It is hard to be surprised by the comments of AFT President Randi Weingarten any more.
She does more caves than a hibernating bear.
Yesterday she functioned as the enabler for those who think the biggest problem in education is that we don’t fire teachers fast enough. This will come as a surprise to her members in Central Falls, Rhode Island. All 100 of them have been fired twice in the past year.
Her record as the bear of the cave clan is being challenged here in Illinois where IEA union leadership is willing and eager to surrender tenure and seniority rights. They believe this will satisfy the thirst for blood of teacher bashers and union haters.
They learned nothing from the concession they made on linking teacher evaluation to student test scores last year. They hoped to win Arne Duncan’s approval for a pittance of Race to the Top money. Duncan said no to the money, but teachers are stuck with the dumb evaluation procedures any way.
Last week they claimed that the Battle for Madison was about “union busting and nothing more.”
The leaders of the Wisconsin unions know and have said that this is not true. They know that what Scott Walker is attempting is a broad political power grab, aimed at collective bargaining rights and so much more.
In today’s NY Times, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman lays it out.
Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.
As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”
Saturday. Madison. 3PM. Be there.
Fred Klonsky 
It is a little difficult to keep the outrages straight, so I should probably update you on RI. The 100 Central Falls teachers have gotten layoff notices. 11 of these were laid off for performance reasons, which seems like a particularly ambiguous status, and I’m not going to speculate on even what it actually means legally. But otherwise, sending out a lot of layoff notices doesn’t necessarily mean they’re even contemplating laying off that many people. Basically, anyone who might get laid off in any scenario needs to be notified by March 1.
I’m not saying things are rosy in CF, and fiscally they’re going to get constantly worse now, because it is a small district that’s going to steadily lose enrollment to encroaching charters. Probably what will happen is that within the decade it will be reduced to a small enough rump to be digested by the Woonsocket school district.
However, ALL the teachers in Providence were just fired — more precisely notified that they will be fired at the end of the year. Not laid off, but terminated outright. Aside from whatever effect this will have on the ongoing contract negotiations, this will get around seniority protection — if you’re fired you have no seniority rights.
This is the PTU’s reward for collaboration.