From Salon dot com. Dems bash teachers unions too.
The week’s first slight to teachers’ unions came Monday, before the convention had even kicked off. Convention Chairman Antonio Villaraigosa spoke at a special screening of the upcoming Hollywood film “Won’t Back Down” for DNC delegates. He was joined by fellow Democratic mayors Cory Booker and Kevin Johnson, top union antagonist Michelle Rhee, and the director of Parent Revolution, a group pushing for “parent trigger.” The film is a sympathetic fictional portrayal of “trigger,” a policy which creates a mechanism for replacing union public schools with non-union charters, based on signatures from parents. American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten recently wrote that the film has “egregiously misleading scenes” which depict a union preventing teachers from working past 3 PM and protecting a teacher who punishes kids by putting them in the closet.
As I’ve previously reported, “parent trigger” has widespread support from Democratic mayors, none more vocal or prominent than Los Angeles’ Villaraigosa. While the screening was not listed as an official convention event, the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward reported that the Obama Administration was asked for permission to hold the event in Charlotte, and deferred the decision to the DNC’s political director, “who raised no objections.”
The day after the “Won’t Back Down” event, Democrats ratified their new platform, which pledges to “fight for collective bargaining rights,” including teachers’, but also to “work to expand public school options for low-income youth,” including charter schools. Charter schools are far less likely to be unionized than other public schools.
In his Tuesday night speech, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick described one of the transformations incentivized by Obama’s signature “Race to the Top” initiative, touting how Boston’s Orchard Gardens Elementary school “is turning itself around,” with changes including higher “teacher standards and accountabilities.” But the website of the Boston Teachers Union also highlights Orchard Gardens as an example – “of how blame has unfairly been laid on the steps of union teachers…” The BTU (an AFT affiliate) says that despite a “failure of leadership” that included six different principals over seven years, the reforms imposed there included ejecting the majority of the staff, including some who had never been evaluated. The BTU website also charges that the superintendent’s key “turnaround” proposals, most of which went into effect, featured “very little that resembles education innovation and a lot that looks like cost cutting and attempts to limit teachers’ voices in these schools.”
Asked about these criticisms, Boston Schools Superintendent Carol Johnson named greater integration of arts and engagement of parents as new innovations, and defended the removal of the majority of the school’s former teachers: “Principals, if they’re going to be responsible for the test scores, they have to be able to choose their starting line-up.” It’s easy to imagine why Governor Patrick didn’t make that argument directly in the convention hall.
...Asked whether he was bothered by Patrick’s speech highlighting a school that ousted the majority of its employees and implemented changes condemned by its union, Van Roekel answered, “I think he was highlighting the opposite by pointing that out. I think he was highlighting that what works is the collaboration and the involvement.”
Full story: http://laborspains.blogspot.com/2012/09/from-salon-dot-com-dems-bash-teachers.html
Original story: http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/dnc_disses_teachers/
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