‘Oh, my head,” said parent activist Mona Davids on learning that the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, or CPAC, had been hijacked by the United Federation of Teachers to carry the UFT’s policy agenda in Albany tomorrow.
As president of the NYC Parents Union, Davids has gone to court to undo Gov. Cuomo’s “sequester” of $250 million in school aid for the city. CPAC members should be joining that fight — but instead they’ll lobby legislators against Mayor Bloomberg’s agenda.
As The Post’s Sue Edelman reported on Sunday, the UFT is paying for buses, hot lunches and pro-union position papers for 100 CPAC members going to Albany for “lobby day.”
Mind you, CPAC is supposed to be the voice of parents inside the city Education Department. But, like everything education-related, the teachers union successfully got its hooks into the group.
Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott shouldn’t be surprised, but ashamed for (as Sam Pirozzulo of Community Education Council 31 on Staten Island told The Post) “giving them the keys to the castle.”
Walcott wouldn’t be in this pickle if he and his predecessors had done the work necessary to make CPAC members feel needed. Chancellors must have a little politician in them.
In Edelman’s story, the UFT sounded downright gleeful and defiant at having once again bested the city.
If any Democratic mayoral candidate thinks he or she can get the best of the union once installed in office come January, better think again.
The UFT is more dangerous than Rumplestiltskin. It plays the long game against a mayor who’s term-limited and a schools chancellor who’s tied to a lame-duck incumbent mayor.
But I expect that UFT boss Mike Mulgrew & Co. are on a mole hunt to find who leaked their CPAC briefing documents to The Post. They’re thin-skinned when called out.
After I exposed the UFT’s use of “astroturf” parent groups to tout its agenda last month, its paid parent spokesperson has disappeared from the public stage — while I was accused on Twitter of stalking her online.
I had also outlined the union’s 40 years history of co-opting legitimate parent and community groups. So Walcott should have been on guard against the UFT “body snatchers” who took over “his” parents group.
Meanwhile, real education reform is sidetracked.
Tomorrow, the UFT-influenced CPAC will lobby against the Parents Union bill to give independent parents a seat on the city’s Panel for Educational Priorities, and against Bloomberg’s school reorganizations and his fair treatment of charter schools — not for restoring that lost school aid.
As Davids tweeted, “How can losing $250 million not be THE priority on lobby day?”
Cuomo (the self-styled “students’ lobbyist”) defends withholding the aid because the UFT and Bloomberg couldn’t agree on a teacher-evaluation plan. His sequestration of money for our kids’ schools was unchallenged until Davids and other parents won an injunction against it in state court. Regardless, Mayor Bloomberg has announced cuts costing each city school $200,000.
Meanwhile, whatever teacher-evaluation model is agreed upon, the evaluations will be shielded from the prying eyes of most parents and taxpayers. Bowing to the unions, Cuomo and legislative leaders want the information kept sacrosanct, protected from parental and media inquiries.
So parent activists like Mona Davids and Sam Pirozzulo are left to do the real work not only on Cuomo’s sequestration, but on helping to ensure that the things like the phony “lobby day” are exposed to an unsuspecting public.