Unity Uses Red-Baiting - Just Part of their MO

Mr. Welch: Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness. You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?


That there is a large core of activists who have shunned UFT internal politics has been a well-known fact. Activating this group has not always been easy, as many of them view the UFT leadership as unmovable and the opposition movement devoid of the kind of politics that are of most interest to them.

Today's Unity mailing that slithered into UFT members' homes red-baiting ICE-TJC presidential candidate Kit Wainer has provoked many of these progressive UFT members into outrage and shock. The emails and phones have been burning up with offers to help in the final days of the election campaign from people who have had little prior interest.

Will the Unity intent to garner last minute votes backfire in the long run by waking up a potentially activist left-oriented section of the UFT that has been ignoring internal politics?

This is not the first time Unity has resorted to red-baiting. When New Action was not yet sucking up to them, Unity regularly slimed New Action's leadership for ties to left wing political parties. What will be New Action's response to the Unity attack on Wainer when they were themselves so wronged? And how does Unity's attacks on Wainer jive with the history of their current allies in New Action? Members of ICE and TJC always condemned the Unity mud-slinging at New Action in the past (and won't sling the enormous amount of mud on Unity personnel they have accumulated.) But now all we can expect from New Action will be the sounds of silence. Getting those seats on the Executive Board come with a very high price in principles, whatever ones are left.

Read TJC's strong response on the Norm's Notes blog.


I received this email tonight from a former New Action member:

"We used to go to Mike Shulman's home on Saturday mornings signing countless times to ensure a large number of NAC names would be on the ballot. As a former chapter leader, I had Mike come to our school--an elementary school--where the opposition message to Unity was warmly greeted.

When he and his inner circle betrayed us by pandering to Unity for jobs, it left us with a bitter taste.

The New Action ad in this week's UFT rag looks like it was an anti-NAC piece written by Unity."

The more you hang out with the sleaze, the sleazier you become.

UFT Election News - March 12, 2007

It is not often that people leave Unity Caucus, which can be compared to black hole where some good people desiring to change the union enter, never to emerge. Once enticed with job opportunities, free trips and other perks, the desire for change seems to go south.

Former Unity Chapter Leader running with ICE
That is why the Jerry Frohnhoeffer's move from Unity to the ICE-TJC slate is so remarkable. Jerry is chapter leader at Aviation HS, one of my favorite schools. He is running for Vocational HS VP against Mike Mulgrew from Unity. You can read his bio at my other blog, Norm's Notes.

Building a viable opposition
I met a new Unity CL recently and he is and has been a critic of Unity and even ran against the Unity CL at his school who was humping the 2005 contract. When he won he looked around for signs there was a viable opposition building. When the vote was taken on the 2006 contract he looked for signs in the vote totals that something had been built since the 2005 contract, and seeing the 90% YES vote decided that Unity was his only option. He hopes to reform them from within. Good luck!

He is wrong about that vote being the key. Many people opposed to Unity voted YES. The building of a viable opposition takes a lot of coalescing of forces to create a political movement. Seeing things evolve over the years there's room for hope. New Action's desertion has left a void in the infrastructure of an opposition. No matter how ineffective they were as an opposition, they did have the ability to get literature out. TJC started building 15 years ago but with New Action still around, the going was slow. Once it was clear they were aligning with Unity TJC began to have much greater success. ICE, starting out 3 years ago also has been building infrastructure and the election process is part of that building effort. No matter what the result in this election, the opposition is not going away. And if we should see the farce of New Action holding 8 Exec Bd seats, Unity 81 and ICE and TJC none, there is no better demonstration of the lack of democracy in the UFT.

Next: New Action History Lesson 1

See you at tonight's UFT Exec Bd meeting. Come on down. I'll be hovering over the ribs.

