Weingarten Takes a Dive for Capitalism

Last week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers (AFT) boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

The problem is that there is nothing immoral about it. While the majority of schools to be closed are in low income communities of color, the motivation to close them is not wicked, sinful, nor is the goal to harm poor black kids. Rather, the proponents are capitalists exploiting an essentially legal method to crush the Philadelphia teachers union and transfer public K-12 tax dollars to private charters and online schools. Calling it an immoral act merely obfuscates the financial motives (and legal methods) behind it, undermining teachers’, parents’ and students’ ability to successfully resist it.

Another problem is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is essentially just a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school) and BCG members serve on numerous other KIPP boards, as well. Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education and stands to profit handsomely from the closures by offering online courses to students displaced by the closures.

Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt, as well as hedge fund manager and Democrats for Education Reform[er] Whitney Tilson—all cheerleaders for charter schools and teachers’ union-busting. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

BCG was also hired by the Transition Planning Committee (TPC) of Memphis to oversee their mass transfer of students out of the public school system and into private charter schools and has been involved in the post-Katrina plundering of the New Orleans school system, as well as pro-charter and anti-teachers’ union activities in Cleveland, Seattle, Chicago and Dallas. According to Diane Ravitch, their goal in Memphis is to increase charter enrollment from 4% to 19% of all students by 2016, which will effectively transfer $212 million from the public school budget to private charter schools.

Union-Sanctioned Union-Busting

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has lost thousands, more. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist in the first place, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has. An occasional high profile arrest, while doing nothing to improve teachers’ job security, working conditions or compensation, does help boost union bosses’ street credibility by making them look like tough, self-sacrificing fighters, rather than parasites.

 
In order to keep members in line (and maintain the good graces of the ruling elite), union leaders need to convince the rank and file that alternatives to strikes and other job actions will be effective. In the case of the Wisconsin state house occupation, the unions argued that they could best reverse their state’s union-busting legislation at the ballot box and convinced everyone to go home.

In the case of Philadelphia’s school closings, Weingarten has similarly distorted the issue, ignoring the impact on job security and collective bargaining power and focusing on political corruption. She described events in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy (an immoral act?)—a politically popular concept that is likely to appeal to community members’ sense of patriotism, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs or stop the closures. Indeed, if the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions.

Why Weingarten Got Arrested

This week, Valarie Strauss (Answer Sheet) interviewed American Federation of Teachers boss Randi Weingarten about why she went to Philadelphia and got arrested. Weingarten correctly noted that the people of Philadelphia, who had asked for a one-year moratorium on school closures, have been repeatedly ignored by the mayor. She also correctly pointed out that the push to close the schools is largely the initiative of the mayor, governor, the city’s School Reform Commission (SRC) and an outside consulting firm, Boston Consulting Group (BCG). “When the powers that be ignore you, and dismiss you,” she told Strauss, “then you have no other choice than to resort to civil disobedience to confront an immoral act.”

What Weingarten did not say was why they want to close dozens of schools (i.e., open up space for private charter schools to set up shop) or whether she was planning on engaging in ongoing civil disobedience to achieve her goals. The fact is that a single arrest at one high profile public meeting is nothing more than a publicity stunt. It is not an organized or effective strategy for reversing a large-scale public giveaway to private business.

One justification for the closures is the school district’s perennial budget problems. Yet the district voted to spend $1.4 million to hire BCG, according to Workers World. BCG Partner Sanjeev Midha is a trustee for KIPP Philadelphia (an online charter school). Not surprisingly, BCG promotes online education. Other BCG alumni include Mitt Romney, Benjamin Netanyahu, hedge fund manager John Paulson, and GE CEO Jeff Immelt. SRC members include Feather Houstoun, a former president of the William Penn Foundation (which donated additional money to hire BCG) and Pedro Ramos, who currently sits on the board of the United Way (which also coughed up funds to hire BCG).

