Four kinds of tenure, but who's counting

[NOTE: Small updates towards the end in blue print.]

For those who think Weingarten's ATR agreement with the DoE on the tenure issue has helped the profession much, think again.

While it's true that some ATRs might get placed in real jobs and some principals might get an incentive to hire them, there's a category of excessed members who aren't even included in this plan. In fact, they've blown some more buckshot at the contract and broken tenure up into categories. Like differentiated instruction.

Thanks a lot. This kind of collective bargaining is really for the birds.

Teachers get excessed in two ways, when a whole school gets shut down or when their positions are cut in schools that otherwise remain open. Central will pick up the tab for the first kind (school closings), but all the other kinds of ATRs will be paid for out of their school budgets. I don't know how many fall into each category, and I'm not sure the union does either. If they do, they're not saying.

What we have in this new agreement is an incentive to hire back one type of excessed vets, but not all. Don't you love it when equity in the union is not equity in the union?

Here, then, are the four tiers of tenure:

1. Tenured educators placed in a real position, paid out of the school's budget.

2. Tenured educators placed in a real position, paid in part by central for eight years. Principals get extra money the first year to sweeten the deal.

3. Tenured educators placed in a provisional position for a year, paid in part by central. They can be dropped at the end of the first year (regardless of seniority), but principal will get that extra cash if they keep them on permanently.

4. Tenured educators who remain ATRs, paid for by central or by the school. This is the least privileged category of tenure, and the thing is: your qualifications and years of service make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the vets are worse off, because two-for-the-price-one hiring still flourishes citywide.

Oh, yes. Did I tell you that Weingarten sabotaged her own rally yesterday? Well, it really wasn't her rally, because it's obvious she collaborated with Klein to diminish seniority rights. This rally was forced upon her when the Delegate Assembly voted for it some weeks ago. She must not have gotten her signals out to her Unity people quickly enough to stifle it, so it got voted in by accident and she had to go along with it.

She begged the organizers to call it off. Didn't work.

She scheduled an "informational" meeting for ATRs at the UFT HQ a half hour before the rally was supposed to start — two subway stops away, mind you.

She moved the time of the rally to 5 pm without telling the organizers.

She had people at the City Hall station telling people making their way to the rally to go down to the UFT instead.

And she served them wine and cheese down there, when — for solidarity's sake — they should have really been at Tweed.

And of course she kept the meeting running for a couple of hours, so there was no way anyone was going to get to Tweed to hear the enraged protests going on over there.

I also heard she put it to a vote, whether the people at her meeting wanted to walk over to the rally or not. A vote? They override the vote at the DA that demanded the rally be set up in the first place. Please tell me that's not true.

This is union-busting of the WORST kind. It came from union management.