Along with its usual claims that cuts will destroy schools, the Web site of the United Federation of Teachers marks the union’s 50th anniversary by paying strange homage to a firebrand founder, Albert Shanker.
It does so by saying that, “In a movie, Woody Allen once described Albert Shanker as a mad bomber who destroys the world.” The union apparently sees this lone sentence as high praise for its late boss.
The movie was “Sleeper,” a 1973 hit where Allen, director and star, wakes 200 years in the future. Amid gags about dehumanizing machinery — remember the Orgasmatron? — Allen learns his old world was destroyed when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
The line drew laughs, but the Web reference suggests the union still doesn’t get the joke. Shanker’s militancy was the butt, not a point of pride.
But hold on. Perhaps we’re wearing blinders. Maybe we fail to understand the union’s scorched-earth policy on protecting its interests, even at the expense of New York students.
Its bitter resistance to charter schools, and attacks on philanthropists who help fund them, is a defining moment in union history. The sorry state of affairs makes clear how far the organization has drifted from Shanker’s vision of building a union that was powerful but also respected because it demanded excellence and results from its members.
Shanker, a Queens native who died in 1997, was a brilliant labor organizer devoted to quality public education. He proposed a national teachers exam to foster standards and sought ways to separate incompetent teachers. Alarmed by the declining quality of those joining the ranks in late 1970s and early ’80s, he said the union should not offer membership to anyone who couldn’t meet high standards.
Although he led the charge against vouchers, he vigorously supported school choice in the public system, saying in a 1985 speech that giving parents more options “would go a long way toward getting rid of the notion that people are captives.” He warned that if teachers advocated only for themselves, without regard to students, it would be impossible to earn respect and fair compensation.
If Shanker were the “Sleeper” coming awake today, he couldn’t be happy with how his union heirs have undercut that vision. They are bitterly trying to stop meaningful choice — which is what charters are — and protect incompetent teachers.
Instead of being ashamed by bad schools, labor bosses have thrown all their might into resisting change. They often act like bullies, fearing competition from those who dare to demand success from both students and teachers.
After agreeing to a new pact on teacher report cards, the union boasted that student test performance would not be a significant factor in how its members are graded. This is cause for celebration?
Instead of saying “thank you” to generous New Yorkers who have given tens of millions to help thousands of public-school students get a better chance, the union blasts “Wall Street hedge funds” and seeks to limit new schools, even though most help poor, black and Hispanic children.
With the city and state mired in a recession it rejects any and all concessions. It is a safe bet that the deal in Albany to lift the charter cap will cost taxpayers a bundle. The UFT would have denied school choice to children unless its members got more money.
Shanker, of course, was no saint. He served brief jail terms after leading illegal strikes in 1967 and ’68 and helped create the old Board of Education, which took control of city schools away from the mayor and shifted it to political hacks the union controlled.
Yet Shanker, flaws and all, looks like a noble public servant compared with those now running the UFT. He knew something they don’t pretend to understand: The union can’t succeed by defending failing teachers and bad schools.
Hey, Andy, watch your backers
There is much to like in Andrew Cuomo’s first week as a candidate for governor. After hiding in the Rose Garden, he busted out with an impressive list of reforms that include a tax freeze, spending cuts and pension changes.
He picked a credible running mate, Rochester Mayor Robert Duffy, who is willing to buck Democrat Party orthodoxy. If Cuomo is elected and succeeds at implementing his agenda, New York state would be on the road to fiscal sanity and economic recovery.
Yet there are two worrisome signs. First, Cuomo accepted the support of the Independence Party with a too-clever-by-half dance around a criminal probe.
The Manhattan district attorney is following $1.2 million Mayor Bloomberg gave the party, especially $750,000 that went to one man without clear documentation.
Cuomo said the party wasn’t a focus of the investigation, but the DA hasn’t said that publicly. Besides, as attorney general, Cuomo knows you can’t predict with certainty where a case will end up. Given his demand for ethics reform, he could have set an example by waiting to see whether the party is clean.
The second concern is his support for Nassau County DA Kathleen Rice, one of five Democrats trying to succeed him as AG. According to The New York Times, Rice got hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions from personal-injury lawyers at a single firm and other firms that work with it, or about 20 percent of all her donations.
The firm, Weitz & Luxenberg, already has Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on its payroll. One partner’s son works for Rice in Nassau.
Cuomo showed why an attorney general needs an arm’s-length relationship with the governor. His tough report on Eliot Spitzer’s use of the State Police to spy on a political rival came when Spitzer looked invincible, and it sparked the Troopergate case.
For Cuomo, the danger is that the Independence Party and Rice’s ties have the potential to damage his reform cred. To inspire millions of voters to help him change New York, he needs to avoid any signs he’s just another pol on the make. These two moves don’t help.
How many geeks to fix a leak?
More nonsense from the faculty lounge. As evidence of his team’s engagement in the Gulf oil disaster, President Obama said that Energy Secretary Steven Chu — a Nobel Prize winner! — assembled a bunch of brainiacs in Houston to find answers.
* Well, well. If Nobel winners have a knack for plugging leaks a mile underwater, we’re in good hands with Obama and Chu. Then again, I suspect a knowledge of plumbing isn’t held in high esteem by the Nobel crowd.
What? Were they all driving Citroens?
Headline on the Drudge Report: “Frogs still causing traffic jams in Greece.” See, wherever they go, the French ruin everything.
TERROR-BLE WORD CHOICE
File this one under “There he goes again.”
John Brennan, President’s Obama counterterrorism czar, displays a gift for saying incredibly goofy and dangerous things.
* The other day, he said the US doesn’t call our enemies “jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purify oneself or one’s community.”
He said the same thing last summer, and earlier this month said the US wanted to engage “moderate elements” of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terror group.
The really scary thing is that Brennan has Obama’s ear, especially now that Dennis Blair has been booted as national intelligence director.
Yikes.