If the school closures go through, the district will lose dozens union jobs. According, to National Educators Association president Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA, alone, has lost 150,000 unionized teaching jobs over the last three years. The AFT has no doubt lost thousands, as well. If Weingarten wants to save her own job (and her more than $600,000 per year income) she needs to maintain membership levels, not let them shrink further. However, to do this requires mobilizing Philadelphia’s teachers, who are affiliated with the AFT, to do far more than protest at school board meetings. They need to engage in concerted and ongoing job actions and civil disobedience, something neither Weingarten nor any other major union leader wants to do.

The paradox is that while union bosses depend on their members’ dues to pay their salaries, they depend on the good graces of the ruling elite to exist at all, graces that have been granted to them in exchange for keeping the system running smoothly. The quid pro quo is that if they keep their members quiescent and on the job, the unions are tolerated and minor concessions are sometimes granted them. The bosses will even tolerate the occasional angry rant, arrest or otherwise uncivilized act by union leaders if it helps them to keep the rabble in line. Consequently, union leaders have been relying more and more on legal and political action than on strikes and other job actions, a strategy that has, at best, merely kept the decline in union membership from occurring any faster than it has.

 
Weingarten described her action in Philadelphia as a strong “statement” that the mayor, governor and SRC are not on the side of the people. In other words, the school closures are an attack on democracy, which is a politically popular concept, but not one that is likely to save teachers’ jobs. If the problem is merely the product of bad politics, as she has implied, then the solution is supposedly to fight back in the political arena, thus squelching any movement for workplace actions. 

Ultimately, Weingarten's got arrested because she needed to look tough to her constituents. It was a relatively painless and cheap way to win points among parents and teachers, but not an effective strategy for ending the school closures or saving union jobs.

The AFT is Finally Fighting Testing (Not)

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is expanding its drive “against excessive testing” with a pithy and pathetic new campaign called “Learning Is More Than a Test Score.”

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the campaign is intended to de-emphasize testing and bring back arts and physical education. However, according to the Washington Examiner, she conceded (as she has always done) that testing has a crucial role to play. Indeed, Weingarten has supported legislation and helped broker contracts with school districts that promote the use of student test data to evaluate teachers (see here, here, here, here and here).

The AFT is not really opposed to high stakes tests. The name of the campaign, “Learning is More Than a Test Score,” implies that the union accepts the tests as one aspect of learning, while its reference to “excessive” testing implies that it simply wants less of it. Either way, the union has accepted the inaccurate and discredited assertion that high stakes tests improve learning outcomes and capitulated to the corporate education “reformers” attempt to rationalize and profit from public education (i.e., testing is big business for the test and textbook publishers).

From a purely selfish perspective (the only perspective a fighting union should take since its purpose is supposedly to improve the working and living conditions of its members), all high stakes tests should be opposed since they can only tell us how well students answer multiple choice questions compared with their peers, under timed and stressful conditions—not where, when or how they learned to do this. The fact that test scores (and student achievement) correlate more strongly with students’ socioeconomic backgrounds than with teaching ability (see here, here and here) should draw into question their validity as a measure of teacher skill in the classroom. Furthermore, the data show that the tests cannot an accurately or consistently measure performance for the majority of teachers and may only be accurate for those at the extremes, and only if averaged out over three years—something that is rarely done.

However, even from the perspective of a public servant (the perspective usually taken by the unions, since they are terrified of being accused of putting their own wellbeing above that of their students), the tests should be opposed. Test administration takes considerable class time away from actual learning (as much as 2-6 weeks, depending on the school). The drastic consequences for schools compels many to sacrifice even more class time for test preparation, sometimes even to the extent of slashing entire programs (e.g., physical education, art, music, science). The tests are stressful and anxiety-provoking for children, yet serve no educational purpose (i.e., children cannot learn anything useful from the tests). They also make school seem even more boring and meaningless, contributing to students’ sense of alienation from learning and disdain for school.

