Randi Weingarten gave a major address to the AFT Teach Conference yesterday, in which she explained why she took Betsy DeVos to Van Wert, Ohio, and she called out the forces of destruction now targeting public schools in America. It is time, she says, to resist. To resist privatization by charters and vouchers; to resist the attacks on the teaching profession; to fight racial segregation; to resist the budget cuts that hurt children. And to stand up proudly for our public schools, the anchor of our communities, governed democratically by elected school boards. [Jeanne Allen, director of the pro-charter, pro-voucher Center for Education Reform, called for Randi’s resignation for drawing a line connecting school choice advocates today with segregationists in the mid-twentieth century.]
I. Introduction—My Day with Betsy
Welcome to TEACH!
I know many of you have just arrived in Washington (and you can understand why we call it the swamp), but let me start by taking you on a trip, to a town in Ohio called Van Wert.
Like many rural areas in America, Van Wert has grown increasingly Republican. And in the November, 2016 election, it went overwhelmingly Republican.
Does that mean that the people of Van Wert agree with everything Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are trying to do, like end public schools as we know them in favor of vouchers and privatization and making education a commodity?
Not in the least.
The people of Van Wert are proud of their public schools. They’ve invested in pre-K and project-based learning. They have a nationally recognized robotics team and a community school program that helps at-risk kids graduate. Ninety-six percent of students in the district graduate from high school. This community understands that Title I is not simply a budget line but a life line.
Why I am telling you about this town? Because these are the schools I wanted Betsy DeVos to see—public schools in the heart of the heart of America.
Unfortunately, just like climate change deniers ignore the facts, Betsy DeVos is a public school denier, ignoring the good in our public schools and their foundational place in our democracy. Her record back in Michigan, and now in Washington, makes it clear that she is the most anti-public education secretary of education ever.
Betsy DeVos called public schools a “dead end.” Our public schools aren’t a dead end. They’re places of endless opportunity.
They’re where 90 percent of America’s parents send their children. And while Secretary DeVos may have thought Van Wert would be a good photo op, my goal, like any educator, was to teach her something.
And we did: Great things are happening in our public schools. And with the right support, they can do even better. That’s what she saw in Van Wert, and that’s what’s happening in public schools across the country.
Betsy DeVos cannot claim ignorance of what’s happening in public schools. Only indifference.
But how can you be indifferent when you hear from someone like Claudia?
I remember Claudia’s history class—the great discussions and the lively debates. But I also remember some grousing that I was pushing the class too hard. (Claudia, I didn’t push you nearly as hard as you pushed yourself.) And I could not be more proud that my former student is a member of AFT Local 243 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Everyone in this hall has their Claudias. It’s why we do what we do. And it‘s why we are going to hold Betsy DeVos accountable for her indifference, and for her attacks on our profession and on public education.
But her attacks are not the only challenges we face. She’s not the only ideologue who wants to destabilize and privatize the public schools that millions of Americans value and rely upon.
Let me be blunt: We are in a David versus Goliath battle. And in this battle, we are all David.
II. How Did We Get Here?
So how did we get here?
It didn’t just happen last Election Day or Inauguration Day.
The moment we’re in is the result of an intentional, decades-long attempt to protect the economic and political power of the few against the rights of the many. It has taken the form of division—expressing itself as racism, sexism, classism, xenophobia and homophobia. And its intentions are often disguised. For example, take the word “choice.”
You hear it all the time these days. School “choice.” Betsy DeVos uses it in practically every sentence. You could show her, as I did, an award-winning robotics program, and she’d say “What about choice?” which she actually said. You could probably say “Good morning, Betsy,” and she’d say “That’s my choice.” She must love restaurant buffets.
But let me be really serious. Decades ago, the term “choice” was used to cloak overt racism by politicians like Harry Byrd, who launched the massive opposition to the Brown v Board of Education Supreme Court decision.
After the Brown decision, many school districts, especially in the South, resisted integration. In Virginia, white officials in Prince Edward County closed every public school in the district rather than have white and black children go to school together. They opened private schools where white parents could choose to send their children. And they did it using public money.
By 1963, African-American students had been locked out of Prince Edward County public schools for five years. AFT members sent funds and school supplies. And some traveled from New York and Philadelphia to set up schools for African-American students in church basements and public parks, so these students could have an education.
And what about the schools Betsy DeVos appallingly called “pioneers of school choice”—historically black colleges and universities? HBCUs actually arose from the discriminatory practices that denied black students access to higher education. HBCUs are vital institutions, but that doesn’t change the truth of their origins: They were born of a shameful lack of educational choices for African-American students.
Make no mistake: The “real pioneers” of private school choice were the white politicians who resisted school integration.
But neither facts nor history seems to matter to this administration.
In March, DeVos gave a speech here in Washington.
She justified “choice” by saying: “I’m simply in favor of giving parents more and better options to find an environment that will set their child up for success.”
Who could disagree with that? It’s not ideological to want a school that works for your kid. It’s human.
But her preferred choices—vouchers, tuition tax credits, and private, for-profit charter schools—don’t work.
