Thursday, March 18, 2010

Response to Unity

After seeing the Unity Caucus election ad, I emailed Michael Mulgrew. I said to him in part:

"I understand elections are a tough business and you can attack me all you want, but to take a quote from the NY Times where I was criticizing the DOE and use it to say that I appeared defeated and then ask the members if they want a president who had given up is quite a stretch.

In reality, as you know from the email I sent you the weekend after the PEP school closing vote, I asked to be part of the lawsuit opposing the closings and then I said, 'We want to be involved in any ongoing struggle to keep our schools open.' This hardly sounds like giving up."

I also told Mr. Mulgrew that at the February High School Committee Meeting, I called for a three point plan to stop school closings in addition to the court case that I have strongly supported.

I said we should picket the work places of the Mayor's PEP appointees.
We should also lobby Albany to take the Chancellor's school closing authority away and maybe his waiver from educational requirements too. Why wait until the law sunsets to change it? It isn't working now.
We should also have a tougher advertising campaign.

You can read the entire proposal on this blog if you wish.
3 POINT PLAN TO STOP SCHOOL CLOSINGS

I also informed Mulgrew about how after the PEP vote on Janaury 27, people from Jamaica, including me, were still talking to the press and we had speakers at the February Panel for Educational Policy meeting and the City Council hearings on school closings in early March. It hardly sounds like we quit in any way at Jamaica.

I made other points on the election and Jamaica High School and I concluded by saying that a great way to increase turnout in the UFT election would be to have a presidential candidate forum between us.

I have not heard back from the president and the email was sent to him on March 9.

What is Unity afraid of? A fair fight apparently is the answer.

11 comments:

Anonymous said...

James get this into your head, as a member of the UFT you are already involved in the lawsuit.

Why should you or ICE (presuming that's who you meant by "we") be mentioned specifically? You know you'd throw a fit if any other caucus was mentioned.

Anonymous said...

We meant Jamaica High School.

Anonymous said...

I think this is excellent.


When I distributed our latest election flier I got a good response. Some people did ask "What does ICE stands for?" and "What would James do?" Actually, these are some of the things said to answered hem.

Anonymous said...

The creation of the ATR crisis is alone enough in a rational world to trigger an ICE avalanche. Have been talking up that history. How unity originally said "No problem, you get paid for doing nothing, etc" ICE was predicting exactly what was happening, and only when agitated about ATR's did union begin to do anything about it. . .

Anonymous said...

"We meant Jamaica High School."

What about the other schools?

I understand that James works at Jamaica and it hits home But no, I'm not gonna take a big leap of faith to believe that the "we" in the article meant all of the schools. A president must think globally, not only in his own backyard.

Anonymous said...

For the past two days this website was made unaccessible. Could it be that the ballots were mailed out at this time? Or is it just a coincidence that for the first time in years this website had been tampered with?

Anonymous said...

Great, more ICE conspiracy theories.

The site was up knucklehead.

Anonymous said...

I guess all the 2005 givebacks are just part of a conspiracy theory. Good thinking unity slime.

Anonymous said...

The email to Mulgrew had nothing to do about UFT politics. James was writing for Jamaica where he is the chapter leader.

Anonymous said...

That's not what his post says.

Anonymous said...

Read it closely Mr. Unity.