating estimated revenues. Within a year after taking over the school system, the mayor then announced that test scores had begun to go "up."

Deregulation in Chicago's schools was based on the same types of manipulation of numbers that served the executives of Enron (and other crooked corporations) so well in the private sector during the "Dot.com" and stock bubble manias of the late 1990s. The manipulation of financial information (the budget "deficit" claim) and test score information ("trending up" was what Chicago's school administration called the test score reports during the same years the stock market bubble was being inflated) reduced the integrity of the school board's financial and educational data to a shambles. But that was no problem in the short term, because Chicago-based Arthur Andersen was doing for the financial data (through the annual audit of the ending financial statements) and many educational programs (through multi-million dollar "consultancies" to "audit" everything from pre school programs to some high school academic programs) the same jobs it was doing during the same years for Enron (and before that for Chicago-based Sunbeam and Waste Management, both of which cooked their books and cheated their shareholders and workers years before Enron did).

For the union to support the rampant teacher bashing and union busting that comes with mayoral takeovers like Chicago's the union leadership has to be willing to become a company union. The company is City Hall.

By January 1999, the mayor's team at the Chicago school board had busted several of the union's that represented Chicago school employees and was ready to attack the heart of teacher rights: tenure. In February 1999, after safely getting a new contract from the leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (after a highly questionable referendum), the school board fired 137 tenured teachers, exercising its new power to terminate even those with tenure. When the union leadership challenged the firing in federal court, the school board, supposedly run by our friends from City Hall, not only used its own $8 million legal department but paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to the blue chip law firm of Jenner and Block to defeat the union's federal court challenge to the abolition of tenure for Chicago teachers. (To date, Jenner and Block has been paid more than $1 million to defend the school board against the union's challenge in the main federal case, Shegog et al v. Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees).

Throughout the entire attack on union and teach- er rights, the union leadership refused to criticize the City Hall school "team" that was undermin- ing the unions and slandering teachers and other school workers on an almost daily basis.

Critics within the union grew in size and strength during the six years (July 1995 through June 2001) that Paul G. Vallas served as Mayor Richard M. Daley's handpicked "CEO" of Chicago's vast public school system. On May 18, 2001, the members of the 36,000-member Chi- cago Teachers Union got their first chance to vote on a referendum on the mayor's takeover. Paul Vallas, the school system's CEO, endorsed Chicago Teachers Union president Thomas Reece, an incumbent with a war chest on more than $200,000 and control of every one of the more than 40 jobs at the CTU's headquarters. The Chicago Sun-Times (circulation 500,000 daily) told Chicago's teachers to vote for Tom Reece and his "team."

When the results of the election were announced on May 25 after a hand-count of the paper ballots, the opposition slate from the Pro Active Chicago Teachers and School Workers (PACT) caucus had won the elec- tion with 57 percent of the vote to Reece's 43 percent. On the day they voted, all five of the PACT candidates for city-wide union office were teaching in their schools (or, in the case of Maureen Callaghan, candidate for treasurer, working in the school office where she served as secretary). Deborah Lynch (now CTU president), Howard Heath (now CTU vice president), Jacqueline Price Ward (now CTU recording secretary), James Alexander (now CTU financial secretary) and Maureen Callaghan (now CTU treasurer) all had to clean out their classrooms (or desks) before they reported to the downtown offices of the Chicago Teachers Union on July 1, 2001, to begin leading one of the largest locals in the American Federation of Teachers.

The victory of PACT in the May 2001 CTU election was an overwhelming vote of no confidence in the union leadership that had allowed the once powerful Chicago Teachers Union to become a company union under the domination of Chicago's City Hall. The victory of Deborah Lynch Walsh (who dropped the "Walsh" from her last name recently) and the other members of the PACT slate (including 40 of the 45 members of the CTU executive board, was a victory for the rank-and-file and for the secret ballot and democratic unionism. The betrayal of the teachers and other union members in Chi- cago by the former union administration was decisively repudiated on May 18 in what was the most exciting union election in recent Chicago memory.

The hard work began immediately. The new leadership of the CTU is rebuilding a coalition of more than a dozen unions repre- senting those who work in Chicago's public schools -- from janitors and school engineers to truck drivers and lunchroom workers. With an eye towards the negotiations for a contract which expires on August 31, 2003, Deborah Lynch and her colleagues in the union leadership have been mobilizing their union membership in unprecedented ways.

Not only has the election of Deborah Lynch provided a repudiation of the politics of union busting and teacher bashing in Chicago's public schools, but it has begun to lead to an unprecedented era of mobilization and hope among a formerly demoralized membership of the once mighty union. With every step the Chicago Teachers Union takes towards getting its strength back after years of con- valescence in the isolation ward of company unionism, teachers and other union members add their voices, votes and hard work to the massive job of rebuilding the city's public schools after years of mismanagement by the political cronies of City Hall.

George Schmidt Visits Rockaway

George Schmidt, founder and editor of the independent education newsletter Substance for the past 27 years and a major source of information on events in the Chicago school system, met with a group of NYC teachers at the Ed. Notes palatial estate this summer in Rockaway Beach. It was Georgeʼs first return to Rockaway since he went out on a date to Rockaway Playland in the 60ʼs. Schmidt, accompanied by his 14 year old son, Danny, regaled his audience with tales of the Chicago “corporate” model of mayoral control, how school workers took back the union and shared his experiences at the AFT convention (attended by 800 Unity Caucus members at your expense) held in July in Las Vegas. George also gave us advice on how to make Ed. Notes a more viable and effective source of information for school workers in NYC. See Georgeʼs article on Mayoral control on page 5 and the stories on CTU President Debbie Lynch on pages 5 and 6.