After decades of experiments with voucher programs, the research is clear: They fail most of the children they purportedly are intended to benefit.
The Department of Education’s own analysis of the D.C. voucher program found it has a negative effect on student achievement. The Louisiana voucher program has led to large declines in kids’ reading and math scores. Students in Ohio’s voucher program did worse than children in its traditional public schools.
And, while parents are promised greater choice, when a family uses a voucher to attend a private school, in reality it is the school—not the family—that makes the choice.
That’s because private schools can—and many do—discriminate, because they are exempt from federal civil rights laws. Vouchers increase racial and economic segregation. And they lack the accountability that public schools have. Many voucher programs, like the one here in Washington, D.C., don’t even reveal how much public funding they receive or how students are performing. DeVos defends this lack of transparency, saying the important thing is not quality or accountability, but, what? Choice.
These choices do not increase student achievement. They do not reduce inequity or segregation. They drain funds from and destabilize our public schools. And they move us further away from the choice every child in America deserves—a well-supported, effective public school near their home.
But Trump and DeVos are not backing off their support for vouchers, for-profit charters and other privatization schemes. They have proposed a $250 million dollar “down payment” they want to follow with billions of public dollars for vouchers and tuition tax credits. And you know how they plan to pay for it? By cutting federal education spending that goes directly to educate children in public schools by $9 billion dollars.
Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment, are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation. We are in the same fight, against the same forces, that are keeping the same children from getting the public education they need and deserve. And what better way to pave the path to privatize education than to starve public schools to the breaking point, then criticize their shortcomings, and let the market handle the rest. All in the name of choice.
That’s how a democracy comes apart.
On the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, I was in Topkea, Kansas, the home of the plaintiffs in the Brown case. I was there to support the fight against Governor Sam Brownback’s draconian disinvestment from public education.
The big idea behind the governor’s “real-live experiment” with trickle down economics was that cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations, and slashing public services, would somehow lead to an economic boom.
There was no boom—only devastating cuts to public schools and other services, and a bust for the state’s economy.
This spring the Kansas Supreme Court found that the people who’d suffered the most were black, Hispanic and poor students.
We fought this vile experiment. And last month even the Republican-controlled Kansas state Legislature forced Governor Brownback to increase public education funding by nearly $500 million dollars.
We took a stand in Prince Edward County. And we took a stand in Kansas. Both fights were long and hard. We didn’t give up, and we didn’t do it alone, with one tweet, one speech or one demonstration.
III. How Do We Move Forward? Five Values (Five Smooth Stones)
Yes, it’s exhausting. We have to fight harder and harder just to keep from losing ground.
But I haven’t lost heart or faith, because, although we face formidable adversaries, we are David to their Goliath.
When leaders controlling the federal government are hell-bent on taking away healthcare from 32 million people in order to give a tax cut to the ultra-wealthy, we are David to their Goliath. When officials far from the classroom care a whole lot about testing and test scores, but don’t give a damn about what our students really need, we are David to their Goliath. When hedge funders, billionaires and anti-labor ideologues band together in an axis of inequality, further rigging our political and economic system against working folks, we are David to their Goliath. When a presidential administration takes actions that make immigrant students afraid to dream, that favor fraudulent for-profit colleges over students seeking an education, that put an entire religion in its crosshairs, we are David to their Goliath. When governors in state after state go after labor rights and voting rights, and they find an ally in the newest Supreme Court justice who will hear the Janus case, we must be David to their Goliath.
Years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Valley of Elah, where the standoff between David and Goliath took place. And if you remember Sunday school, you’ll recall: That wasn’t a fair fight either. Goliath was big; David was a little guy. Goliath had an army. And David? David had a sling—with five smooth stones. But David had a plan. Goliath no doubt assumed his greater strength was enough, but we all know how that ended up.
I like the fact that, in our sling, we also have five smooth stones. Five core principles. Five values that we are translating into action.
What are they?
• First, Americans deserve good jobs that pay a decent wage, and provide a voice at work, and a secure retirement.
• Second, they deserve healthcare so people are not one illness away from bankruptcy.
• Third, they need public schools that are safe and welcoming and prepare young people for life and citizenship, career and college. And speaking of college, it must be affordable.
• Fourth, none of this happens without a strong and vibrant democracy, including a free press, an independent judiciary, a thriving labor movement, and the protection—not suppression—of the right to vote.
• And fifth, there is no democracy without safeguarding the civil rights of all. That means fighting bigotry and discrimination—like the attacks on immigrants, Muslims, and transgender kids; and the rising tide of anti-Semitism and racism.
I am on the road more often than not, or at least it feels that way. And I get to talk with a lot of people. Here’s what I’ve seen and heard: No matter where people are from, or their political persuasion, there is a common set of aspirations—for themselves and their families. When we connect on values—these values, these 5 stones—we win. We help make people’s lives better, and we repair the common ground that has been jackhammered apart.
IV. Four Pillars
Well, David had his five stones, but he only needed one. And while I could talk at length about each of these five core values, I want to focus on one: powerful, purposeful public education.