Measuring Teachers

"If teachers are to be held accountable for the performance of their students, strategies for measuring the impact of their work must be refined or, at least, the uncertainties of these measurements must be taken into account in assessing the impact of teachers and schools on student performance."
http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9050/index1.html

The word performance can be viewed narrowly (how kids score the reading and math test) or broadly. Once behavior enters into it - often discounted as an "excuse" but to teachers one of the most important factors - things get very sticky. I do not mean behavior in the sense of "good and bad' but in the wider sense of the resources students bring to the table and the ability of the teacher to work with them in that framework. I had "successes" with kids who did not move higher in reading but moved significantly in their ability to control their emotions, function within the context of a classroom, etc. Can these things be measured?

I taught in a rotation system in elementary school. One year you get the higher performing class, the next you don't. Same school, same families, same teacher, etc. This was not a big school -- 2 or 3 classes on the grade. My measured performance varied vastly depending on which level I taught. In some ways I was better with the struggling kids. There were teachers in my school who were awesome with the top classes but fell apart when they had the bottom classes. We had teachers who were willing to sell their souls to stay out of the bottom classes.

Class size made a difference but the administration in my school in the 70's at least tried to make the lower exponent classes smaller. Most teachers fought to teach the better classes even with the higher class size. Favorites of the principal were often rewarded (violating the contract) with these classes year after year. Or they tried to put the teachers they thought to be the best with the top classes, relegating the lower classes to some sort of triage.

The entire process is so complex, trying to judge teachers on performance is very difficult. In the old days the key thing was if you could control your class. The entire school -- colleagues, admins, parents, etc measured you as a teacher based on that factor alone. When I learned how to do that I felt it was one of the major accomplishments of my life and turned me into a confident teacher. It was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Dealing with actually teaching them after that became the next hard thing.

I met a top lawyer at a party a few years ago and he entered teaching around the same time I did in the late 60's to stay out of the draft. He couldn't believe I stayed in all these years. He taught in the south Bronx for 2 years and said it was the hardest thing he ever did. He was not referring to the teaching part.

Klein was there too as a teacher escaping the draft at the same time for around 6 months and you never hear him sat a word about that experience. I know what he must have went through. We all did. He knows what it's all about and that is why I consider him such a snake in the way he and others put the main blame for failing schools on teacher competency.

Cerf said as much at the Manhattan Inst luncheon. That is why we have all the phony prof. development. The way I and other generations of teachers learned PD was from the great teachers who worked with us.

Robotics at Javits Center Mar. 16-18

FRC (FIRST Robotics Competition) Regionals at Javits, Mar. 16-18

The New York City Regional is a FIRST Robotics Regional Competition that will be held between Friday, March 16 and Sunday, March 18, 2007 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. The 2007 competition will include sixty-three FIRST Robotics teams from New York City, the metropolitan region, and as far away as Brazil, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

The event is a world-class celebration of high school students, engineers, and mentors creating and discovering tomorrow’s science and technology! Twenty major New York City corporations will be on-hand to offer information about summer jobs, internships, co-op positions, and other employment opportunities at our first ever career fair. With an additional 200 middle school teams in five boroughs, the 2007 FLL and FIRST Vex demonstrations will only increase the excitement! http://www.nycnjfirst.org/nyc_frc.html

I will be there all 3 days at the registration desk, so stop by and say hello.

Friday is a practice day so the kids will have some time to take visiting school groups around.
I am coordinating school visits on Friday, so if you are interested in bringing a group contact me directly.

Read more at my robotics blog: http://normsrobotics.blogspot.com/

Daily Doins: March 8, 2007

How does a retiree spend a relaxing day? First, you start out by going to the printer to order more UFT election leaflets. Then, on to the full-day Region 4 robotics workshop. Then back to the printer to pick up the leaflets. Then off to meet a group of teachers at a high school who want to hear about the UFT elections. On the way, drop off leaflets at varying schools. Wrap up the evening battling the Unity slime on the blogs. Who wants to be sitting in the sun in Florida?

