NewTLA Candidate Upsets Washington, Wins UTLA Presidency

Contrary to most predictions, Julie Washington was beaten by Warren Fletcher in the runoffs for president of the United Teachers of Los Angeles. According to the L.A. Times, Fletcher had 4,711 votes or 53.6% and Washington had 4,247 votes or 47.4%. However, less than 80% of members actually voted.

Washington was the former vice president and considered by most to be an insider who would carry on the legacy of A.J. Duffy. She was the chief negotiator on several occasions in which UTLA gave up significant concessions. Fletcher, in contrast, ran a campaign that was critical of the previous UTLA administration and its weakness in defending teachers’ interests. He had the support of a small opposition movement within the union called NewTLA. According to In My Trends, NewTLA endorsed Fletcher “based on the belief that he would help promote a more respectful, civil environment within UTLA where meaningful reform may be more likely.”

NewTLA has argued that UTLA is an antiquated union, stuck in the old ways (e.g., fighting to protect teachers’ pay, benefits and working conditions), unwilling to collaborate with the bosses to facilitate reforms (i.e., unwilling to accept reforms that would undermine working conditions and labor protections and maybe not even benefit students). (See NewTLA: Voice of Reform or Reaction?) The question is will Fletcher be their man? Fletcher's campaign platform emphasized returning “UTLA to its core priorities" of salary, benefits, retirement and job security, implying that he is not interested in fighting privatization and the proliferation of charter schools, attempts to tie teacher pay to student test scores, or other “tangential” issues also known as top down reforms. Furthermore, he hardly mentioned rank and file organizing during his campaign, suggesting that he does not intend to rule by consensus.

If Fletcher turns out to be a true NewTLA union president, UTLA members will surely suffer, while the billionaire Ed Deformers will have a valuable insider where they need it most: heading the nation’s second largest teachers union.

New Sheriff in Town, Julie Washington, LAUSD’s New Corporate Enforcer

Arne Duncan was in L.A. this week for an education summit. That can only mean one thing: promotion of his latest pet project, employee/boss collaboration. The details of this summit are summarized by Charles Taylor Kerchner (in John Fensterwald’s, Educated Guess).

According to Kerchner, Duncan told listeners that “Crisis gives us a perfect opportunity, not just a perfect storm.” Crises, we should remember, allow entrepreneurs to swoop in to clean up messes created by cumbersome government bureaucracies, as they so beautifully demonstrated in Iraq and Haiti. Crises make it easy to justify extraordinary tactics, even ones that trample personal freedom or common sense, like the idea that labor-boss collaborations will serve the interests of workers.

Yet this is precisely what Duncan was up to. According to Kerchner, incoming superintendent John Deasy and Julie Washington, the “new sheriff in town” at United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), will negotiate in an environment that “expects the labor contract to be used as an instrument of reform.”  Although he didn’t say who expected this, we can presume it was the local billionaire Ed Deformers like Eli Broad and Phillip Anschutz. It no doubt was also Duncan, who demanded “productive, tough collaboration to solve problems, not just ‘a kumbaya moment.’ (Anyone else out there getting tired of this dumb cliché? When do teachers and administrators ever hold hands and sing? If we’re lucky, we get a decent contract without too much fighting, hardly a kumbaya moment and hardly typical, either).   What Duncan is really saying is that he and Deasy, Anschutz and Broad will determine what needs to happen and it will be up to Washington to convince her members to accept it, that it is in their best interests.

So what kind of rollbacks and burdens are teachers going to be asked to carry in order to help make the corporate education profiteers happy (I mean, in order to improve student achievement?) Merit pay is certainly one of them. According to Kerchner, tying teacher evaluations to student achievement is a “settled issue,” (at least for the bosses.) The question is how to get the workers to buy into it. Kirchner says it will be part of the upcoming contract negotiations. Washington has already bought in, providing a few suggestions for an evaluation system that is differentiated to assess different levels of competency at different career states.

Apparently our teaching and curricula are now in crisis, too. Kirchner caught retired business executive and ambassador Frank Baxter saying “the system’s obsolete.” If we really do have a curricular crisis, then we will need a lot of new books, software, and support materials, which should make the publishers and tech companies very happy. This, of course, is the impetus for Common Core Standards, which is costing California $1.6 billion to implement. Baxter supports the blending of live teachers and computer-aided instruction (by which I think he means firing teachers and replacing them with computer-based lessons and subscription lectures—not the creation of cyborg teachers, which I would support, in hopes that they would get fed up with their exploitation and attack their masters, like Capek’s androids in RUR). Baxter’s plan would actually save the state money as computers and software are much cheaper than public service workers, especially when we factor in their Cadillac pay and benefits.

UTLA Presidential Election Headed to Runoff

Veteran UTLA leader (and Duffy crony) Julie Washington finished first in the race for president of United Teachers Los Angeles, but did not win enough votes to avoid a runoff. Washington, the outgoing vice president, won 44% of the vote. Warren Fletcher was second, with 37.3%. Turn out for the election was abysmal, with only 17% of members returning ballots, perhaps an indication of overall teacher disillusionment with the union.

Washington is seen by many LA teachers as a UTLA insider and part of the problem with the entrenched UTLA bureaucracy. LA teachers are facing a continuation of mass conversions of their schools to private charters, as well as teacher furloughs, mass layoffs, and attacks on seniority and collective bargaining. The Duffy/Weingarten administration, while making militant public statements against these attacks on teachers and students, did very little to mobilize teachers to take effective actions against these attacks. A Washington victory is seen by many as a continuation of UTLA impotence and irrelevance.