American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten had to scramble in embarrassment this week after a presentation at a recent conference was posted on the Web.
Because the PowerPoint lecture, delivered by an AFT “legislative advocate” — that means “lobbyist,” in plain English — turns out to underscore the sharp disparity between the union’s public posture and its actual policies.
It detailed how the union successfully rebuffed efforts by Connecticut education reformers to enact a “trigger law” — under which parents can reconstitute a consistently failing school into a charter school.
Complete with chapter headings like “Plan A: Kill Mode,” the report describes how the union first tried unsuccessfully to strangle the bill in committee.
Then it managed to recraft it to create “school governance councils” that “are [only] advisory and do not have true governing authority.”
In other words, parents can now only recommend a change — even a majority can’t mandate it.
Which effectively destroys the whole purpose of a parent trigger. And does little for the students — but does protect union jobs.
Even as the AFT claimed to be engaged in constructive dialogue and collaboration, it managed to ensure that “parent-trigger advocates were not at the table.”
Indeed, the lecture concluded that among the developments that “helped us” quash the bill’s original intent was an “absence of charter-school and parent groups from the table.”
So much for the unions’ mantra of always putting the students’ interests first.
The presentation even boasted of the “karma” that two of the trigger’s biggest proponents were defeated for re-election.
After education activist RiShawn Biddle posted the 19-page presentation — each page of which contained the AFT logo — on his Web site, the union hastily pulled it.
And up went a note explaining, “We . . . have removed [these materials] because they do not represent AFT’s position.”
Weingarten claimed she’d never seen or approved the PowerPoint presentation — but distanced the union only from the language used, not the tactics that neutered the parent-trigger law.
As Gwen Samuel of the Connecticut Parent Union told the Hartford Courant: “I’m concerned that they were so bold. This screams, ‘I’m untouchable.’ ”
Indeed it does.