The Broad Foundation is not
anti-union. Rather, it seeks to transform unions into a form of company union.
A company union is a union located within and run by a company or a
national government, and the union bureaucracy is incorporated into the
company’s management... Ken Derstine
... the "seat at the table" strategy is not due to bad strategy but in fact
that strategy is endemic to the way the union leadership has operated for 50 years -
part of the very fabric of their DNA. They can't try to organize the
membership or run a democratic union that might threaten this seat - or stool. They
are locked in....Ed Notes
As I reported last night -
Ken Derstine on Randi after Watching AEI Video: This is a company union -in re: Randi's tweet to me last night about evidence related to her VAM waffling. Let's look at the bigger picture of evidence of ed deform collaboration. Boy, is there evidence.
In order to mount an effective response to the union complicity, we must study and understand who and what the AFT/UFT really represents, which is not us but the ruling class. [I know for some people "ruling class" connotes a "RC" meeting in some
dark rooms to plot - not exactly but when it comes to ed deformers like Eli Broad et al, not
totally wrong.]
At Saturday's MORE meeting, Jonathan Lessuck made that very important
point. (Jonathan is a member of Progressive Labor, which has been a
presence at the AFT and NEA conventions.) He said that without such an analysis people in MORE will think that by certain actions they can get Mulgrew/Unity/Randi to modify their policies instead of engaging them fully.
When an opposition - like New Action - plays the role of lobbying the
leadership to change instead of full-scale engagement with the rank and file - it ends up with a mindset of fighting for little
crumbs rather than fully engaging the leadership in an all front battle.
At times I worry about MORE becoming New Action, light, especially when I see opposition people joining UFT bullshit committees.
[Soon I'll be putting forth my argument for MORE to boycott the UFT election farce next year as a true militant "in your face" act of resistance rather than misleading members that we can win ANYTHING. And maybe just let New Action have its little crumbs.]
There has been a yin-yang in MORE on this point over the years.
Some caucuses think that getting Randi to say she is now against VAM or supporting opt out is a victory of sorts [Let's celebrate - we got them to react - look how our work is paying off].
I don't agree. I see it as co-optation and when people like Diane Ravitch praise Randi whenever she does something like this I see it as enabling Randi to engage in further co-optation and distraction -- pulling people away from the struggle. Thus, this weekend's
big NPE conf in Chicago will enable Randi to play the true reformer. I wasn't able to make it but if I could I don't know if I could be polite.
[Later I'll report on the remarkable attack Leo Casey made on Leonie Haimson and KidsPac for daring to criticize de Blasio on education.]
Without understanding the union obligations to certain interests, Mulgrew and Randi actions do not make sense - like why would the UFT not jump on the opt out and anti-common core case as a way to strike back at the deformers? {"If you fuck our members, we will fight you tooth and nail on every single initiative, even if it has merit - first stop the attacks and then we'll talk."}
I have been making this argument in MORE for years and surprisingly there has been some resistance along the lines of "what difference does their motivation make?" A component of MORE looks at the leadership as self-interested and often blundering bureaucrats not driven by ideological or entangling alliances with elements of the Ruling Class. Some of us, often the older ICE wing of MORE who have experienced the actions of the UFT since the 60s, see much deeper roots between our union, the government and corporate interests. [We are told that if we present this to the members we will look like nuts - sometimes I think the rank and file is more advanced than the activists].
The
George Schmidt 40 year old book on the AFT and the CIA and the Kahlenberg Shanker bio are must reads. (In fact I'm going to run a study group this summer on George's book and invite all of you to join in - we'll hold it a Madison Square Garden.) Some people seem to think that the "seat at the table" strategy is due to bad thinking when in fact that strategy is endemic to the way the union leadership has operated - part of the very fabric of their DNA. They can't try to organize the membership or run a democratic union that might threaten this seat. They are locked in.
Ken Derstine has been relentless in exposing the entanglements, but with a focus on Randi, he makes it look too much like it's her - rather than the 50 years of entangling alliances. If Randi didn't exist, not much would be different and one of my tasks is getting people to see that.
From Defend Public Education
The Broad Foundation and the unions
See also: Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?
This is an except from a longer article on this blog originally published on February 24, 2013 and updated numerous times: Who is Eli Broad and why is he trying to destroy public education?
Above: New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel
Klein, second right, hugs United Federation of Teachers President Randi
Weingarten after winning The Broad Prize Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2007, in
Washington. Eli Broad, left, and Bush's U.S. Secretary of Education
Margaret Spellings look on.