Tech Support in Medieval Times

In my last years in the system I was a technology staff developer assisting teachers with the integration of technology after Giuliani wasted $150 million putting 4 computers and a printer in every middle school classroom in the city, a system most teachers found practically useless in the context of the 45 minute or less period. (Most tech educators begged them to start out in the early grades and work the systems up the chain, but why listen to educators when businessmen can make the dicisions?) So my "support" often involved crawling around under tables plugging in printers and internet cables.

There's a much better system of tech support at Devil Ducky: Introducing The Book

Kit Wainer On the Non-Debate: Friday, March 2

Ballot facts

from Jeff Kaufman

Ellen Fox and I examined the membership list today at the American Arbitration Association. Over 161,000 ballots will be mailed. The list was missing 56 full time UFT staff members. This list will be emailed to me shortly. Jeff Zion, AAA official in charge of elections expected less than 50,000 to be returned.





Ballots to be mailed on Friday.
Academic HS 17642
Vocational HS 2125
JHS 12826
Elementary 36892
Retired 50207
Functional 38541
Special Ed 3579
While they were separated in the list Academic and Vocational will get the same ballot. Functional and Special Ed will get the same as well. Functional includes private sector. Charter schools are in each division.

Schmoozing at the Brecht Forum

As previously posted here, Sally Lee of Teachers Unite, hosted a forum on UFT basics aimed at new teachers, a number of whom enter teaching with a negative attitude about the UFT and unions in general. They are going to rescue the schools from those burned out teachers who value the contract over the children. Many have been imbued with the "corporate is good, public institutions are bad" mentality from college or previous jobs.

After all, look at the massive propaganda machine in the media that blame teachers for all the problems in the schools. With the DOE pointing its finger directly at the union contract as a reason for failing schools and with the DOE's ability to capture Teaching Fellows and Teach for America teachers with a "stay away from the union" and "you will find union people who don't want to work" and "UFT Chapter Leaders are the worst teachers" propaganda blitz, there is a lot of work to do.

At the same time, a group of these teachers are socially conscious and looking to be politically active in social justice areas. Sally's idea was to bring veteran union activists like myself and Megan Behrent (just a little bit less vet than I am) together with some of these people to explain how we see the union operating from our perspective, as members of ICE and TJC. If people want to get the Unity/union leadership point of view, they can always read the NY teacher, watch the commercials, or go to chapter meetings when the suits come to the school. But these are the people who often turn them off.

The event, surprisingly, brought out a mixed group of newer teachers and vets, some of whom read about it on this blog, including someone from Unity (not from the leadership.) We think everyone got something out of it. It was a pleasure working with Megan, who is so knowledgeable and articulate in presenting her views and that of TJC. She combines practical experience with her theories of activism. In particular, Megan is so good at addressing the idea that teachers who insist on adhering to the contract or who don't put in 12 hour days as somehow not being as caring as teachers that do. Points were raised that none of these 12-hour a day teachers have families with children or have to commute and that when they do they will find it impossible to put in the same time. In some ways, the concept of "heroic teacher saving the children," the Klein/corporate model of the ideal teacher, is very anti-mother (I know that many fathers take a big share of child-caring, but let's face it, women still bear the brunt). Lost in the rancor of the last few contracts with its time extensions was the disruptions so many families went through with rearranged baby sitting, etcc.

Sally has been bugging me for years to put together a flow chart of how the UFT is organized and I finally did it as well as a chart of the various caucuses. I used them to present a section on "UFT Basics 101." I will ultimately post them both when they are more presentable for the web.

Here is Sally's outline we worked from. We got most of this done, but not all.

Getting to Know the UFT: An Introduction for Teacher Activists
March 1st, 5:30 p.m., Brecht Forum

Overview of UFT Structure and History (15 min.)