Great things are happening in public schools in every community in America, and we need to lift them up. Poetry slams. Socratic seminars. Science fairs. Speech therapy. Students checkmating their chess coach. A once-struggling student reading on grade level.
Any one of you could talk about things going on in your classroom and your school that you’re proud of—and I hope you will! In New York City, the United Federation of Teachers (my home local), started what they call #Public School Proud— you saw it in the video. This campaign is now taking hold in Florida, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas. It’s one of the ways school employees, parents and communities are showing that there is so much to be proud of in our public schools.
We get that public schools are not perfect and that every one doesn’t always work for every one of its students. We know that schools in America have always been unequal, often based on race and class.
But I’ve never heard a parent say, “That school doesn’t work for my kid. So I want to engage in an ideologically driven market-based experiment that commodifies education and has been proven to be ineffective.”
No, most of the time parents want a neighborhood public school that works for their child. They want their child to feel safe. They want their school to have adequate resources and small enough class sizes. They want their school to have music, art and science. They want their child to soar in challenging classes and get support when they struggle. They want their child to fill the dinner table conversation with stories about what they did in school that day.
Our public schools are filled with dedicated professionals who are doing their level best—despite never having enough funding, despite the relentless attacks, despite misguided policies gussied up as “reforms” and despite the challenges children bring from home.
And with some key investments and the right strategies, we’ll not just have the will, we’ll have the way.
So as far as I’m concerned, the only choice is: Do we as a nation strengthen and improve our public schools, or don’t we?
We know what works to accomplish this: investment and focus on four pillars of powerful, purposeful public education:
• Children’s well-being;
• Powerful learning;
• Educators’ capacity; and,
• Collaboration.
Children’s well-being means meeting children where they are—emotionally, socially, physically and academically. Making sure they feel safe and valued. Since half of the kids in public schools are poor, that also requires confronting the reality of poverty. One way is to coordinate the services kids need in community schools. The AFT Innovation Fund is helping our affiliates open and expand community schools.
What about powerful learning? Public schools are asked to develop students academically and personally. That doesn’t happen by testing and test prep. It happens when learning engages students, and encourages them to investigate, strategize and collaborate. It’s why we fight fiercely for art and music and project-based learning like the computer animation career tech program the AFT Innovation Fund is supporting in Miami.
And what about developing our capacity as educators? How many times in your career have you been thrown the keys and told to just do it? No one would tolerate that for pilots or doctors or our armed forces. But educators? Please…
We continue to fight against the infantilization of teachers and the “teachers should be seen and not heard” sentiment of people who make decisions affecting teaching and learning, but who haven’t spent 10 minutes in a classroom. That’s the purpose of the AFT Teacher Leader Program, which now counts 800 participants. Thousands of members have participated in AFT professional development. And hundreds of thousands more have developed their skills through Share My Lesson and the professional development offered by our state and local affiliates.
The glue that holds all this together is collaboration: school employees, parents and community partners working together. When schools struggle, the response too often is top-down takeovers and firing staff. Those approaches are “disruptive”alright—another term public school deniers love—but they are not effective.
Just look at McDowell County, West Virginia, the eighth-poorest county in the United States, where coal used to be king. The state took over the school district for a decade. Nothing changed. But now, after an AFT-led partnership that utilizes these four pillars, graduation rates are up by double digits. Most importantly, we are helping change children’s lives.
These four pillars won’t be built on hopes and wishes, they’ll be built on learning effective strategies—which you’re doing here at TEACH —and on investment.
Investment is crucial. But Trump and DeVos, and many states, are actually going in the opposite direction. They tell the lie that public schools are failing, and they try to make huge budget cuts to make the lie real.
The Trump-DeVos budget zeros out resources for reducing class size and for teacher professional development, and strips all funding for community schools, and afterschool and summer programs. So offerings like the summer learning program at D.C.’s Brightwood Education Campus, which I visited this week, would be gone along with its Springboard program, a summer literacy course for students in kindergarten to second grade. This program not only prevents summer learning loss, but in the five weeks of classes, has increased students’ literacy levels by three-and-a-half months. In essence, the Trump-DeVos budget takes a meat cleaver to public education.
And it’s not just the education cuts. While Trumpcare might be on hold right now, the battle is far from over. Its $880 billion dollar cut from Medicaid was inhumane. And it would mean, for the almost 80 percent of school districts that rely on these funds, the loss of school nurses and health screenings, wheelchairs and feeding tubes, for our most vulnerable kids.
And for what? A tax cut for the wealthiest Americans?
These cuts rob children of opportunity. That’s why we fight them, with actions like the lobbying and rallying many of you did yesterday. And I want you to know, people are with us. The AFT recently commissioned a poll. Three-quarters of the people we talked to oppose the deep cuts to education that Trump and DeVos are proposing. And just as many oppose taking away funding from public schools to increase funding for private school vouchers and charter schools.