Diane Bondareff/The Broad Foundation/AP
See: N.Y.C. Wins Prestigious Urban Education Award | Education Week
The Broad Foundation and the unions
The Broad Foundation Mission Statement states that one of its goals
is the transformation of labor relations. The Broad Foundation is not
anti-union. Rather, it seeks to transform unions into a form of company union.
A company union is a union located within and run by a company or a
national government, and the union bureaucracy is incorporated into the
company’s management. This opens up the workforce to unfettered
exploitation for profits of the owners. Many right-wing governments
internationally use company unions to suppress worker struggles against
low living standards. In 1935, during the labor struggles of the
Depression, the National Labor Relations Act was passed which outlawed company unions in the United States.
Broad
has found no shortage of former or current union leaders who are
willing to be bought and join his venture philanthropy to foster
labor/management “collaboration”. Former President of the Service Employees International Union, Andy Stern, is just the most visible on the board. In education, the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) fosters this collaboration.
Outgoing President of the United Teachers - Los Angeles Helen Bernstein was TURN's first head with a grant from the PEW Charitable Trust and started TURN in 1996. Leadership of TURN was taken over by current AFT Vice President Adam Urbanski, when he was head of the Rochester, New York local in1999. By 2001, TURN had formed a partnership with the Broad Foundation. According to the Los Angeles Times,
on April 5, 2001, Eli Broad announced his Foundation was donating $10
million to TURN to foster labor/management “collaboration”. In 2009,
Broad invested $2 million in TURN, “a network of National Education
Association and American Federation of Teachers locals”. (Broad's 2009 Annual Report, Page 15) (For more details about TURN's affiliation with corporate education reform see Schools Matter, "Paul Toner and the TURNcoats", July 24, 2012.)
In the early days of this collaboration, labor leaders joined leaders
in politics, business and non-profit organizations in staffing the
faculty at the Broad Superintendents Academy, training the future Broad
Superintendents. According a 2002 Broad press release (Page 2) participants included:
• Rod Paige, U.S. Secretary of Education in the G.W. Bush Administration
• Henry Cisneros, Secretary of HUD in the first Clinton Administration and now CEO of American CityVista
• William Cox, Managing Director of Broad, School Evaluation Services
• Chris Cross, Senior Fellow, Center on Education Policy
• Chester E. Finn, Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
• Frances Hesselbein, Chairman, The Drucker Foundation
• Don McAdams, Founder, Center for Reform of School Systems
• Donald Nielsen, President, Hazelton Corporation, Chairman of the 2WAY Corporation
• Hugh B. Price, President and CEO, National Urban League
• Paul Ruiz, Principal Partner, Education Trust
• Adam Urbanski, Director of Teacher Union Reform Network
• Randi Weingarten, President, United Federation of Teachers.
• Superintendents from the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Detroit,
Houston, Long Beach, Memphis, New Orleans, Oakland, Rochester, San
Diego, San Francisco and Seattle school districts also addressed the
Academy.
On November 8th and 9th, 2002, Randi Weingarten participated in a
retreat at the Eli Broad's home which included corporate and education
leaders. The Press Release said this about the Broad Foundation Summit:
"The recent launch of several initiatives
incubated at previous retreats and the Foundation's increase in assets
to $400 million prompted the Foundation to convene this strategic
planning session. Previously, the Foundation hosted retreats in May of
1999 and February of 2000. The Broad Foundation's mission is to
dramatically improve K-12 public education through better governance,
management and labor relations. The Foundation's investments are
designed to transform large urban school districts from lackluster
bureaucracies into high-performing public enterprises."
In 2005 the Broad Foundation made a $1 million grant to help the
United Federation of Teachers in New York City, at that time headed by
Randi Weingarten, to open two union-run charter schools in Brooklyn, the
first such schools in the country. In October, 2012, it was announced
these schools are in academic and enrollment trouble and will probably
close at the end of the school year. This became another opportunity for another round of teacher bashing by the right-wing media. (Note: This column is written by Micah Lasher, executive director of StudentsFirstNY.)
On September 18, 2007, the Broad Foundation awarded New York City public schools the
Broad Prize for Urban Education. Joining Eli Broad on stage at the
ceremony were U.S. Secretary of Education in the Bush administration
Margaret Spellings, New York City Education Chancellor Joel Klein, and
Randi Weingarten, President of the United Federation of Teachers.
