By Ben Velderman
EAGnews.org

DETROIT – American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten may be the shrewdest politician in the country.

Weingarten was just elected to her third term as leader of the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and is already developing the narrative that she’s going to chart a new, reform-friendly course for her union.

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In the afterglow of her overwhelming victory, Weingarten talked to Reuters about a new, “solution-driven” brand of unionism that will unite “those we serve and those we represent.”

“And we have to think … what’s good for kids and what’s fair for teachers?” Weingarten said, adding that “this is about fighting for things as well as fighting against things.”

For a brief moment, we were tempted to put a headline on this article saying, “A new day is dawning! Weingarten understands that education reform is necessary and inevitable.”

But then we reviewed Weingarten’s record, and it became obvious that she hasn’t “seen the light” at all. Her soothing talk about “solutions” and “collaboration” are only meant to address the union’s considerable public relations challenges. Behind the carefully chosen, poll-tested rhetoric lies the same self-serving union as before.

Consider: Weingarten presides over the AFT, which is the parent union of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers and the Chicago Teachers Union.

The UFT and the CTU only happen to be two of the most destructive teacher unions imaginable.

Over the past year, Weingarten’s underlings at the UFT have spent a small fortune in legal fees to keep an array of dangerous and predatory teachers in classrooms with children, despite the best efforts of city officials to fire them. Every few weeks, New Yorkers learn about another sex-depraved teacher who, with union help, has “lawyered up” in order to keep his (or sometimes her) job.

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Likewise, the CTU has disgraced itself by promising a full-blown teachers strike in the fall if union teachers don’t receive a whopping 30 percent pay raise. The Chicago school district is broke, but greedy CTU leaders won’t let that detail keep them from draining what’s left in the school’s coffers or walking out on the children.

To our knowledge, Weingarten hasn’t uttered a single word of reproach to UFT and CTU leaders for their reckless and selfish strategies. She hasn’t publicly called on her union cohorts to think about “what’s good for kids.”

Instead, Weingarten is choosing to remain silent – a clear indication that she tacitly approves of the local unions’ ugly behavior and adult-first priorities.

Just as her concern for children is disingenuous, so is Weingarten’s “record” as a reformer, which the Reuters story discusses in detail.

“Weingarten was attacked by critics for a willingness to throw her support behind deals in places like Philadelphia and Cleveland, where AFT locals bargained away tenure protections, or New Haven, Connecticut, where the union accepted a teacher evaluation system that removes teachers whose students don’t perform well on standardized tests,” Reuters reports.

This is where Weingarten’s political skills shine brightest: She steps into tense bargaining situations where public pressure for K-12 reform is so great that changes simply must occur.

At that point, Weingarten signs off on deals that seem to offer big concessions, but really only pacify reformers into thinking they’ve won the showdown.

For example, the idea that teachers will lose their jobs if their kids don’t perform well on standardized tests is a stretch. In most cases where new evaluation systems have gained union approval, test scores become a fraction of a teacher’s overall evaluation; classroom observations will continue to be the main way teachers are measured.

In those cases in which a teacher is found to be ineffective, there is usually a remediation process to help improve the teacher’s performance. The worst cases will end up before an arbitrator, which means a poorly performing teacher has a fifty-fifty chance of keeping his or her job.

And yes, some unions have agreed to merit pay plans, but typically, they only agree if the “reward” is given to the entire teaching staff. It’s the t-ball approach to merit pay: everybody bats, everybody runs the bases.  That remains consistent with the tired union line that all teachers are equal and should be compensated the same.

These lukewarm reforms can be considered improvements, but only in the sense that something is better than nothing. Weingarten’s reform record is hardly as impressive as her admirers believe, or as far-reaching as her critics fear.

Essentially, Weingarten tosses reformers a few table scraps and convinces the media that she really served a banquet. Empty rhetoric and symbolic concessions made only under duress – that’s the “Randi Weingarten” approach in a nutshell.

And for that she’s rewarded with a Reuters story entitled, “Teacher union boss bends to school reform winds.”

Like we said, she’s one of the shrewdest politicians in the nation. We just hope reformers don’t believe the hype.