I am a progressive, have been one since the 1960s, when I became a New York City public school teacher for a few years and learned that my union, the United Federation of Teachers, was much better at representing my interests than those of the kids I taught. It shouldn’t have come as such a surprise.
What was true then is true now.
Though the union masquerades to this day as an advocate for children, its job is to advance the interest of teachers. On some issues, like class size, decent salaries and school funding, teachers, parents and students are natural allies. On others, like protecting bad teachers behind seniority and tenure walls and resisting any form of effective evaluation, they are on a decades-long collision course.
As someone who’s spent a lifetime on the left, covering politics for nearly 40 years at the Village Voice, I’ve long been angered by the refusal of many on my side to even acknowledge that the UFT is a special-interest group. It’s never been more disturbing than it is now, six months into the first term of a mayor who is simultaneously a progressive paragon and an advance man for the union. We haven’t lived with that kind of contradiction before.
Mayor de Blasio, at this moment, has the power to define what’s progressive in New York. He has unfortunately transferred the credibility he’s earned on other fronts to a union, embracing its positions on charter schools, a new contract and tenure and seniority protections that are anything but progressive.
With de Blasio and the UFT-financed Working Families Party as allies, the union is hijacking the very language of movement politics, annexing left journalism to defend its narrowest interests and even recruiting progressives to join its war against charter schools that work for kids.
Seen through a progressive lens, all that should matter in these school skirmishes is whether a charter, a contract or an employment rule benefits students. Whenever progressive Democrats instead choose teacher power over the futures of minority kids, they are putting a big bucks lobby ahead of a core but comparatively powerless constituency.
You may, for example, have gotten the impression, when the WFP appeared poised last month to nominate charter foe Diane Ravitch to oppose Gov. Cuomo, a charter champion, in his reelection bid, that these nonprofit-run public schools are a Republican hedge-fund conspiracy. That’s what the WFP, a sometimes-blunt instrument exploited by the interests that bankroll it, and 75-year-old Ravitch, the adopted guru of the UFT and de Blasio administration, would have us believe.
In fact, the last two Democratic Presidents have put far more money into charters than hedge-fund donors, with Bill Clinton jumpstarting them and Barack Obama requiring states seeking Race to the Top subsidies to create them. And even as the WFP was making charters a focal point of its Cuomo critique, the House was passing a bill in May that kicked $300 million into charters, $50 million more than the prior authorization in 2011.
Charters won the votes of 158 House Democrats, a dozen more than in 2011, with only 34 Democrats joining the union in opposition. Backers included almost the entire New York delegation, many of whom run with WFP support. Ravitch, whose lobbying meetings with congress in February were arranged by the teachers union, called the bill “toxic.” Its sponsor, George Miller, the legendary California liberal, said simply: “Charter schools continue to prove that all children can succeed.”
As quiet as it’s kept, de Blasio is the only mayor of one of America’s 10 largest cities, almost all Democrats, who isn’t a charter booster. The thousand-strong U.S. Conference of Mayors, headed by the black mayor of Sacramento, strongly backs charters, as do such prominent Democrats as California Gov. Jerry Brown, the new housing secretary and ex-San Antonio mayor Julian Castro, Denver’s Michael Hancock, Philadelphia’s Michael Nutter, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and the left-of-Hillary hope Martin O’Malley, Maryland’s governor.
Even Zephyr Teachout, the Fordham professor who ran unsuccessfully against Cuomo for the WFP designation after Ravitch dropped out and now plans to challenge him in a Democratic primary partly because of his “support of corporate school reform,” is the protégé of new charter school backer Howard Dean.
Democrats like Dean and others have seen through the “privatization” trashing of charters by Ravitch and the union, recognizing that there’s no structural difference between the non-profits that run public school charters and the ones that operate Head Start, day care and pre-K programs.
For his part, de Blasio has never explained what distinguishes maligned charter non-profits from the ones that will run 60% of his celebrated new pre-K classrooms.
The only difference, in fact, is that most charters, unlike other nonprofit education providers, opt out of contracts like the UFT’s 200-page straitjacket that micromanages the school day and imposes an assembly-line mentality on schools – one that charters have exposed as dysfunctional.
Some on the left are, like the union, deliberately conflating “privatization” and contract-free schools in the Frank Luntz “words-that-work” tradition of bogus branding. Charter opposition is now reflexively used in New York City as a progressive barometer, regardless of the overwhelming evidence of their benefits to mostly black children, with 63% of the schools here outperforming traditional schools in math, for example.