(Sally) [slide presentation]
• Radical history
-What did Teachers Union fight for?
• 1968 strike
-Teachers vs. Community
• 2006 Context
-Community perception of UFT
-UFT’s role in national politics (Beyond Contracts)

(Megan)-Purpose of labor unions: Current State of solidarity/labor movement
(including: How TFA/Fellows program break solidarity)

(Norm) -How UFT is structured (hierarchy, caucuses, how resolutions are passed, etc.—

Why Get Involved (and what may happen if you do, and how to do it)? (20 min.)
(Norm/Megan) •Individualistic set-up of teaching (the “Dangerous Minds”/”Freedom Writers” trap): “I can make a difference” vs. building a broad movement
• Rank and file involvement/democracy makes the UFT stronger (including: how this will affect community/social justice issues)

(Sally) • Social Justice Unionism

(Norm/Megan) • Risks and Advantages of getting involved with the union in a school
(including the content of what you teach)

(Norm/Megan) • How can rank and filers get involved?/How can rank and filers utilize union as an organizing strategy for social justice?
-Rep/Delegate
-Caucuses
-Voting
-Chapters endorsing particular issues
-Conduct outreach about issues at DA meetings

• Strategies for protection
(Megan) -Consultation Committee
(Norm) -Customized consultation committee

Know Your Rights! (10 min.)

(Norm) • Role of chapter leaders
• Typical abuses/typical grievances

• Resources: Where can individuals look up rights?

Q & A (30 min.)

Participant questions for veteran union activists (introduce any union activists who are present to answer questions).

Klein & Weingarten: Separated at birth?

Trained as corporate lawyers.

Reached the highest positions in their organizations through appointment by the largesse of a powerful person above them.

Entered education for reasons unrelated to developing a career as a teacher.

Taught full time for only 6 months.

Run autocratic, rigid top-down, patronnage-ridden organizations top heavy with people making six figure salaries a year where personal loyalty is more important than competence.

Believe appearance is more important than reality.

Have in-house public relations staffs at great cost and pay high sums to outside PR agencies. View public relations as primary over trying to solve real problems.

Make at least a quarter of a million dollars a year plus expenses.

Wainer Clear Winner in "Debate"

While not a debate, but more in the nature of statements made by Weingarten and Wainer, the response by Weingarten to even the possibility of a debate is indicative of a fear of standing in front of the members in a forum where he doesn't have absolute control.

The following appeared today at the UFT-CWE wiki. Since I was banned on Broadway (52, that is) I remained outside to interview people as they left. Video is being edited and we hope an interview with Kit Wainer outside the UFT building will be available soon. Also, more coming on my banishment.

From http://uftcwe.pbwiki.com/

ICE-TJC candidate Kit Wainer clearly demonstrated his clear vision for a union that represents its members instead of its leadership at a meeting held at our regular chapter meeting on March 2nd. While Weingarten came off as personable she clearly told us that raising awareness of adult education issues was "our problem."

"The work must be done by the Chapter," she stated suggesting that it was our responsiblity to get other organizations involved.

It is hard to understand why she would not help us more. She offered to allow us a few minutes at a Delegate Assembly meeting which, of course, is attended only by UFT members, hardly the group that needs to be convinced about the need for adult education.

We have not endorsed a candidate but it is clear who the winner should be. For more on Kit Wainer see his video at http://www.elfrank.com/Kit/.

Coming Soon to the UFT: 28,000 Home Child Care Providers

I've been writing about how at-large voting guarantees Unity victory time and again. So far the 55,000 retirees with the addition of the lock-step chapters like guidance and secretaries that support Unity (most of the functional chapters are naturally led by Unity loyalists) have done the job. But soon they will have another 28,000 home child care providers, who have been organized by the UFT, joining them as another chapter. This will finally make the working in school teachers a minority in the UFT. (80,000 out of close to 200,000 UFT members.)

We totally support the organizing effort and the great work the UFT has been doing in organizing this group. But of course, we always question their motives. Rumors have been around that getting the UFT recognized as official bargaining agent is subject to negotiation -- like supporting the lifting of the charter school cap in exchange (with language to give the appearance that it will be easier to unionize the teachers, but in reality nothing much.)