On November 17th, 2008, shortly after the
election of Barack Obama as President, Randi Weingarten spoke at the
National Press Club. As reported by journalist Dana Goldstein, in a
March 20, 2009 article The Education Wars
in The American Prospect, Weingarten offered “an olive branch” to the
corporate luminaries in attendance (including many mentioned in this
article who are affiliated with the Broad Foundation). She spoke about
seeking “common ground” on such things as merit pay for teachers,
evaluations based on test scores, and teacher tenure.
In its 2009 Annual Report (Page 10), the Broad Foundation said,
“Teacher unions have always been a
formidable voice in public education. We decided at the onset of our
work to invest in smart, progressive labor leaders like Randi
Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City
for more than a decade and now president of the American Federation of
Teachers (AFT). We partnered with Weingarten to fund two union-run
charter schools in Brooklyn and to fund New York City’s first
incentive-based compensation program for schools, as well as the AFT’s
Innovation Fund. We had previously helped advance pay for performance
programs in Denver and Houston, but we were particularly encouraged to
see New York City embrace the plan.” (See the picture in the 2008 Broad Foundation Annual Report, page 14 and a featured Weingarten quote on page 15.)
On the same page (Page 10) of the 2009 Annual Report the
Report boasted of being one of the earliest funders of Teach For
America stating “our investment in this innovative teaching corps has
grown to more than $41 million.” The same page also says, “Since 2000,
our CMO (charter management organization) investments have swelled to
nearly $100 million, creating 54,474 charter seats in 16 cities. We
provided early start-up capital for charter operators like KIPP, Aspire,
Green Dot and Uncommon Schools. They have since become the models for
other CMOs to emulate.”
In April, 2009, the AFT teamed with four venture philanthropies: the
Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Bill &
Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation—to
create the Innovation Fund. The private-foundation contributions, in
addition to the AFT's down payment of $1 million, brought the fund's
total to $2.8 million. Weingarten said its funds were made available for
local affiliates to "incubate promising ideas to improve schools."
In an April 28, 2009 article, Education Week’s Teacher Beat described the purpose of the Innovation Fund this way:
“Both Weingarten and the foundation folks
spoke a lot about the importance of working together and
collaboration...Both she and Adam Urbanski, the president of the
Rochester, N.Y., affiliate who will serve as the fund's executive
director, were quick to minimize the fact that AFT's education-reform
objectives haven't always been in line with those of the private
foundations. (Broad and Gates, for instance, were said to be primed to
offer financial support behind D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee's
two-tiered pay proposal, although as far as I know, neither foundation
ever confirmed that on the record.)”
On June 3, 2010, at their union leader’s urging, the Washington D.C.
teachers Union ratified a contract with the Washington D.C. School
District, headed by Chancellor Michelle Rhee, which included performance
pay linked to test score growth, and a weakening of seniority and
tenure. Weingarten had interfered in the Union's election to ensure it would be held after the contract ratification. Rhee got most of what she wanted in
terms of merit pay for teachers and loss of seniority. Union President
George Parker called the ratification of the contract “a great day for
teachers and students.”
When the union election was finally held on November 10, 2010, Parker
was voted out of office by the union rank-and-file. On May 20, 2011,
Michelle Rhee announced that Parker was joining her corporate reform organization StudentsFirst.
Rhee had resigned as Chancellor of Washington D.C. schools on October
13, 2010, and started StudentsFirst soon after, after her sponsoring
Mayor was not reelected. Rhee’s Deputy Chancellor and chief negotiator
of the 2010 teachers’ contract, Kaya Henderson, replaced her. Henderson
recently announced the proposed closing of 20 schools due to “under
enrollment”.
On July 8th, 2010, Randi Weingarten welcomed Bill Gates as the keynote speaker at the national AFT convention. Subsequently, in April 17th, 2012, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $2 million to
five of the AFT’s TURN regional networks through the Consortium for
Educational Change, “an Illinois-based network of teacher unions, school
districts, and professional organizations that work to make school
systems more collaborative, high-performing organizations.” Of the
grant, Mary Jane Morris, executive director of CEC said, “There is clear
evidence that policies and programs that truly impact teaching
effectiveness result when teacher unions and management collaborate as
equal partners. Each stakeholder brings a unique understanding and
knowledge-base that must be considered.”