Even from a taxpayers’ perspective all tests should be opposed, as they cost billions of dollars and suck revenue out of the classroom, where it can benefit children, handing it over to test and textbook publishers. In California, alone, it is estimated that the new Common Core Standards (CCS) exams will cost $1 billion to implement (most of it going toward new books, test design, and computers and software to administer the tests). Yet there is no evidence that any high stakes standardized test has improved learning.

Indeed, the real impetus behind the testing mania is corporate profits, not improving the learning or wellbeing of children. In California, where $20 billion has been slashed from K-12 education over the past 4 years, the state Board of Education voted to adopt the CCS two years ago, knowing even then that it would cost more than $1 billion and that the state would have to borrow or slash further to get the money. Yet California already had among the toughest standards in the nation. There was no educational benefit from changing the standards, no potential for it to significantly improve learning, graduation rates or the achievement gap.

To a rational, fiscally conservative person, no need plus no money should have equaled no new test. Instead, heavy lobbying by the educational publishers convinced the board to spend money it did not have on a test it did not need, thus further impoverishing California’s schools. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, with Governor Jerry Brown’s supposedly balanced budget and promise not to make any further cuts in K-12 funding. (Proposition 30, while doing nothing to restore the $20 billion cut over the past 4 years, was supposed to hold K-12 funding steady, but it is not yet clear whether the cost of CCS has been factored in).

More is Less?

Rather than opposing more testing, AFT and NEA have come out in support of CCS (see here), arguing that the CCS tests will be better and more meaningful than the previous ones, even though the tests have not yet been created and it is impossible to know how they might differ. By most accounts, though, the new CCS exams will not significantly decrease the amount of class time lost to testing, anxiety for children, pressure on schools to improve at all costs, or cuts to “nonacademic” programs.

To be fair, the AFT has made a statement in support of Seattle’s Garfield High School teachers who are boycotting Washington’s MAP test. This is a unique and positive step, as neither the AFT nor the NEA have supported this kind of teacher civil disobedience in the past. The unions’ historical perspective has been that this is tantamount to insubordination and failure to fulfill one’s job responsibilities—thus administrators would be justified in disciplining them. On the other hand, the AFT is not providing any material, logistical or tangible support, nor are they promoting similar boycotts or civil disobedience elsewhere—actions that would be necessary if they really want to see an end to the testing mania.

Will Bar Exam Turn Teachers Into Shysters?

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has launched a new initiative to raise entry standards for teacher-preparation programs, calling it a “bar exam” for teachers. My first thought on hearing the news was that they were trying to turn us into shysters, but then I remembered that we are already considered disreputable and unscrupulous by much of the public.

What's black and tan and looks good around a teacher's neck? A doberman!

So how will the bar exam change matters?

The AFT and its bigger sister, the National Education Association (NEA) have both been tripping over each other to prove to the public that they accept and intend to remedy every criticism made against teachers and their unions. This has included a tacit acceptance of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its testing mania, as well as evaluation reform and Value-Added models for assessing teachers.

So when the free market “reformists” insisted that there were too many incompetent teachers out there, it was only natural that the teachers’ two largest unions should jump to defend their members by conceding that it has just been too damned easy to become a teacher up until now, and new, more stringent entry requirements were necessary to protect our precious children.

Of course there are significant differences between lawyers and teachers which make this metaphor just plain silly.

For one, lawyers stand to make anywhere from two to several hundred times more than teachers, thus providing the incentive to spend thousands of dollars on tutoring and training courses to help them pass their tough bar exam. With teacher pay abysmally low and working conditions deteriorating daily, why should anyone want to invest the time and money into a professional teaching degree, as well as training for the tougher new test, when it could cost them years of debt and all the stress and anxiety that accompany the job?

Another consideration is that it costs society little if an aspiring law student fails the bar exam. Even if s/he retakes the exam and repeatedly fails it, it simply means one less lawyer. Last I heard, there was no shortage of lawyers, particularly if one has the money to hire one. But a “bar exam” for teachers implies lots of failure, which could easily translate into a significant teacher shortage. The number of students will not magically decline in unison, so class sizes will necessarily rise, while many students will find themselves being taught by non-credentialed, long-term substitutes. Thus, rather than improving the quality of teachers for greater numbers of students, a “bar exam” for teachers could wind up causing more students to have mediocre or lousy teachers and greater competition for help from the good teachers.