The union also poses as a Democratic bastion that suffered through the Bloomberg nightmare – a supposed orgy of teacher bashing. That narrative was invoked by de Blasio when he and UFT boss Michael Mulgrew announced their labor agreement, the most expensive in the city’s history, last month.
But ask Freddy Ferrer if the UFT struck the same pose when he was the Democratic nominee against the billionaire incumbent in 2005 and it refused to endorse him. Ask Bill Thompson, the Democratic nominee against Bloomberg in 2009; the union shunned him then, even though he is such a UFT favorite they endorsed him over de Blasio in 2013 (they also sat out the 2008 term limits debate).
Or you could step back in time and ask David Dinkins and Ruth Messinger, the Democratic candidates in 1993 and 1997 that the neutral UFT refused to back against Rudy Giuliani, sabotaging them with ads and other attacks (the UFT actually endorsed George Pataki over Carl McCall in 2002).
In fact, until the union jumped on de Blasio’s bandwagon in the sure-win race last November, it had not endorsed a Democratic mayoral candidate since 1989 – with the exception of 2001, when it picked three losers, one in the primary (Alan Hevesi), one in the runoff (Ferrer) and one in the general (Mark Green).
Capping the real narrative of UFT choices, its longtime president Randi Weingarten became president of the American Federation of Teachers in late 2009, and asked Mike Bloomberg to introduce her at the National Press Club, where the two enjoyed a lovefest, celebrating the largest salary increases for teachers – 43% – attained anywhere in America over the Bloomberg years.
The struggle for the next contract always determines UFT politics, an understandable fact, but one that does not allow the union to climb atop a high horse on the presumption that no one will recall its trips down the low road. Yet that’s precisely the horse it mounted, demonizing Bloomberg to negotiate a grievance contract that will cost up to $19.6 billion when replicated by other unions.
De Blasio himself said in the final 2013 mayoral debate that there was “no way in the world to pay out the full amount” of the retroactive increases the unions wanted. But he now says he’s found a way, namely by stretching out the payments and getting undefined “savings” that the union is promising to make in health costs, excluding any member contributions.
It’s no accident that most of the pricetag for the UFT is backloaded until after de Blasio’s re-election in 2017. That’s when the biggest of the new raises (3%) and 75% of the retroactive lump sum payments, combined with the costs of a new contract in 2018, could well spark workforce attrition reductions and class-size increases – an outcome that’s hardly good for kids.
But look past money for a minute to the substantive choices this “progressive” mayor and union made. The contract reverses a 2005 Bloomberg gain that set aside 150 minutes a week for tutoring sessions with struggling students, preferring to devote that time to amorphous professional development, “collaboration with colleagues” and parent contacts, though there’s no evidence that these alternatives help pupil performance as much as small group instruction.
In exchange for 19.5% compounded salary increases and up to $50,000 in retroactive payments, “not one additional minute has been added to the work schedule,” the UFT site boasts.
Beyond these salary increases for all teachers, even those who no principal will put in a classroom, the contract creates master, model and ambassador teachers, partly picked by the union, who can get up to $20,000 in bonus pay while doing minimal additional work.
Instead of the independent “validators” previously used to do second-opinion reviews of weak teachers, the contract requires teacher validators, also selected in part by the union and paid an extra $15,000 a year.
Lesson plan requirements are newly restricted, unassigned teachers in a reserve pool must be given two chances to fail, supervisors get “less time” to do observation reports on teachers, and even teachers with an unsatisfactory rating are slated for $5,000 in bonus pay if they work in tough schools.
And while de Blasio constantly talks about his own public-school parenting history, they are given no role in schools beyond more teacher visits.
How can any of this be progressive? It’s special interest protectionism and patronage at its worst.
The same with de Blasio’s opposition to the recent California court ruling that struck down laws very close to what we have in New York – an inflexible reliance on seniority and tenure, reinforced by the contract the mayor just negotiated. Only 50 NYC teachers have lost their jobs in tenure cases since 2013. Los Angeles Judge Rolfe Treu found that these kinds of protections “shock the conscience” and “disproportionately affect” minorities.
The question is not whether these insurmountable layers of teacher insulation are “valuable” to the system. The question is whether they help kids. Isn’t that the only truly progressive measure?
Barrett is an investigative journalist. His wife is an aide to Gov. Cuomo.