On June 7, 2012 the Chicago Teachers Union was holding a strike
authoirzation vote. (90 percent of the teachers' union, and 98 percent
of those voting called for a strike.) Randi Weingarten flew into Chicago
the same day, not to support the teachers, but to attend the Clinton
Global Initiative Conference. She participated on a panel with Chicago
Mayor Rahm Emanuel to praise him for his Chicago Infrastructure Trust. Speaking on the panel, she
supported the neoliberal agenda of labor and management collaboration
which historically has been to the advantage of capital against labor.
Weingarten left town without speaking to the teachers. She did join the
picket line near the end of the strike. (It has not been disclosed if
she was there to support the CTU or to end the strike.)
An
article in Reuters, right after the 2012 AFT convention reelected
Weingarten to a third term, began: “In the maelstrom of criticism
surrounding America's unionized public school teachers, the woman
running the second-largest educator union says time has come to
collaborate on public school reform rather than resist.” "U.S. teacher union boss bends to school reform winds", Reuters, July 31, 2012
The Chicago teachers' strike in September, 2012, to which the AFT gave tepid financial and verbal support (not
rallying locals nationally to support the CTU), ended on September
19th, 2012. On September 22nd, Weingarten joined Secretary of Education
Duncan, who was on a bus tour through the Midwest to promote Race to the
Top as part of the President Obama's reelection campaign.
On the tour she joined Gayle Manchin, wife of West Virginia U.S.
Senator Joe Manchin, on a panel to discuss “how to build public-private
partnerships to support educational improvement as the path to a
brighter future.”Weingarten had praised this program as
an example of business/labor collarboration at the Clinton Global
Initiative conference. The state-run McDowell County, West Virginia
school system and the AFT had created the philanthropy organization "Reconnecting McDowell”
in 2011 to foster “collaboration between business, government and
nonprofit organizations to establish programs that address the
challenges faced by this community.” The AFT has given the fund
millions of dollars from the dues of the AFT rank-and-file to this
corporate organization. The AFT is now teaming with Teach for America and businesses (see the last paragraph) in McDowell County to build low income teacher housing for low income teachers. (For more on this and the use of the pension funds of AFT members to invest in this and other infrastructure projects, see Which Side Are You On? on this site.)
On November 17th, 2012, Weingarten teamed with New Jersey Education Secretary Chris Cerf (Broad Academy Class of 2004)
to successfully promote the ratification of a contract for Newark
teachers that included merit pay based on performance (including
high-stakes test scores). The merit pay scheme was subsequently deemed to be a witout merit.
On December 13, 2012, the New Jersey Education Law Center announced it had found that Eli Broad was offering a $430,000 grant to New Jersey contingent on the reelection of Governor Chris Christie.
Terms of the grant include a requirement that the number of charters be
increased by 50%, requiring that all public announcements of the
program by the state have to be cleared with the Broad Foundation, and
it contained a lengthy provision about making documents, files, and
records associated with the grant the property of the Foundation. New
Jersey bloggers speculated that Broad’s real concern was the keeping
Cerf as the New Jersey Secretary of Education.
On December 13th,
2012, Weingarten held a press conference with Bill Clinton and Obama’s
housing secretary Shaun Donovan to announce the AFT would invest $1
billion from the NYC teachers pension fund for Hurricane Sandy relief
for the NYC area. NYC Mayor Bloomburg criticized the investment because
taxpayers would have to bail out the pension fund if the investment
failed.
One month later the U.S. Congress allocated $50.5 billion
dollars for Hurricane Sandy relief.
Weingarten had explained her belief in the investment of the teacher
pension fund in infrastructure projects around the country at the June 19th, 2012 Clinton Global Initiative Conference. She has never explained what gives her the right to use the pensions of millions of teachers for this purpose.
On January 29, 2013, Weingarten was interviewed on
NPR’s All Things Considered. She continued her campaign for a teacher’s
“Bar Exam”. This year long campaign is an endorsement of the corporate
education reformers campaign against teachers that says the problem with
schools is “bad teachers” and tenure. Arne Duncan and New York Governor
Cuomo have been aggressively supporting this proposal. Weingarten did
this NPR interview at the same time as New York City teachers are in a
battle against an unfair and flawed teacher evaluation system which
Cuomo was threatening to impose through drastic cuts in state funding
for NYC public schools if not agreed to or dictatorially imposing the
teacher evaluation system outright.
On March 11, 2009, in an article in the NYC education website Gotham News, in the article "Eli Broad describes close ties to Klein, Weingarten, Duncan",
Broad described his education philosophy and his collaboration with
Klein, Weingarten, and Duncan. The article did not state that
Weingarten's relationship with Broad dates back to at least 2002.
