Randi Weingarten Secretly Met with Steve Bannon -- Quisling!

Yes, you read that right. The Intercept on November 1, 2017 reported that this meeting happened. In a classic, but ignominious fashion, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers,did a collaborationist act and met with The Architect of Alt-Right demogoguery. We can just hear the rationales now, that she wanted to get a seat, or more likely, stool at the table.

Disgusting creep, that he was in the White House was bad enough; but Randi got snookered into meeting him to get a deal??? The stooge, she took the seat at the table thing to the most obscene end. This was merely the extension of the dumb move she made in not endorsing an opponent of Bloomberg, because she though she could get a good deal.

 This was merely the extension of the dumb move she made in not endorsing an opponent of Bloomberg, because she though she could get a good deal.
Here are the key quotes, from 'The Intercept':

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten met one-on-one with then-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon back in March, following the announcement of President Donald Trump’s proposed budget cuts and plan to craft a $1 trillion infrastructure package. The Intercept learned of the meeting, which has not been previously reported, independent of Weingarten or Bannon. It was instigated through a mutual friend and appeared to be part of Bannon’s effort to realign the parties, according to Weingarten.

“Look, I will meet with virtually anyone to make our case, and particularly in that moment, I was very, very concerned about the budget that would decimate public education,” Weingarten said. “I wanted it to be a real meeting, I didn’t want it to be a photo-op, so I insisted that the meeting didn’t happen at the White House.”

Weingarten didn’t take notes at the meeting, which was held at a Washington restaurant, but told The Intercept she and Bannon talked about “education, infrastructure, immigrants, bigotry and hate, budget cuts … [and] about a lot of different things.”

She came away a bit shook. “I came out of that conversation saying that this was a formidable adversary,” she said.

He was looking, Weingarten said, for some common ground that could assist him in realigning the two parties, his long-term goal in politics.“I think he sees the world as working people versus elites. And on some level, he’s thought about educators as working-class folks. But what he doesn’t do is think about the other side of educators, as people who fiercely believe in equality and inclusion. It isn’t an either/or philosophy. The [Martin Luther] King philosophy of jobs and justice is not the Bannon philosophy, let’s put it that way,” she said. “He’s trying to figure out where the friction is, and how to change the alignment. I think that’s really what he was trying to do.”

Hearing Bannon attack elites, including the types of hedge fund Democrats who fund the charter school movement, in the same way she would, was surreal. “He hates crony capitalism,” Weingarten said. “The same kinds of things [we say], you could hear out of his mouth, and that’s why it’s so — you sit there in a surreal way, saying, ‘How can you sit right next to all these elites?’”

Since the election, Weingarten has emerged as one of the most vocal leaders within Democratic circles to resist Trump’s agenda – regularly speaking out against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, deportation threats, budget cuts, and attacks on the Affordable Care Act. She was one of the first Hillary Clinton allies to endorse the Bernie Sanders-backed Keith Ellison in his race for chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Less than two weeks after the election, Weingarten and Maureen Costello of the Southern Poverty Law Center sent an open letter to the president-elect, signed by 100 other organizations, calling on him to forcefully denounce hate. “While you spoke against bullying, intimidation and hate crimes in your ‘60 Minutes’ interview, the appointment of ‘alt-right’ hero Steve Bannon as your chief strategist — which has been cheered by the Ku Klux Klan, the American Renaissance and other white supremacist groups — sends the exact opposite message,” they wrote.

Bannon’s embrace of the “alt-right” movement has at once propelled his rise and put a ceiling on it. It took him from obscurity to the White House and now to the head of a rebel conservative movement. But his ability to realign the parties is hampered by those more noxious elements of his coalition. It was reportedly Bannon, for instance, who urged Trump to not condemn white nationalists in Charlottesville, Virginia, even after one of them allegedly killed a counterprotester with his car. That makes Bannon’s hunt for allies among labor unions and within the black and brown working class that much harder.

“This is one smart guy,” Weingarten said, “but I was pretty clear with him about my criticism of the white nationalism philosophy.” For Weingarten, who is Jewish and a lesbian, Bannon’s “alt-right” politics are more than an abstract threat. Indeed, in a typical White House, a labor leader would not ask to have a meeting outside the White House and then say nothing about it for six months.
In August, just days before he was fired (or resigned) from Trump’s administration, Bannon called Robert Kuttner, co-editor of liberal magazine American Prospect, to talk about a range of issues, including trade and identity politics. Kuttner published a summary of their conversation, remarking that he left “with a sense both of [Bannon’s] savvy and his recklessness.”

Weingarten came away with the same impression: “Let me say it this way: Kuttner’s download about their meeting was not surprising to me in the least.”

At the time of the meeting, the Trump administration had proposed slashing the federal education budget by 13.5 percent, a figure that would amount to more than $9 billion in cuts. The White House also proposed cutting Medicaid by $800 billion, threatening school districts with funding they use to provide health and special education services.

For the rest of the article, go to the original 'The Intercept' site.
Instead of meeting with Bannon, Weingarten should have been leading a real resistance in the schools and in the streets.
As they say, 'No words' for how disgusting her move was.

Tests and transparency issues

*Education Commercialization Complex parallel to permanent war economy
*UFT failure to broadly attack, on principle, the test-regime
We see that this permanent war against teachers economy, just as the military has had "black budget items," items that were kept secret, "for the good of the people," we have Common Core questions that are kept secret-- NY's State Education Department is only selectively disclosing some questions. Since the government cannot use the national security excuse, what excuse could they use? -Corporate private security or copyright. Baloney.