V. RESIST—AND RECLAIM
While people have always supported public education, what makes this moment different is that now, millions of Americans are hungry to fight for something better. But with the daily outrages and the relentless assaults on our values and our democracy, it can be hard to know where to begin.
Well, it begins with elections. They have consequences—big time. Voting really matters. But what can we do between elections? That’s where one of the books I’ve become obsessed with helps.
It’s by Yale history professor Timothy Snyder. It’s called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. And you got a copy in your conference bag.
Snyder’s 20 lessons are told through the lens of history. They sharpen our understanding of what is going on around us. And these lessons are important because most of today’s students were born after Nazi genocide, after apartheid, after the Berlin Wall fell, and after de jure segregation in the United States had been outlawed. They could have, as Snyder writes, the “sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.”
Tragically, that’s just not true.
He writes “History does not repeat, but it does instruct. History can familiarize, and it can warn.”
He reminds us that we can’t take our institutions for granted. That dictators throughout history have built power by kneecapping trade unions and co-opting or undercutting public education.
Believe in truth. Listen for dangerous words. Contribute to good causes. Be a patriot. Defend institutions, such as unions. There is something that each of us can do to defend democracy and fight tyranny.
And if the next generation is to take up the fight, who better to teach them than America’s educators?
So I am asking you… Let’s take our responsibility to resist injustice full on… And let’s take our responsibility to reclaim the future full on. Classroom by classroom. Community by community.
If I could ask you to do anything, it would be this: Tell your stories. Advocate for your students. Do it in public. Shine a light. Use social media. Show the people here in Washington what’s happening at home. Show them what a budget cut means in very human terms.
Many of you are doing this already.
And we are not alone. Take a look. This is a photo of the inauguration last January. (Pause) And this is from the Women’s March just one day after. And so is this, and this, and this. [She shows photographs here, contrasting the half-empty Inauguration of Trump, and the vast crowds at the Women’s March.]
No, we are not alone.
Yes, those millions—yes, millions—of people who have protested since Election Day are, as the kids say, woke. They are energized—energized to fight against bigotry and hate, to fight for an economy that works for everyone and an America that leads the world.
Why do we teach our students about Dr. King’s letter from Birmingham jail? Or Cesar Chavez’s organizing of immigrant workers, or Mahatma Gandhi’s fasts, or Malala’s ordeal? Because we know that nothing is more inspiring than when people whom the powerful want to keep down, rise up.
And we, too, will rise.
To rise takes more than a moment, or even a hundred moments. It takes a movement.
And you are part of that movement. So:
• If you are a local union president, please rise!
• If you’ve been part of the AFT Teacher Leader program, rise up!
• If you have participated in an AFT professional development course, rise up!
• If you have downloaded or uploaded a resource on Share My Lesson, rise up!
• If you have bought school supplies for your students, or food for a hungry kid, please rise!
• If you’ve spent a sleepless night worrying about a student, please rise!
• If you have lobbied for a cause you believe in, rise up!
• If you are #Public School Proud, rise up!
• If you know that the union can help empower you to make our communities and our world a better place, please rise!
By resisting, and reclaiming the promise of public education for all of our students, we will preserve our democracy. We will protect our most vulnerable. We will strengthen our communities. We will take on Goliath. And we will win.
# # #
Wow. This should be printed out and nailed to many locked doors!
Meaningless.
Randi Weingarten is the enemy of working teachers.
She is a disaster as a union leader and proof of our side’s deep problems.
As long as she remains in her position we will continue to lose.
Nothing she says can ever change this. Ever.
Randi Weingarten is a collaborator……In the WW2 France sense of the word. A vile, disgusting gift to the privatizing movement.
But she does see public school students as an exciting new market for ed tech product!
So it’s not all negative. Sometimes she pushes product, in between anti-public school diatribes.
Can she interest your public school in some K12, Inc. courses? No money down.
U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rallied a conservative crowd in Denver on Thursday, criticizing teachers unions and local protesters and defending private-school vouchers as a way to help disadvantaged students.
“Our opponents, the defenders of the status quo, only protest those capable of implementing real change,” DeVos told members of the American Legislative Exchange Council, an influential conservative group that helps shape legislative policy across the country. “You represent real change.”
She attacked just about everybody in that speech. Sadly, she once again neglected to mention the 90% of children who attend public schools.
Clearly not a priority in DC.
If they only plan to serve the 10% of the public who attend charter and private schools can we cut 90% of their staff? Sounds reasonable.
Anyone Think to ask Randi if she sits on the Board of any Charter Schools. Hedging her bets???? She talks a good talk but does she walk a good walk.
To answer your question: NO!
Didn’t ed reformers say they would work to protect public schools from attacks by Trump and DeVos?
What happened to that? Why are teachers unions the only people advocating on behalf of children who attend public schools?
Between the thousands of paid ed reform advocates and the thousands of federal employees one would think they could find ONE advocate for 90% of US students.