Of course, my criticisms are only valid if the AFT’s new exams truly are as difficult as actual state bar exams, which can have failure rates as high as 30-50% (see here and here). While it remains to be seen how challenging these exams will be, the AFT is also calling for teaching candidates to have 3.0 GPAs and higher scores on college entrance exams, in order to get into teaching programs in the first place. This could significantly reduce the number of people eligible for credential programs, or encourage them to get their undergraduate degrees from degree mills and less rigorous universities. This would further reduce the number of high quality entry level teachers.

AFT President Randi Weingarten, a woman who earns over $600,000 year NOT working the classroom, said, "It's time to do away with a common rite of passage into the teaching profession—whereby newly minted teachers are tossed the keys to their classrooms, expected to figure things out, and left to see if they and their students sink or swim.” (From Ed Week)

Her comments show a great deal of ignorance and disdain for teachers who act as mentors and master teachers to help novice teachers find their feet and grow professionally. Indeed, there is only so much a teaching candidate can gain from a university classroom—the rest must be learned in front of a K-12 classroom, through student teaching, peer observations and actual practice. It is absurd to think that any teaching program or high stakes test can produce a cadre of perfectly molded teacher droids.

Could more stringent requirements work in the favor of existing teachers? If the AFT’s proposed reforms are adopted, it would almost certainly create a teacher shortage. Theoretically, this could drive demands for higher wages, as districts compete more aggressively for fewer qualified applicants. In reality, however, it seems unlikely that districts, states or the federal government will pony up the money to pay teachers enough to make the new requirements worth their trouble. If budgets continue to be anemic, teachers’ salaries are most likely to remain stagnant, regardless of any future shortage.

The AFT’s proposal is yet another lousy solution to an imaginary problem. Sure, beginning teachers say they feel unprepared to start teaching. However, this is not because they didn’t have to pass a tough test. It is because keeping a bunch of kids focused, motivated and interested in the subject matter is no easy task. Getting them to behave and show respect for you and themselves is equally challenging. No exam can prepare a teacher adequately for this.

On the other hand, one might wonder why a union is focusing on making it tougher to become a member. Isn’t the job of unions to protect the interests of their members? Does the AFT believe that teachers who have jumped all these new hurdles and made it as teachers will somehow win the respect of Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee, not to mention comfortable salaries and better funding and support for the classroom needs?

No amount of obsequiousness and self-blame will get the free market education reformers to back off, give up their privatization schemes, or cease their union busting.

Chicago Teachers Vote to Continue Strike

Huck/Konopacki Labor Cartoons

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) House of Delegates voted Sunday to reject the latest contract proposal and continue their strike, in a challenge to both the leadership of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the leadership of their own union, who had negotiated the tentative agreement.

The leadership of CTU is seen by many as a progressive, fighting leadership, willing to go toe to toe with their powerful parent organization, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), led by Randi Weingarten, as well as powerful Democratic Party leaders like Rahm Emanuel and even President Obama. Indeed, the CTU leadership challenged all of these individuals with their initial rejection of the use of student test scores to evaluate teachers.

Yet their most recent compromise tentative contract agreement with CPS sold their members out by permitting student test data to account for as much as 30% of teachers’ evaluations, the WSWS reported today. Any use of student test data is unacceptable, even as little as 1%, because student test data is an unreliable and inconsistent proxy for teacher ability. It can lead to false positives and false negatives, and result in good teachers getting bad reviews and possibly even laid off as a result.

The tentative agreement also gives principals considerable discretion over hiring, eviscerating recall rights for recently laid off teachers, while also slashing layoff benefits in half. (The details of agreement were released Sunday evening).