The real reason is that publicization of the tricky questions, hello, will expose what illogical, inappropriate questions the Common Cores brings into English and math, as At the Chalk Face reports in "New York ELA day 2 disaster #FAIL #Pearson #NYSED." The blog site reports several substantive issues with the Common Core questions. This is the negative consequence of privatization of test publishing functions by the international corporate giant, Pearson PLC, away from what historically had been a public function under the aegis of the New York State Education Department.

However, from the organization that we would expect to hear much criticism, the United Federation of Teachers, whose members were in touch with the tests, we have heard limited anecdotes of trouble, mixed with praise for the Common Core, as indicated in this April op-ed column in the Daily News by the UFT president, Michael Mulgrew. The leader mentioned the lack of a curriculum, the fact that test prep is not teaching and that teachers are over-burdened with paperwork. The union should issue a broad, comprehensive critique of the way that tests are hijacking the purpose of education, are vulgarizing the learning experience and are degrading teachers. Contrast this limited critique with the multiple details from the Chalk Face blog a week earlier.

This is reflection, once again, of the detachment of the union leadership from rank and file (regular non-officials) teachers on the ground. Contrast the union's alternating complicity or silence with this regime with the on-going critique launched by the union's MORE caucus, on their website and in person, for example at the union's delegate assembly. (The union's pretenses at critiquing the evaluation system are ephemeral window dressings.) Otherwise, we would have heard fire and this depth of detail from Mulgrew, and probably less enthusiasm for the Common Core.

Diane Ravitch mentions in "What is the Goal of Common Core testing?" that Rick Hess predicts that Common Core anxiety, prompting some parents "to demand “reforms” and an escape from their neighborhood schools." As she says, reformers will gloat over failing scores (no doubt to continue the failing schools line).

UFT Does Have New Contract: It's Danielson and VAM-Based Evaluations

2007 CONTRACT 2.0, THE POST-2009 EVALUATIVE CHANGES AS THE DE FACTO NEW DOE-UFT CONTRACT

There has been much discussion of how New York City teachers, under representation by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), have not had a new contract in the nearly four years since 2009, that is, not since outgoing president Randi Weingarten installed Micheal Mulgrew as her replacement, ratified by the UFT executive board. (How interesting it would be to see what a roll call vote would have looked like. Did the New Action members dissent from Weingarten's hand-picked choice?) The no contract angle even made a front page notice in the Chief, in the context of Mulgrew's getting re-elected in spite of producing no contract during his tenure.

Yet, teachers need to keep in mind that we do have a new contract. It exists in the extra-contractual give-backs that the UFT under Unity/Mulgrew's leadership.
Along with these points, we must note: it is a mistake to slip into the dichotomy of saying that Mulgrew is strong whereas Weingarten was weaker for us. When we look at the severity of the give-backs, we must ask, on what grounds are people asserting that Mulgrew better?

Weingarten set the cast for the current era UFT. She perennially said that new times called for teachers to concede and for unions to collaborate. She has always couched this position in language saying that teachers have to find ways to work together and so on. So, Mulgrew has followed in this position. He has only avoided clearly enunciating the collaborationist position. Whereas Weingarten would wrap her surrenders in statements calling for professionalism and cooperation, Mulgrew just concedes, without the rationale. The buzz-cut hairdo and portly physique has conned us to ignore that he has made giant concessions out-side of proper contractual procedure.

Let's look at the record, at the points by which Mulgrew has created a new contract. It must be noted that none of these items was ever presented to the membership for a ratification vote. These are priority matters to overturn, to protect our working conditions.

OBSERVATIONS
Teaching in New York has experienced a sea change in recent years. Unannounced observations are routine. Informal observations are treated with the weight of formal observations. Practices that would have been rejected out of hand in the past are routinely tolerated, with no systematic UFT fact-finding and push-back. Teams of network observers enter and disrupt classrooms with intrusive poking in and interrupting teacher-student interaction with questions.

DANIELSON FRAMEWORKS
As I've argued elsewhere at greater length, the union promoted this back in 2011, promoting this as helpful to teachers. Yet, as practiced in New York City, this is a nit-picking tool that can assail any but the super-human, hyper-organized teacher. In use, expect it to be used in a subjective manner, with sympathetic supervisors being fairer and biased principals to separate their friends from the pariahs. It will be rolled out officially in fall, 2013, a contract-quality change in our evaluative process, but it never faced a membership-wide discussion or vote.

VAM EVALUATIONS
It has been roundly documented: value added modeling is junk science. (For example, see here and here; test results correlate with school district poverty indices.) Again, supervisor bias can creep in. The low-totem pole teacher could get the challenging assignment; the favored teacher could get the easier classes. Last fall, the MORE caucus campaigned for a membership vote on the evaluation process. The UFT leadership (Unity) resolutely squashed the motions for a membership vote.
[UPDATE: This May 27 post at NYC Educator shows that already principals are using VAM against teachers, in one known instance, to deny tenure.]


Arguably tangential to a contract-quality job concession, but extremely influential upon teachers' working conditions, in a detrimental way, has been the Race to the Top. It has triggered many of the evaluative changes:
* Mulgrew conceded to Race to the Top. He joined in with New York City and State to endorse the state's application for Race to the Top. The stipulations of RTTT have brought forth increased numbers of school closures, an expanded number of charter schools, and test-based teacher-evaluation systems. Yet, the California Teachers Association has denounced it as hurting students; and at least 80 Ohio districts have rejected it, recognizing that the administrative costs out-weigh the benefits.

DIFFICULT TO REVERSE PRECEDENT
There is so much that Mulgrew has given away between 2009 and now. Strategically, in coming contract negotiations, this year or next, it will be very difficult for the union to reverse the practices. The city will be unlikely to give back on colossal encroachments it has made in the recent past.

Let's not kid ourselves. This is a terrible we find ourselves in: a de facto new contract, reached outside of proper protocols of what should happen in a union workplace. This is backroom deal-making with no membership vote. This must be challenged.