They should be a totally separate chapter with their own president and executive board and should not be deciding issues like the high school, middle school and elementary VP's. If it is necessary to amend the UFT constitution, we should make that a contingency of supporting the entry of these workers into the UFT.

NYC Public School Parents Blog (New)

She will protest, but I believe Leonie Haimson's listserve has been one of the major galvanizing forces in the city for parents and other forces to unite against BloomKlein. Alliances have been built across the city. At the rally on Weds. I met more of Leonie's Lions, a force that will increasingly be reckoned with. We've seen some of Patrick Sullivan's fine posts on NYC Educator and other places. It was a pleasure to finally meet him on Weds. He will now be running a blog based on Leonie's nyceducationnews listserve. Lots of email, but worth all of it. A progressive parent voice with others chipping in. This is so scary for BloomKlein that they monitor it and often respond based on what is being posted there. Now comes the blog. Go there or be square!

Here is what Leonie sent out to the listserve.
Check out the new parent blog with contributions so far from Diane Ravitch, Patrick Sullivan, and Leonie Haimson – about the rally this week, the statistical lies of Tweed, the protest in Queens over Halsey Junior High School and more! Parents and others invited to contribute and to comment.

http://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com

Tiny Kangaroo Down Sport

From a contact:

I was at the UFT in Manhattan and shocked to see the Aussies having a meeting there with lots of PR material etc.

High-priced Aussies ($1000) a day by some accounts, have been part of micro-management attack on teachers. I'm sure the UFT has some explanation, but we get all too many accounts of the collaborative nature of the UFT.

Today at the Brecht Forum

Apparently UFT's leadership is raising questions to the event organizers because it features the opposition. They are not satisfied with Unity Caucus' control of 100% of the UFT media. They wants in on this event too. With Megan Behrent (TJC) and myself being the featured speakers, they want to know why UFT officialdom (the suits) was not invited, apparently not viewing Unity critics like Megan & I as true UFT members.

We'll make them an offer. Invite ICE and TJC to participate in UFT activities (funny, but they don't send Megan or I invitations to many UFT events). Give ICE and TJC regular space in the NY Teacher. And let us have rebuttal time to Randi's long-winded reports at the Delegate Assembly.

Well, maybe Unity clones will show up anyway. They can explain to the new teachers just how democratic the UFT is. Come down and join them.

If you can't make it down today, look for a report tomorrow.

Location:
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (the West Side Highway)
between Bank & Bethune Streets
Subways: A, C, E or L to 14th Street & 8th Ave; 1, 2, 3 or 9 to 14th Street &
7th Ave.

Getting to Know the UFT: An Introduction for Teacher Activists

Thursday, March 1, 5:30 PM

Teachers committed to social justice often avoid having anything to do with their union for a variety of reasons. Whether curious about individual professional rights or how to build a large-scale movement, we invite New York City public school teachers to learn about the radical roots of the United Federation of Teachers, ask questions for veteran UFT activists to answer, and find out why rank and file involvement is key to mobilizing for social change.

Say It Ain't So Martine

Martine Guerrier has been appointed "chief family engagement officer" at Tweed

(I'll give a report on last night's raucous anti-Klein meeting later in the day.)

I read recently that BloomKlein, upon taking over the DOE bought off every potential parent who could emerge to oppose them in local areas with parent coordinator and other jobs. We basically heard the sounds of silence for quite a while. Certainly there was little or no parental presence at PEP meetings (except for special occasions), the one place where voices of protest could be raised publicly.


As a coalition of parent and community voices began to be heard again (and I give an enormous amount of credit to Leonie Haimson and her list for helping to bring some of these voices together) BloomKlein seems to be trying another round of the "buy them off" tactic.

I like and respect Martine Guerrier and I'm sure she feels she can do more on the inside, a classic error people make. She has (had) been the one voice on the PEP that seemed to question (gently) some of the actions of BloomKlein. She was often one of the only ones to question Klein on a number of issues. I haven't attended PEP meetings regularly but some of Martine's votes on controversial issues increasingly were tied to the politics of Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, an ally of Bloomberg. I used to like Markowitz since his student activist days at Brooklyn College, but not after his sell-out so Ratner City and total suck-up to Bloomberg. (Hey Marty, fuh-ged-about-it!)