Randi could have given this speech in 2009 when Obama appointed Duncan to be Privatizer/Charterizer in Chief to undermine America’s public schools. She could have refused back then to take money from Gates and to wage unrelenting war on the billionaire class led by Broad, the Waltons, Zuckerberg,etc. She didnt, b/c the Dem Party line was for more invasive testing, more tech buys, more charters. Randi is a lifelong Democratic Party insider and agent, and like Lily Eskelsen Garcia of NEA who also took Gates money, she refused to organize her rank-and-file to fight against the billionaire boys’ club which funded Obama and Hillary. It’s too late for Randi now to get rhetorically militant simply b/c it’s safe with the GOP in control of all levels of govt. Radi’s latest gestures demonstrate that she’s trying to get ahead of the massive opposition to Trump and lead it back into the Dem Party, where progressive dreams go to die.
Today’s Education Week headline: “Horse On Way to Slaughterhouse, Union Head Calls For Closing Barn Door”
This is the speech Randi should have made five years ago, but a day late and a dollar short are better than nothing. If she truly wants to resist and stand strong, the AFT must work with fellow resisting parent and social justice groups. We must fight them in the courts, the media and, most all, at the polls. We are indeed David to the billionaires’ Goliath. We lack the resources of the privateers. If we unite with other like minded groups, we have a much better shot at taking down the corporate vandals as we should have a multitude of supporters that cannot be silenced.
Here’s the full Jeanne Allen quote:
https://www.edreform.com/2017/07/union-attack-will-not-stand/
“Weingarten Comments Deeply Offensive”
Union leader’s attack on parents and others who support school choice is hateful and should not stand
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
*“AFT president Randi Weingarten’s characterization of education reform parents and advocates as racists akin to the southern segregationists of the past, is not just ill-advised hyperbole, it is a deeply offensive, highly inflammatory insult to all the parents and people – of all races, backgrounds, and regions – who have worked to bring options, opportunities, and reforms to an education system that has failed them for generations.^
“Weingarten’s allies should disavow these comments, and America’s teachers should look into their hearts, consider whether this is the type of language and leadership they want as being representative of their views and voice, and consider inviting Weingarten’s resignation.”
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
Allen puts words in Weingarten’s mouth that Weingarten never said: “AFT president Randi Weingarten’s characterization of education reform parents and advocates as racists akin to the southern segregationists of the past … ”
Uhh, that’s NOT what Randi said. She never claimed that all present-day parents and school operators who participate in voucher programs are racists. Neither did she claim that all advocates of vouchers are “racists.” Saying so is just an attempt to fabricate victimhood and rile up her side so that they will go after Randi.
“Randi says that we’re all racists! Attack her!!! Call in an air strike ASAP!!!”
Randi was just giving the historical context — the facts are clear that the voucher concept DID in fact originate with racists’ attempt to duck the Brown vs Board of Education Supreme Court ruling. Randi also said that, yes, some (but not all) present-day voucher backers, parents, and private school operators use the voucher system to segregate schools, and that — intentionally racist-based or not— the spread of voucher systems has led to greater segregation — by race, income, no special ed kids allowed, etc.
Allen’s the same idiot who was going to pay $100,000 prize to the person or school that made the best attack video on HBO’s John Oliver, after his devastating expose on charter schools.
How did that work out?
Similar to the Weingarten attack, Allen engaged in that same fabricating of victimhood and a call for an attack on Oliver when she responded to Oliver’s video. She put the bounty on Oliver’s head, even though Oliver, in that video, was very careful to point out that he wasn’t attacking all, or even most charter schools, or attacking the theoretical idea of charter schools. He was just pointing out how, in practice, things seemed to be pretty messed up with the operations of many such charter schools .. all due to the total absence of charter schools’ regulation pushed by… you guessed it… people such as … Jeanne Allen.
Here’s the original John Oliver charter school piece:
https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Randi-Weingarten-The-Figh-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Choice_Diane-Ravitch_Privatization_Public-170721-48.html#comment667097
with my comment, which has embedded links at the post.
When our public schools are gone, so will the only road to income equality be ended. Then the guys in the last chart here, win! http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/hirsch.pdf
Shared knowledge is the only way democracies thrive. http://www.aft.org/sites/default/files/periodicals/hirsch.pdf
HERE ere IS SOMETHING that you can do…TO FIGHT THE CORRUPTION. BE INFORMED.. because if you only hear fake news how will you be able to discern what is afoot out there…
They are coming for the kids through the schools, because if they # GET ‘EM YOUNG, they got our future workers and citizens.
Listen my friends…if you trust me…which you will if you go to my series on privatization at OpedNews.
And don’t miss this one :Quicklink: Betsy DeVos’ plan to sell out public schools is a Koch Brothers dream come true; By Jim Hightower https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Betsy-DeVos-plan-to-sell-in-General_News-Cabal_Education_HightowerJim_Koch-Brothers-170719-10.html#comment666885
which has more links to the reality of THE “CHOICE” NARRATIVE.
Poor sweet dear Randi . . . .
She has triangulated and quadrangulated so often in the last 15 years, that no one can ever seriously tell where she stands. The chameleon can only change colors so many times before audiences finally figure out that the creature is unreliable and only interested in self survival. You can’t blame the creature to want to flourish, but you can set the creature free and not take care of her like a pet any more since she no longer really acts like a caring, warm labrador retriever. It’s NOT her fault, however. After all, she’s a reptile, plain and simple.
