Vol. 74/No. 28      July 26, 2010

Unlike previous years, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden did not speak at the National Education Association (NEA) convention in New Orleans, and they turned down invitations to address the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) convention in Seattle.

The NEA spent $50 million in 2008 backing Obama’s presidential bid and mostly other Democrats. The AFT spent millions of dollars doing the same. Obama spoke at the 2007 and 2008 conventions of both groups.

According to New York Times reporter Sam Dillon, “Union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling.”

“Today our members face the most anti-educator, antiunion, antistudent environment I have ever experienced,” NEA president Dennis Van Roekel told the union delegates in New Orleans. Union officials say they feel betrayed by Obama. Pointing to federal programs that undermine public education and scapegoat teachers and their unions for “failing schools,” Van Roekel said, “This is not the change I hoped for.”

Teachers across the country have been hard hit by cutbacks in government funding for education. In March 26,000 teachers in California were told they would be laid off, on top of the 15,000 who lost their jobs last year.  
 
Bloomberg freezes teachers’ wages
In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg threatened in June to lay off 4,400 teachers, claiming that state budget cuts left him no other choice. In the end he froze teachers pay for the next two years, but warned that layoffs were still an option. Two thousand positions left vacant by teachers who retire or quit will not be filled.

Some 60,000 elementary and high school workers were laid off across the United States in 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, double the number laid off the year before.

The Obama administration is touting the Race to the Top program, which allows school systems to compete for grants if they carry out White House-backed “reforms,” at the same time proposing cuts in other federal education funds. They have combined this with enforcement of the George W. Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind Act to promote charter schools and push for laying off teachers based on their supposed “effectiveness” instead of on seniority.

With the open backing of Obama and Education Secretary Arnold Duncan, the school board in Central Falls, Rhode Island, in February fired every teacher at the local high school, claiming they were to blame for students’ low test scores. The teachers were rehired in May after the union agreed to a longer school day, extra tutoring of students with little extra pay, and a new teacher evaluation system.

“I never thought I’d see a Democratic president, whom we helped elect, and his education secretary applaud the mass firing of 89 teachers and staff,” AFT president Randi Weingarten told the convention, “when not a single one of the teachers ever received an unsatisfactory evaluation.”  
 
Competition for education grants
Although the AFT, like NEA leaders, has publicly complained about attacks on the union and public education, AFT leaders have agreed to many of Obama’s education “reforms.” With the agreement of the AFT, the New York State legislature recently voted to lift the cap on charter schools, increasing them to 460 from 200. It also made it easier to fire some teachers.

While teachers at New York City public schools are unionized, most at charter schools are not. By agreeing to increase the number of charter schools and tying teacher evaluation to student performance on standardized tests, the New York State government can compete with other states for $700 million in Race to the Top grants.

A July 5 column in the Daily News by a leader of the New Teacher Project, an antiunion group that backs these measures, lauded Weingarten for backing “bold reform.”

The article noted that Weingarten has helped negotiate agreements in Washington, D.C.; New Haven, Connecticut; and Colorado that allow school administrators to get rid of teachers without regard to seniority.

Lynn Nordgren, president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, boasts that the union there has helped push out more than 400 “ineffective” teachers in the past 10 years.

In spite of the continued bipartisan assault on public education and the teachers unions, both the AFT and the NEA are gearing up to back “education-friendly lawmakers,” mostly Democrats, in the November 2010 election.

“The contributions and voices of NEA members always make a difference during elections, and politicians know it,” the NEA Web site says, encouraging teachers to make contributions for the upcoming contests.
 
 
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