Naturally, one would expect this since Martine owed her position on the PEP to Markowitz' appointment. Her one big vote against the promotion policy when Bloomberg fired the PEP who opposed him ( he couldn't fire Martine because she was a borough appointment) was the highlight. Markowitz apparently gave her free reign on this, while the Staten Island borough Pres, fired the SI rep at that time.

I don't remember all of her votes, but I do remember an unsettling pattern of support for Klein's policies seemed to be emerging. And Klein always bent over backwards towards her. She does command a great deal of respect with her demeanor and intelligence.

But Martine is not the first person of this ilk to be co-opted and will now be drawn into the maw of the DOE, joining people who had a rep for integrity like James Leibman, forced to sit in as an acolyte at Klein press conferences, in the midst of buzzing Blackberries, never to utter her own thoughts again without filtering through hordes of press agents. In other words, the sounds of silence.

See original post from Leonie Haimson to her listserve and email from DOE here.

Arthur Goldstein, ICE-TJC Candidate for Exec. Bd. At-large Speaks About the Election

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dznjzblBz9A

Teacher arrested and removed from school in handcuffs

The NY Teacher trumpets every time there is a rare grievance victory. BloomKlein just laugh and refuse to enforce even sustained grievances. Weingarten brags about the pamphlet “Know Your Rights” but when you do stand up for your rights you find the union behind - far behind.

A little over a week ago I got a chilling phone call. It was from a former colleague who taught across the hall from me for a decade. That day (Thurs, Feb. 15) she was arrested and taken from her school in handcuffs based on a bogus charge made by a parent. She was not told the reason or told her rights. Most egregious was the actions of the school administrators. The AP came up to her room and told her she was wanted in the office. Not one other word that there were 5 cops waiting for her to arrest her. 5 cops! I guess there are no other crimes to solve in this city. But I do not blame the police for this.

The former Leadership Academy principal, who is close to the parent, was smiling ear-to-ear. She had finally found a way to remove a teacher who was a thorn in her side (the teacher ran for chapter leader last year and lost by a slim margin.) It was certainly within her power to convince the police that this case did not warrant an arrest.

What kind of monsters do we have running our schools?

How do we know the charge was bogus? While the teacher sat in the police station until 7pm, the police investigated at the school and the child was taken to the hospital by the police and found to not have a mark on her. When they returned to the station, the cop said it was all “nonsense” and they rescinded the arrest. They had looked at her 22-year record and found not one mark against her. “People we spoke to had good things to say about you,” they said. Someone from child support services told the teacher that the parent, who was at the station, said that if the teacher offered an apology, “this would all go away.” “Hell no,” the teacher said. For escorting a child to her seat after she had run out of the room twice? “Hell no!”

The teacher will now spend months or longer in the rubber room. We are efforting to help her find a lawyer to sue everyone involved. Maybe one day she will own the school building where she was so humiliated. And hopefully, the principal’s house.

The principal can keep smiling ear-to-ear, for now, having removed the one person who stood up to her. What a lesson to the rest of the people in the school, which has undergone enormous turnover in just a few years. Ask people if things are not worse than when the principal arrived.

Now, where does the blame lie for this fiasco? The principal? Sure. But I also blame a union leadership that can be so weak, helpless or worse, not consider that this can happen to any teacher in the system at any time, a high priority issue to address.

Why not, you might ask? I should put it in terms of they are more concerned about the bad public relations that might result from a teacher that is guilty than they do about the innocent teachers who have to be put through this. When I told some union officials about the case, they said, “Why didn’t she call the union?” The teacher has no faith in the union and when she did call the district rep the response was not exactly immediate. The UFT will say, “She should have read the “Know Your Rights” pamphlet in their "blame the victim" mentality.