Bargaining teams and unions often justify compromises with bosses or legislators that harm former or future employees, arguing that their role is to protect the interests of their existing dues-paying members. Not only does this strategy lack compassion, it is also stupid since it undermines the union’s own power. Thousands more Chicago teachers will be laid off in the next five years under the city’s plan to shut down up to 120 schools, resulting in fewer union members. Of those who get rehired by one of the 60 new privately-run charter schools slated to open in that time, most, if not all, will lose union representation.

In an indication of just how far the CTU leadership is willing to go to end the strike and make peace with the bosses, CTU President Karen Lewis plans to force through another vote on the same tentative agreement this Tuesday, without engaging in any further negotiations with CPS. This implies that she intends to ignore the delegates’ concerns and criticisms of the tentative agreement and pressure them to vote against their members’ own interests. She is counting on mounting criticism by the press and the threat of fines and jail to coerce delegates into accepting a bad deal.

Mayor Emanuel responded to the rejection vote by threatening court action against the teachers. According to the WSWS, he said he would “not stand by while the children of Chicago are played as pawns in an internal dispute within a union,” implying that both CPS and the union leadership are the only reasonable parties in the dispute, while the House of Delegates and general membership are crazy for rejecting the tentative agreement. His threat to obtain a court injunction against the teachers suggests that he has lost faith in CTU President Karen Lewis’ ability to keep her members in line.

Emanuel has called the strike illegal (teachers in Illinois can strike on wage issues, but not evaluations) and a threat to the safety of children. This latter argument is particularly cynical considering the district has done little to repair dilapidated facilities and broken air conditioning or to reduce class sizes to a safe and healthy level. He has overseen and encouraged school closures that have only exacerbated staffing and class size problems, thus jeopardizing the safety of children.

His argument that the strike is illegal is only partly true. They are striking over wages, and they happen to be unwilling to make any compromises on that issue as long as the district plays hardball on other working conditions and safety matters.

The issue of the strike’s legality has much broader significance. The ruling class can take away workers’ rights any time they think they can get away with it, as they did in Wisconsin and continue to attempt throughout the nation. Workers’ power lies entirely in their ability to withhold their labor, not in making alliances and compromises with politicians, particularly considering that the politicians are members of the ruling class and have far more in common with other wealthy members of the ruling elite than they do with workers.

Not long ago, unions had no legal standing and any strike could be declared illegal. Workers were often imprisoned, beaten or killed for participating in strikes, yet they continued to use this tactic and win improvements in working conditions. Workers today have the choice to disobey unjust laws and resist oppressive demands by their bosses or continue to see their wages and working conditions deteriorate.

Unions today, however, have a great distaste for strikes and the risks they entail. There have been very few large teacher strikes in the last few decades. The CTU strike is unique in this respect. Still, the CTU leadership has an interest in ending the strike quickly. The leaders do not want to spend time in jail or receive fines or lose their status and influence. They do not want to challenge unjust laws or corporate giveaways or the district’s “right” to shut down schools and give them away to private charter school operators, even if these undermine the union’s power in the long term. Furthermore, they do not want to burn their bridges with their allies in the Democratic Party or their parent organization, the AFT, even if that means accepting less power as a result of privatization and layoffs.

More Testing for Teachers?

This week, Good Education asked, “Do We Need a 'Bar Exam' For Teachers?”

Of course this is completely absurd. While exams are very good at determining whether one remembers a bunch of arcane regulations, rules and laws, teachers do not need to know this kind of stuff. On the other hand, teachers already have to pass relatively challenging comprehensive high stakes exams in most states to demonstrate their content knowledge. More importantly, the things that matter most in education (e.g., ability to build a positive rapport with students, design and implement creative and engaging lesson plans, create a safe and supportive learning environment) are difficult or impossible to assess by means of a pen and paper exam.

According to Good Education, American Federation of Teachers president, Randi Weingharten, recently suggested that implementing a “bar exam” for prospective teachers might improve the quality and status of American teachers. To her credit, when challenged on her proposal, Weingarten clarified that she meant more than a multiple choice exam and suggested some sort of “clinical” test, which presumably could include observations of student and or probationary teachers.