I say throw the pet in the middle of the highway and hope she doesn’t turn to road kill.
It will be extremely difficult to oust Weingarten, but never impossible.
The saddest part is that she continues to fool – of all people – herself, and she is willing to play that very game between her and, ummm, her.
Lesson learned.
I know many, many educators who are furious with Randi for not standing up for the civil rights of teachers when she could, at the UFT and the AFT.
They are correct in their criticism.
But she has the pulpit, and better late than never.
Maybe, she can rally voices, or break through.
let’s give her a chance, and besides we need to support the message!
Eh.
That’s not how these things work.
“Better late than never” works for Thanksgiving dinner, but it doesn’t work for the fire department or NATIONAL GOTDAMNED UNION LEADERS!!
Weingarten is a collaborator. Long ago she began breaking her sacred and fundamental duty to protect organized teachers from threats. Anything she says now, no matter what, are the words of a traitorous collaborator. Our only path forward against the privatizing agenda is taking back our unions. That’s our mission. Not rallying behind the empty words of the disaster named Randi Weingarten.
How many millions of dollars in salary has Weingarten made off of teachers?
http://mediatrackers.org/national/2014/04/29/teachers-union-boss-randi-weingarten-salary-360000
How many teachers make $360k per year?
How many teachers would do what she has done?
You get no argument from me.
The UFT of which she was president allowed this to happen to me
http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
Oddly, Randi eventually rescued me… well, I was given arbitration NOT A REAL DEFENSE TO THE INJUSTICE, and allowed to retire…with my small pension and benefits. I had planned to teach for many more years, but I ran for my life.
They had instigated false charges of corporal punishment, and even said I threatened to kill the principal, as they were ready to charge mw with incompetence, when my husband called Randi, and MIRACULOUSLY got through.
She knew full well what was happening in Manhattan, and as I was famous ( the NYS recipient of the EDUCATOR OF EXCELLENCE AWARD (NYSEC) and the Harvard/Pew cohort for the National Standards Research, she ‘rescued’ me into retirement.
I owe her for that… other teachers lost everything, but she knows that I do not give her a pass on the neglect she showed.
We need leadership in the unions, and in the nation.
The unions made the workplace a fair place.
“Fairness is a contract’s fundamental purpose. A raw, moralistic conception of fairness—that people shouldn’t get screwed.” RULES & REGULATIONS are the target these days, but it is those things that bring fairness to the people.
The unions disregarded the rules, and let the principals win.
Here is the story of a teacher that says it all.
Lorna Stremcha (MONTAN) was set up BYTHE PRINCIPAL to be assaulted in her classroom, and SHE HAD TO GO TO COURT TO GET JUSTICE!
T COST HER HER LIFE’S SAVINGS: One woman’s legal fight against workplace bullying
http://blog.ebosswatch.com/2013/05/one-womans-legal-fight-against-workplace-bullying/
SHE HAS WRITTEN A BOOK ABOUT IT. a must read!
Here she is. Ask yourself where was the union!
“Where was the union?”
I can tell you in my case the “union” Missouri NEA affiliate was in bed with the unethical power hungry wench of a principal who tried to get a subordinate to file false sexual harassment charges against me for using the term mental masturbation to describe a meeting in which the principal agreed with me (as dept chair speaking for our department) that what we were doing during “Being Professionally Developed” time was completely worthless and that what our department wanted to do for the students during that time was a good thing–but no, we couldn’t do what we knew what was right for the students but what she, the ultimate adminimal, wanted us to do.
The “union” did nothing for me other than to provide someone to record any further meetings to prevent the adminimal wench from lying so much. So, I said bye bye to the union-no more of my dollars went to them.
Exactly. My story and all the stories.
Duane see my comment in the larger version. I do not want it to crawl along the side.
Read Lorna Stremcha’s Bravery, Bullies, & Blowhards: Lessons Learned in a Montana Classroom:
“https://www.amazon.com/Bravery-Bullies-Blowhards-Lessons-Classroom/dp/0991309936/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dpop_dD1Kvb1ERS2PX_im
Her principal set her up to be assaulted in her classroom, after failing to fire her with fabricated charges. Here she is telling how she had to fight to get justice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIF2kVwW1r0&sns=em
boy did she fight., and lost her life savings when the UNION FAILED TO ENSURE HER CIVIL RIGHTS WITH THE SIMPLE TASK OF “DISCOVERY”.
http://nycrubberroomreporter.blogspot.com/2013/10/lorna-stremcha-and-her-rubber-room.html
That is why the Esquith case is so important. He is fighting to disprove allegations by looking at their evidence.
