Intercepts
A listening post monitoring public education and teachers’ unions.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten delivered a speech to the National Press Club yesterday. Alexander Russo helpfully collected the major press reports.

Here is an excerpt:

“Our sights are set on tougher academic standards, stricter discipline, less bureaucracy, higher quality schools. These goals, shared by teachers and school boards alike, compel us to transform collective bargaining into a collaborative process – negotiations focusing not only on traditional bread-and-butter issues, and also on issues of employee involvement and school quality.

“Our challenge is clear: Instead of relegating teachers to the role of production workers — with no say in organizing their schools for excellence — we need to enlist teachers as full partners, indeed, as co-managers of their schools. Instead of contracts that reduce flexibility and restrict change, we — and our schools — need contracts that empower and enable. This new collaboration is not about sleeping with the enemy. It is about waking up to our shared stake in reinvigorating the public education enterprise. It is about educating children better, more effectively, more ambitiously.

“The new direction we are charting… is not only about vision, it is about action. It is about changing how each of our local affiliates does business, changing how they bargain, changing what issues they put on the table, changing the ways they help their members to become the best teachers they can be.”

Oooops. Wait a minute. I’m sorry, those words aren’t from Randi Weingarten’s National Press Club speech yesterday; they are from National Education Association President Bob Chase’s National Press Club speech of February 5, 1997.

As we now know, Chase’s introduction of new unionism in that speech led to a Golden Age of collaboration between unions and management, where both sides held the interest of the kids, not adults, as their primary concern. Obsolete and harmful work rules were removed, fiscal prudence was practiced, incompetent teachers were swiftly dismissed, and American public education blossomed into the envy of the world that it is today.

You can read all of Weingarten’s speech and the various press reports about it, but all you really need to pay attention to is the one sentence written by Sam Dillon of the New York Times:

“It is unclear how much practical effect Ms. Weingarten’s speech will have on the stance her 1.4-million-member union and its locals take in negotiations with school districts or in lobbying state legislatures.”

And the world looks just the same, and history ain’t changed.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 12:35 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.