While such an exam could conceivably be designed and implemented in such a way that prospective teachers were objectively assessed for their skill in front of students, the likelihood of this occurring is very slim in the current climate of punitive education reform and general defunding of public education. There just simply isn’t the money to train and hire sufficient objective 3^rd-party evaluators to make these classroom observations.

Leaving it to site administrators is certainly possible—it would merely be an extension of their existing evaluation responsibilities. The problem here is that most administrators already lack the time and training to do this well and, as the executives of their respective schools, they have an inherent bias that could undermine prospective teachers’ chances of earning their credentials or compels some to substitute what they think their administrators want for good teaching methods.

Perhaps most significant in this debate is not the way such an exam would be designed or implemented, but the presumption that making it harder to become a teacher will somehow get the Ed Deformers to back off and take us more seriously.

The attacks on teachers have virtually no basis in any factual or real deficit in the profession. Rather, they are exaggerations and fabrications designed to muster public support for preconceived profit-making schemes. For example, “tenure and seniority protect bad teachers,” is a popularly-believed but inaccurate statement designed to rally support for abolishing tenure and seniority, which itself is intended to weaken union protections and the unions themselves. Weakening or destroying the teachers unions indirectly weakens the union movement as the public sector is one of the few remaining sectors of the economy that still has many unionized workers.

Making it tougher to become a teacher will not change this. The corporate education profiteers will continue to find new ways to make a buck off of public education and they will continue to see the teachers and their unions as the biggest obstacle, using whatever propaganda necessary to achieve their aims. This will almost certainly continue to include the denigration of teachers and the profession.

Who Needs Tenure? Who Needs Green Dot?

The new contract between New York's United Federation of Teachers and Green Dot, the California-based charter school operator, offers teachers no tenure or seniority-based layoffs, according to Gotham Schools. Green Dot NY teacher evaluations will be based 20% on student standardized test scores and 20% on other measures of student academic growth.

Dana Goldstein (lady wonk) sees this as a model for teacher contracts of the future, assuming that teachers are well-trained and allowed to participate in the administration of their schools. She sees Green Dot as a “healthy” environment that emphasizes collegiality and professionalism and that has little “administrative overreach.” Randi Weingarten told her that she could envision entire districts based on Green Dot-like contracts.

The problem is that even if it was true that Green Dot was a “healthy” work environment that truly valued collegiality and professionalism, there would necessarily still be an adversarial relationship between management and employees, as there necessarily is in all workplaces. As long as someone else is in charge of one’s income, working conditions and job security, the relationship is exploitative and adversarial by definition.

Forgetting (or denying) this is asking to be walked all over. Without tenure, seniority, or other job protections, teachers at Green Dot can be fired or disciplined for almost any reason, like at non-unionized charter schools, including organizing or taking job actions to defend their contract or fight for a better one.

The other problem is that Green Dot is not a “healthy” work environment that values its employees. It is a private, for-profit enterprise whose entire raison d’etre is to maximize profits. They do this by exploiting teachers, paying them as little and working them as hard as possible. They cannot afford to give teachers any real autonomy or authority and will inevitably try to impose policies that are detrimental to students’ and teachers’ wellbeing. Without tenure and seniority protections, teachers are far less likely to challenge such policies, no matter how “collegial” or “professional” the environment.

Let’s not forget that Green Dot was behind the intimidation campaign in Compton by the astro-turf Parent Revolution. Green Dot has been sucking millions of dollars from cash-strapped public schools in Los Angeles and elsewhere, with some of its schools performing so poorly they have gone under. They have surrounded some of their schools with private thugs who have pepper sprayed students.

In short, Green Dot is a dysfunctional and dangerous work environment, not a “healthy” environment to which teachers should aspire. And Weingarten and UFT are collaborationist sellouts—unhealthy for teachers.