If civil rights law was upheld by the union WHICH IS THE LEGAL REP OF TEACHERS…THIS COULD NOT HAPPEN! http://www.perdaily.com/2011/01/lausd-et-al-a-national-scandal-of-enormous-proportions-by-susan-lee-schwartz-part-1.html
But, it did, and I was a celebrated educator when they alleged all kinds of crap, like corporal punishment and PRODUCING A LETTER IN WHICH some teacher (not in my school) alleged that I had told her that I wanted to kill the principal… WHO COULD MAKE THAT UP… WHEN THIS IS WHO I WAS! http://www.opednews.com/author/author40790.html
AND in LA, where fabricated charges took out thousands of teachers. One year, 800 teachers were accused and ALL WERE FIRED.
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-continues-to-target-teachers.html
the union was complicit http://www.perdaily.com/2014/07/former-ctc-attorney-kathleen-carroll-lays-out-unholy-alliance-between-union-and-public-education-pri.html
AND the union consistently hurt teachers there http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/lausd-and-utla-collude-to-end-collective-bargaining-and-civil-rights-for-teachers-part-2.html
http://www.perdaily.com/2014/03/have-reporters-become-poli-ticks–the-media-parasites-of-the-body-politic.html
and thousands of stories here FOR 2 DECADES at the NAPTA site http://endteacherabuse.org/
Without the unions we are fodder for the top-down abuse.
We need unions, but we need to throw out the old failed leaders and put in new ones, and then WE HAVE TO ENSURE THAT THE LEGISLATURE does not shred our rights… IT BEGINS AT THE TOP, and it is the take-over of public education AT THE TOP which has ended the teaching profession.
The people do not know what is going on, They are particularly bamboozled about education, and are sold any magic elixir by a talking head who shill for these people.
The hidden scandal is here, as the media owned by them talks about how unions protect teachers.
Sorry it took so long to reply to you.
The unions have made it possible for the removal of hundreds of thousands of tenured teachers. Our stories are the same across the nation if you go to the NAPTA site, http://endteacherabuse.org/
but Lorna Stremcha’s story is the extreme when the principals have not a shred of accountability: https://www.amazon.com/Bravery-Bullies-Blowhards-Lessons-Classroom/dp/0991309936/ref=cm_sw_em_r_dpop_dD1Kvb1ERS2PX_im
Great speech, but where has Randi been for the past few years? She’s been at her “seat at the table” pushing the last bad agendas for students and teachers. Now that SHE is being threatened, she is asking everyone to RISE UP and defend what they have been trying to defend for the past 20 years. Randi is asking us to make a CHOICE (and a bad one at that)….keep the same bad Bill Gates inspired education reform of the past 10 years instead of jumping ship for the newest bad education reform (DeVos/Trump). Now that Randi has become David, she wants everyone to become her Army. Gosh this woman has chutzpah! I could offer her some respect if she at least fessed up to her part in all of this mess that she herself helped to create, but she doesn’t sound sincere to me in any way.
You should resist and rally, not for Randi, but for millions of public school students that are daily robbed of resources, for the future of our country, for democratic principles, for equity, for your profession and yourself.
I am not a teacher, but a public school parent. Been resisting and voicing dissatisfaction for years. Teachers have been voicing their dissatisfaction for years. Where was Randi? Randi was Goliath and she had an Army of reformers backing her. Now that she is in jeopardy of losing her status and position at the table she is feigning foul play on teachers and students in order to retain her democratic inside life line. She is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Time for her to make an exit and it’s time for teachers to grab their pitchforks and light the torches
Cannot disagree with this.
I hate how the word “choice” has been co-opted.
Soon we are going to change from Medicare to “Medicare choice” where you get a voucher to “choose” whatever health insurance you want to purchase.
What could go wrong?
“Choice” and “reform” are euphemisms that should sound the alert in every citizen. It generally implies “we are going to stick it to you, but we want you to see it as something worthwhile. “
Retired teacher,
The word “reform” when applied to education these days should ring an alarm bell. It means: Whatever I say, I mean the opposite.
Use the Boolean logic “NOT” on everything NOT Reformers say.
It automatically transforms it to the opposite.
Its actually quitecremarkable, just one word — NOT — makes all of their false claims true.
Randi Weingarten is complicit with the corporate education reform movement. She has been istrumental in the implementation of every reform that has come down the pike. Weingarten can make speeches until the cows come home without changing one iota of the destruction of public school teaching she has wrought.
instrumental
“Time to Resist”
The time to resist was yesterday
And months and years ago
But Randi had to bank her pay
So waited, doncha know
Reblogged this on Crazy Normal – the Classroom Exposé and commented:
This should be printed and taped to every front door in the United States. Required Reading!
DeVos wants more private charter schools, in spite of fact that the non-political watchdog Office of Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Education has issued a report warning that so much taxpayer money is being skimmed away by charter school operators that “Charter schools and their management organizations pose a potential risk to federal funds even as they threaten to fall short of meeting goals” because of financial fraud and their hidden ways for skimming of tax money into private pockets.
Charter schools bill themselves as “public schools”, but Supreme Courts in states like New York, Washington and elsewhere are catching on to the scam and have ruled that charter schools are really private schools because they aren’t accountable to the public because they are run by private boards that aren’t elected by voters and don’t even have to file detailed reports to the public about what they’re doing with the public’s tax money.
