I can understand Randi Weingarten's dismay and concern. When the symbol of the national education reform movement (Rhee), who posed with a broom on the cover of Time magazine, proclaims that you have climbed into bed with the reformers, well, that might not sit too well with your dues-paying membership! (President Weingarten got into trouble a few months ago when "the enemy" supposedly put words into her mouth, which she then feverishly tried to spin away.

Since this is a recurring event, maybe President Weingarten needs to pause...and reflect. Maybe Randi needs to read some transcripts of her remarks...with a rank-and-file eye, not from the perspective of someone no longer in the classroom...someone no longer directly affected by the reforms being implemented nationwide.

Randi: It's easier NOT to insert one's foot into one's mouth than it is to remove it.

I have been disappointed in the disappearance of NEA President Dennis Van Roekel from the national education scene. Former President Reg Weaver would be leading the national discussion of educational reform. After Dennis "misspoke himself", he has gone AWOL. However, in light of AFT President Weingarten's frequent dips into hot water, maybe Dennis has chosen the wiser course.

Weingarten and Van Roekel need to quit straddling the fence...quit trying to be politically correct. They are NOT winning friends or influencing enemies. They are simply providing sound bites for those anxious (for whatever reasons) to dismantle public education and bust the unions who once strongly defended the rights of their members.

It's time...way past time...for union leaders to quit tucking their tails between their legs and start kicking some ass!

From The Washington Post...

Link to Original Story

The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Randi Weingarten: Rhee is wrong

The teachers union president whom D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee highly praised in an op-ed article this week -- the column in which Rhee tells New York schools boss Joel Klein that he has a lot to learn from her -- is taking strong issue with Rhee.

Rhee wrote in a Sunday piece in the New York Daily News that Klein, once Rhee’s mentor, should follow the same steps she took in negotiating a newly approved contract with the D.C. teachers union.

The advice column, which displayed Rhee’s characteristic hubris, urged Klein and New York United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew to “lean on” Randi Weingarten, the former president of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers who is now president of the American Federation of Teachers.

“Use Randi Weingarten. I don’t like to get in the middle of someone else’s negotiation and I know that there is a long and complicated history between Weingarten and Klein. However, based on my experiences negotiating with Weingarten, she is very much able to see the direction the nation is heading in and the fact that unions need to be a part of the solution. Both Klein and Mulgrew should lean on her.”

It turns out that Weingarten wasn’t so pleased with Rhee’s advice. In a Daily News article today in response to to Rhee, Weingarten wrote that, in fact, the D.C. contract negotiation experience has few if any lessons for New York and that Rhee is exaggerating the historic nature of the pact.

Here’s the piece:

By Randi Weingarten

It’s all well and good that Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who just negotiated her first labor contract, has a first-time bargainer’s pride of ownership and - through a Daily News Op-Ed that appeared on Sunday - is offering unsolicited advice to New Yorkers about how to resolve the current teachers contract impasse.

But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and so is trying to apply simplistic lessons from the D.C. contract to New York. Doing so is akin to doing test prep instead of teaching and learning: It ignores context, only touches on the facts and provides a quick-and-easy fix instead of a real solution.

Having spent more than a few years in New York City and now some time in Washington as well, I know firsthand they are totally different places. It’s a big mistake to act as if they’re not. What’s more, much of what Rhee claims to be new actually predates her arrival in D.C., and the new contract sets new limits on her powers. In fact, to the extent that lessons can be drawn from D.C.’s contract and applied to New York, they are not the anti-union lessons Rhee lays out.

First, a bit of history.

In New York, after a rocky start when Mayor Bloomberg first took office, the United Federation of Teachers, the community, the mayor, principals and teachers worked together for a number of years to hone legislation governing the city’s schools. During that time, Bloomberg and the UFT negotiated three collective bargaining agreements to strengthen schools and improve student performance.

That’s a record to build on, not forget.

In Washington, the approach to education has been to flirt with fads and cure-alls.

Instead of tackling systemic problems head-on, the city often has relied on a kind of magical thinking.

Vouchers, charter schools, mayoral control, the power to "abolish" individual teaching positions and chancellor-controlled teacher evaluations - all of these have been part of the school landscape in Washington for years. Even the latest national fad, dismissing the value of teachers’ experience, is nothing new to Washington. Yet despite these changes being in place for years, D.C. schools did not dramatically improve - because the changes weren’t sustained and systemic.

This is not to say there haven’t been improvements in Washington’s schools. There are islands of excellence. And, after decades of tinkering and fads, Superintendent Clifford Janey, who preceded Rhee, focused his attention on what was actually being taught in Washington’s classrooms. This was a breath of fresh air to the city’s teachers, who had suffered educational whiplash from a series of increasingly dramatic - and mostly unhelpful - changes to the school system.

In the single best decision she has made as chancellor, Rhee is continuing Janey’s good work in this area.

When it comes to learning lessons from D.C. and trying to apply them to New York, the critical thing to understand is that the new D.C. contract is not some revolutionary document that gives lots of brand-new powers to the chancellor. What it does is take the reality - that the chancellor in Washington has long had extraordinary power to hire and fire employees - and codifies it in contract language that actually gives teachers some ability to push back on capricious actions.

The contract does change the landscape in two important ways.

First, it adds transparency, checks and balances, and some measure of rationality, to the chancellor’s previously unfettered power to hire and fire employees. It does all this while preserving teacher tenure, which has always been about due process and not about a job for life.

Anyone who thinks the D.C. contract is an example of how New York should abolish teacher tenure is just plain wrong.

Second, the new D.C. contract gives both teachers and school officials better tools and conditions to do their jobs. For management, that means a clearer, less convoluted delineation of its authority. For teachers, the contract includes real educational enhancements, not just additional salary. The contract features new initiatives to address student discipline and to create teacher centers, based on the long-established program in New York.