The UFT Under New Boss Moves to Disembowel Charter Schools

by Thomas W. Carroll

In recent years, Randi Weingarten — as president of the United Federation of Teachers – attempted to reposition the UFT as a progressive union that did not fear charter schools, and in fact embraced them.  Weingarten’s boldest move in this regard was her decision to open a UFT charter school.

In her last years as UFT president, Weingarten attempted to distance herself from the more viscerally anti-charter state teachers union, the New York State United Teachers, which one suspects she viewed as out of step with the new national education-reform zeitgeist.

Now, as president of the American Federation of Teachers, Weingarten is continuing her efforts, most recently with clever packaging of a recent New Haven teachers contract hailed by President Obama (see my column on this contract here).

I haven’t always agreed with Weingarten, but I always respected her sense of strategy, her ability to frame issues, and her perfect ear for how far the political process could be bent in her union’s direction.

Over the weekend, however, we got a glimpse of a new UFT.  Michael Mulgrew, the new UFT president, issued with much fanfare a blistering report offering charter-school “reforms” that would disembowel charter schools in New York City and beyond.  Not a subtle passage in the 16-page document.  All red-meat for the anti-charter union masses as he attempts to position himself for re-election in spring 2010, after failing to secure a city teachers contract from the Bloomberg administration.

The report, issued on the Christian Sabbath, was timed to come out before the start of the 2010 legislative session.  Early action on a cap hike is anticipated as the state finalizes its Race to the Top application due January 19th.

With a new UFT leader, gone is Weingarten’s velvety smoothness.  Mulgrew’s report had all the subtlety of an ironworkers strike.

The shrewd negotiator has been replaced by the blunt instrument.

Some of the crasser proposals include the following:

• mandatory unionization of all charter schools (so much for “teacher voice”);
• elimination of the State University (which ironically awarded the UFT charter to Weingarten) as a chartering entity;
• a ban on the use of professional educational management organizations;
• government price fixing of the fees that charter schools could pay nonprofit charter management organizations;
• government control of management salaries (even if paid for with private funds);
• mandated payment of union wages on all construction contracts (even though the state provides no building aid for charter schools); and,
• admissions quotas for charter schools that would mandate that each school enroll at all times exactly the percentage of special-education students, free-lunch students, and English language learners as does the local district average (although no such requirement applies to district schools, whose school-by-school numbers vary widely).

The full report can be found here.

The UFT’s point is not actually the advancement of any specific proposal, but rather to throw out there as much mischief as possible to gum up charter schools – even if it tanks union-represented charter schools in the process.  Mulgrew is not even pretending that he is open to charter schools.

Weingarten, not fearing electoral defeat, would not have risked tanking New York’s Race to the Top application merely to make a political point.  Instead, I suspect she would have offered a few key demands in exchange for a cap hike.  And she would have gotten them.

Mulgrew — by overplaying his hand and doing it in such an openly crass way — risks killing New York’s chances at $350 million to $700 million in much needed educational dollars.

What remains to be seen is whether the Governor and state legislators, in the midst of New York’s mounting fiscal crisis, are so cavalier, too.  Let’s hope not.