I went to the rubber room at 25 Chapel St. Monday, Feb 26 and videotaped a statement from the teacher as she came out at 3pm. Then we went to the UFT Executive Board meeting where we both spoke. “We have a policy,” was the response. “We get a lawyer to assist you.” What is left out is what they don’t assist you with. The legal assistance is limited. I asked why doesn’t the union take this to the top level of the police department so cops will be alerted that these cases are all too often “nonsense.” The response: “People are guilty too. We’ll get them a lawyer.”

Thus, the UFT has the same response whether the teacher has committed a crime or whether there is a vendetta on the part of a principal or parent or even a child. This attitude is what is undermining the union at the basic level – the school.

There are no repercussions for anyone at the DOE because the teacher is left to fend for herself. If she wants to sue for false arrest, the burden is on her to find and pay for a lawyer. Then if she wins after spending an onerous amount of her won money, the union will trumpet the victory as theirs.

Oh, she might even win her way back into the school from hell after the DOE investigates after months in the rubber room. But what of the image children, parents and colleagues have of her removal in handcuffs?

I can point to case after case where Randi Weingarten has protected principals and superintendents, not wanting to interfere with cozy political arrangements.

When Jeff Kaufman, one of the ICE HS reps on the current Exec Bd and himself a former lawyer made a resolution last June calling on the UFT to provide more support to teachers in this position by hiring paralegals to do their own investigation apart from the DOE—questioning witnesses, etc, Weingarten and the Exec Bd were opposed. After all, they have to use the money for more insipid commercials. This is one of the reasons why Weingarten is so anxious to get Kaufman and other ICE-TJC reps off the Board.

At the Feb. 26 Exec. Bd meeting, Jeff and others in ICE gave the teacher a sense of support she does not get from the UFT. Jeff told her what she would have to do and gave her a lot of advice. At the end of the meeting, long-time Unity hack Sandra March, one of our 3 pension reps, attacked me, typical of the standard Unity response.

Because ICE raised this case to such a high profile, we expect the UFT to respond with a higher level of attention than the average teacher would get.

If ICE-TJC had more influence, we would call a press conference in front of the school and parade the teacher as the poster girl for teacher abuse. We would help her find a lawyer and make the DOE pay to such an extent they will think very long and hard before letting this happen to another teacher.

There would be consequences for allowing this to happen to an innocent teacher. The law will take care of the guilty. The UFT should stand up and deliver for the innocents.

Getting to Know the UFT: An Introduction for Teacher Activists

Thursday, March 1, 5:30 PM

Teachers committed to social justice often avoid having anything to do with their union for a variety of reasons. Whether curious about individual professional rights or how to build a large-scale movement, we invite New York City public school teachers to learn about the radical roots of the United Federation of Teachers, ask questions for veteran UFT activists to answer, and find out why rank and file involvement is key to mobilizing for social change.


Presenters:

Megan Behrent has been a high school teacher for eight years and is a UFT delegate. She ran on the Teachers for a Just Contract slate in 2004. She was on the city-wide UFT negotiation committee in 2006 and was one of the few to vote to fight for a better contract on that committee. She is also an active socialist and has been involved in UFTers to Stop the War.



Sally Lee is a former teacher and a core member of NYCoRE (New York Collective of Radical Educators). She founded Teachers Unite to support teacher-activists and progressive educators with resources that develop community leadership and social justice pedagogy.



Norm Scott spent thirty-five years working in the NYC school system, thirty of them as an elementary school teacher. He was a UFT delegate for much of that time and a chapter leader from 1994-1998. He started publishing Education Notes, a newsletter for NYC teachers in 1996 and was a founding member of the Independent Community of Educators (ICE), a progressive caucus in the UFT in 2003. He writes a blog at http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/

Location:
The Brecht Forum
451 West Street (the West Side Highway)
between Bank & Bethune Streets
Subways: A, C, E or L to 14th Street & 8th Ave; 1, 2, 3 or 9 to 14th Street &
7th Ave.