ADAMS-BANKS LOOKS LIKE A FOURTH BLOOMBERG EDUCATION TERM

I've been very busy the last few days spending a great deal of time working on the United for Change coalition that is coming together to challenge Michael Mulgrew's Unity Caucus in the next UFT election that will take place in the spring. If all goes well with the intense ongoing negotiations, we should be able to announce candidates very soon. 

The UFT will need to be organized and mobilized quickly now that Mayor-Elect Eric Adams has chosen David Banks as his Chancellor.

This is from Chalkbeat's article on Thursday's press conference introducing Banks:

The incoming chancellor has also begun to assemble his cabinet. He has tapped Dan Weisberg — who runs an organization focused on teacher quality and handled labor issues under Mayor Michael Bloomberg — to be his top deputy. That move is likely to raise eyebrows with the city’s teachers union, which has previously clashed with Weisberg.

Michael Mulgrew, head of the teachers union, did not attend Thursday’s press conference but put out a supportive statement about Banks’ appointment. (The principals union chief attended the event in person.)

Mulgrew was actually right when he stated last spring that an Eric Adams mayoralty will bring back the worst of the Michael Bloomberg years on education. The UFT President warned us about Andrew Yang and Eric Adams before the primary at the Delegate  Assembly in May.

Yang and Adams working with people who are proven enemies of public education who want to get back into City Hall. 

Mulgrew subsequently lost plenty of UFT credibility when the Union turned around and endorsed Adams after Adams won the Democratic primary in June. Backing someone just because he is likely to win who opposes our core values does not make Mulgrew a pragmatic leader. It makes us look like a flip-flopping joke. 

The ed deformers are back and it is no coincidence that Bloomberg is going to spend 3/4 of a billion dollars for new charter schools now. There's no sugarcoating it. de Blasio never strayed too far from the Bloomberg style of running the schools but it did improve in some ways. Adams will likely reshuffle the bureaucracy yet again but don't expect to see the money end up in the classrooms. It usually doesn't. Expect stupid deforms.

Blogger Gary Rubenstein has it right on what we are up against. Gary's blog post is called, The Tip of the Weisberg. 

Weisberg has led the TNTP that was founded by anti-union Michelle Rhee.  Gary makes some important points:

In 2009 they got into funding ‘research’ and their first publication was called ‘The Widget Effect’ which argued the benefits of merit pay for teachers based on standardized test scores. This publication is still often quoted despite very shoddy statistical practices. Dan Weisberg was the lead author of ‘The Widget Effect.’ More recently they put out something called “The Opportunity Myth” about how most teachers have low expectations because they do activities that don’t completely adhere to the researcher’s interpretation of the Common Core Standards.

Fifteen years ago there were plenty of Michelle Rhee type reformers in leadership positions in school districts around the country. As that brand of reform failed to deliver results, those reformers took positions in think tanks where they could make a lot more money but where they would not have such direct power over school systems.

Back in the Bloomberg/Klein days, people like Weisberg would celebrate judicial rulings where parents would fight to not have their children’s schools shut down. Charter schools, in the wake of ‘Waiting For Superman’, were supposedly proving that all you needed to turn around a school was to staff them with non-unionized teachers. Teacher bashing was all the rage, they even had their own Walton funded movie flop ‘Won’t Back Down.’

What about today, Gary?

But things are different now. Reformers are not as brazen as they once were. The charter bubble has burst a bit, though Bloomberg has $750 million that says he can revive it. But it will be hard. With the failures of projects like The Achievement District in Tennessee, it will a tougher sell to say that we need to replicate their accomplishments. Back in the day, there would be so much talk of charters that were beating the odds with 100% graduation rates or 100% college acceptance rates. Those stories were debunked so often that even The74 hardly runs stories like that anymore. Does anyone know whatever happened to KIPP? The only charter chain that can even claim to get good test scores is Success Academy, and even reformers hardly like to talk about them since they boot (or discourage from enrolling) so many kids who might bring down their precious test scores.

So where does a teacher basher fit into the current system? As a New York City teacher with two kids in the system, I’m a bit scared to find out.

Gary goes on to show some anti-union Tweets from Weisberg.

Now look closely at a sample of what Banks told NBC 4 on Thursday:

“Teachers very often may say ‘I don’t want to work on Saturday, I don’t want to work all year long.’ But if we continue to do things the way we’ve been doing them? We’ll continue to get the same results,” said Banks.

He also added that if the teachers don’t want to work the additional hours on Saturdays or over the summer, he’ll bring in community groups to fill the void. All is part of his plan to break the mold when it comes to education.

Union busting right from the start.

The UFT is a potentially powerful Union but under Mulgrew we are so unorganized and weak that I can't see us ready to wage a battle under Mulgrew's concessionary style leadership against Adams. Don't forget mayoral control of NYC schools is up for renewal in June in Albany. We need new leadership and an organized membership. 

We should be organizing and mobilizing our members and allies to take away the mayor's power over public schools which sunsets in Albany next June and has to be renewed by the State Legislature and Governor to continue. Are we going to start hearing again how busting teacher unions is the civil rights issue of our time? We could very easily end up steamrolled by Adams who on education looks to be planning a fourth Bloomberg term.