Charter schools should at the very least be required to file the same annual public domain financial reports that genuine public schools file to detail how the public’s tax money is being spent. But the private charter school industry is bitterly opposing that financial accountability.
In addition to siphoning the public’s tax money away from the education of children and into private pockets, non-political researcher organizations, such as UCLA’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies, have thoroughly documented the many ways in which charter schools discriminate against children of color and are, in actual fact, in the process of resegregating our nation’s schools.
Charter schools are the lucrative profit-making part of the “education reform/choice/voucher” movement that has from its very beginnings has been rooted in racism. The movement has always had resegregation of America’s schools as its core agenda: The deceptive call for vouchers and “choice” was the first racist response to the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v. Board of Education in which the Court declared that “separate but equal” public schools are inherently unequal and ordered racial integration of the public schools. That ruling triggered “white flight” from public schools to private schools — but parents quickly realized that the tuition cost of private schools was more than they wanted to pay out-of-pocket. That realization led political and private resegregationists to the concoct the “reform” of vouchers, and to sell it to eager parents by deceptively marketing it then —and still today — as merely giving parents a “choice.”
The segregationists’ 1950’s voucher crusade faded away when it became clear that, because of school attendance boundaries and racially segregated neighborhoods, no more than a few token blacks would be attending formerly all-white public schools. In 1972 when the Supreme Court finally ordered busing to end this ongoing de facto segregation, the segregationist “reform” movement rose from its grave and has been alive ever since been trying new tactics to restore racial segregation. That’s why the ACLU has called for a total moratorium on charter schools.
To date, the most successful resegregation scheme is charter schools because charter schools are profit centers to unscrupulous profiteers who recognized charter schools as a way to divert vast amounts of tax money into their own pockets and into the pockets of supportive politicians at every level of government.
An essential part of the strategy to mask their underlying motives has been for segregationists to sell the public on the necessity for charter schools because public schools are allegedly “failing” (Read this book: “The Manufactured Crisis”). With all manner of “research” that essentially compares apples to oranges against foreign nations’ students, and with the self-fulfilling prophecy of dismal public school performance generated by drastic underfunding of public schools, and with condemnation of public school teachers based on statistically invalid student test scores, the segregationists are succeeding in resegregating education in America via what are basically private charter schools that are funded with public money.
Click to access speech_randi-teach_072017.pdf
Randi speaks of David and Goliath. She doesn’t name who Goliath is beyond DeVos and Trump. We are millions of Davids with voting rights. The enemy is a handful of billionaires, with deep pockets like Gates and Walton heirs, who can be brought to their knees but not with Randi’s approach.
“And, while parents are promised greater choice, when a family uses a voucher to attend a private school, in reality it is the school—not the family—that makes the choice.”
Case closed.
Diane Here is a related article/review from the Chronicle:
A New History of the Right Has Become an Intellectual Flashpoint
By Marc Parry JULY 19, 2017
SNIPS/All quoted material below:
Nancy MacLean, a professor of history and public policy at Duke U., has riled libertarians with her new book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America.”
The response reflects the polemical charge of MacLean’s study, Democracy in Chains (Viking). A bumper crop of historians have investigated the history of the right over the past quarter century, often writing with empathy, but MacLean’s book is a different beast. From the image on its cover, a sinister gaggle of cigar-puffing white men in suits, to the subtitle, The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, the study proclaims its intention to expose its subjects as threats to democracy.
The Washington Post, Getty Images
“Democracy in Chains” suggests that James McGill Buchanan, a libertarian economist and Nobel laureate who taught at George Mason U. and died in 2013, inspired the billionaire Charles Koch’s campaign to “save capitalism from democracy — permanently.”
At the heart of this purported plot is a Nobel-winning economist whose ideas MacLean characterizes as “diabolical” and “wicked”: James McGill Buchanan. Buchanan, a libertarian who taught at George Mason University and died in 2013, developed a novel way of analyzing government that would have far-reaching consequences for democracy, MacLean argues. In his view, self-interest dictated the behavior of public officials and those who tried to influence them. The incentives that shaped officials’ actions — winning re-election, expanding their bureaucratic turf — encouraged profligate government spending at the expense of a minority of taxpayers. This violated the taxpayers’ freedom and burdened the economy.
END QUOTED MATERIAL
http://www.chronicle.com/article/A-New-History-of-the-Right-Has/240700?utm_source=esp&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=The+Long+Read+-+Collections+2017&utm_term=236088&subid=19479502&CMP=longread_collection
What Randi won’t do is the the single thing that has to be done if tyranny is to be stopped…she has to identify, by name, those who threaten democracy’s surrogate, public education. In the twentieth century that Weingarten references,the Robber Barons were targeted for shame. They were identified by name. It is what stopped “business as usual” for concentrated wealth.
Weingarten’s words are ignorable, presented as they are at a conceptual level. Also, her attack on an important potential ally- the nurses’ union, showed all of us whose flag she carries.
She carries the flag of corporate America.