One came to soothe, the other to fight.
An unusually conciliatory Randi Weingarten, head of the city’s teacher union, took a flurry of jabs yesterday from Harlem charter-schools operator and former City Councilwoman Eva Moskowitz during a televised debate.
The powerful pair — who for a decade have butted heads over charter schools, labor contracts and the fixes for the city’s ailing public schools — again showed the gulf between them, even as Weingarten appeared ready to extend an olive branch.
“You could call Mike Bloomberg tonight and you could say, ‘Mike, I don’t think tenure is working. Let’s not have a system where teachers get lifetime job security irrespective of performance,’ ” Moskowitz told the labor leader on NY1.
“Let’s not have a system where the standard — and this bugs me so much about the contract — the standard [for removing a teacher] is incompetence.”
Weingarten deflected much of the criticism by contrasting states like Massachusetts — which have strong unions and excellent schools — with areas in the South that lack both unions and good schools.
“So it’s not the unions and it’s not a particular union contract” that’s to blame, she said.
Moskowitz first stoked the ire of Weingarten’s United Federation of Teachers in 2003 by holding hearings attacking the union’s byzantine contract with the city.
The union returned the favor two years later by opposing Moskowitz in a race for Manhattan borough president.
But yesterday, Weingarten pleaded that the two focus on “issues,” not “personalities.”