UPDATE!!
After I posted this blog piece last Saturday, ICE's James Eterno provided some more commentary on the same LIF presentation. He was at the May 13th Delegate Assembly where grievance head Howard Solomon unveiled it to all and sundry.
I could not attend, but am thankful to James for taking the time to lay out the history of this ever-deepening giveback and show how UFT management is trying to spin the current contractual wording into gold.
It's another must-read on the ICE-blog. One of many.
Here's something on Letters to the File that union management has just made available to chapter leaders. I tried to access it without a password but couldn't.
I can't figure out why we all weren't allowed to see it. Is this stuff secret or something?
Maybe it's just too stupid. Making it available to everyone might be too embarrassing.
This presentation on LIFs is strategically useless. No fight to remove a letter from your file is going to make a principal click his heels in joy. There was a reason you got a LIF, and it probably has nothing to do with the kind of respect, professionalism, collaboration, improvement, or sound educational environment the contract seems to call for.
Principals are out to intimidate you, one by one and collectively. They've been trained and encouraged to do it, by a chancellor who has recently put out a presentation saying "Principals never lose," or words to that effect. Fight to get that letter out of your file and you'll continue to be on the principal's shitless, maybe even deeper than before.
Union management sold us out on the grievance process. They know it, we know it. The difference is that these bumblers keep getting a nice piece of our salaries and there's no way either to fine them for their crummy negotiations or get them out of office. The system is so rigged they can't be replaced without sinking a huge portion of your personal money into an election run.
So, here's what they've made available to chapter leaders, for what it's worth. (There are a few sample documents I've not included.)
Raise your hand if you think that will do any good.
Yes. And exactly how many people get their licenses taken away for such trivial items? In other words, so what. These are just tools to keep the troops in line. No one is going to lose a license over this stuff.
And have fun. You might get that meeting, but you won’t change the LIF.
What decade is union management living in? A response these days not only won't get you anywhere, but could possibly make the principal even more combative. After all, many of these newbie administrators are very inexperienced people. Some are not even educators, and most are not in this game for the kids. If you are a good writer, you can really get under their skin. If you are a poor writer, better not show anything you put on paper to an arbitrator. It will certainly color his opinion of you as an educator.
Why bother, or what’s so good about this? If you are incorrectly reprimanded for attendance, the letter in your file shows the principal, not the teacher, is in violation of the contract: you shouldn’t have gotten an LIF on attendance in the first place. If you’re found guilty of corporal or verbal abuse, the LIF is nothing compared to the charge itself, and if the charges are unsubstantiated, do you think filing a grievance to get your LIF on this removed from the file is going to endear you further to your principal? In most cases it's probably better to just let it rot there (thanks, RW) and take it out of your file when its time is up (3 years).
I have an idea.
Let's tell all those union management people — who just loved the idea of PD for all — to go get some PD for themselves. Maybe even an internship for a year in a real school.
We're up against an army of corpocrats and their generals, people who seek power for power's sake. Union management doesn't have a clue about the reality of what we're dealing with. If I'm wrong and they do, their band-aid approach to this abuse is stunningly anemic, or . . . they're collaborating big-time.
ADDENDUM:
Pissed On asked what I left out (that's so cute, a guide to how to give up tenure), so here's a sample of one of the last pages:
It's getting harder and harder to listen to Weingarten plod through her President's Report at the Delegates Assembly each month just to eat up time.
Because that's what it's all about: eating up time — so she doesn't have to deal with any tiresome member complaints and horror stories coming from the chapters.
Weingarten could say everything she has to say and still have loads of time left if she'd just write it all down for us let us read it. 5 minutes, 10 at most. Not the hour we have to sit listening to her, and listening to all the puppets she puts up to convince us she's doing a great job fighting the fight. Ho very hum.
The only way to get through her reports is to keep track of some of the crazy things she says, which is what I did at yesterday's meeting.According to Weingarten, the UFT is the "voice for the voiceless." Yes, she says, she's "out to protect our money," but the UFT is also the "safety net for the most vulnerable."
Silly me, I didn't know I was paying dues so that she or the union could be a "voice for the voiceless" or a "safety net" for the most vulnerable. I thought my dues were for some job protections.
[ALERT: There's a new Norm's comment in the comments. He's right, of course.]
Come to think of it, though, if anyone is the most vulnerable at this point, it's the veteran teachers and the probationers, and I can't see how the UFT is being a voice or a safety net for any of these people. Weingarten also said it's the main job (or most important job) of the union to protect children. If someone wrote down those exact words, I'd love to have them verbatim. It's hard for me to believe she hasn't yet figured out what her main job is as president of a teachers' union.Weingarten then tried to say that her goal is to be the person whom BloomKlein and the rest of the politicians "can focus their ire on," instead of the members.
Cracky. Ask any ATR, any maligned chapter leader, or any of the many members in the rubber room for no cause if they feel BloomKlein is focusing its ire on Randi Weingarten. Most of us think she's making deals with them all the time. And if you need proof of that, look how many times we hear about something way down the line when it's no turning back and the delegates so-called voice is just a rubber stamp.Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but Weingarten seemed never to have heard of TAGNYC — the Teachers Advocacy Group NYC — since she referred to it as an "organization called TAGNY," and pronouncing it Tag-nee.
TAGNYC is one of the most articulate teacher activist groups in the union, and for starters, you can read the testimony they put into the record at the recent Mayoral Control hearings. If she meant the TAGNYC I think she meant and mispronounced its name, it speaks volumes about her callousness towards the members.In response to a complaint that older teachers are being really hurt and marginalized, Weingarten responded professorially: Well, this kind of thing is going on across all professions nationwide.
Trouble is we're not looking for a sociology lesson here. Compassion would be far more appropriate. Steaming mad would be the best — angry enough to really go to the mat for us.
A person behind me rightly remarked at this point that if such a trend for youth existed and that's all Weingarten had to say about it, maybe the president of this union should be replaced by a 25-year-old. In response to a complaint about not being able to remove Letters in the File by grievance, Weingarten said she couldn't think of a single substantive thing that couldn't be changed with the Todd Friedman arbitration.
Darn it. And I thought she actually knew about the lies being allowed to fester in teachers' files. Surely she knows there's no vehicle to get these malicious letters removed, and surely she knows that once upon a time when we did have the right to grieve these things, principals tended to use their power of the pen a bit more judiciously. No one's saying the Todd Friedman arbitration hasn't done some good, but it only works when you can attack a contractual violation. Then part of the remedy is to remove the offending LIF. But I'd venture to say most LIFs these days contain a potpourri of misstatements, distortions and downright lies. There's no way we'll be getting these out any time soon.
If anyone has any more of these RW "messages" from yesterday's DA, I'd love to keep a record of what we're dealing with here.
And I'm starting to get why she doesn't ever put her President's Reports in writing. Who'd want this doublespeak out in the public domain.
[For a full report on yesterday's DA, read James Eterno's detailed account on the ICE blog.]
Raise your hand if you think that will do any good.
Yes. And exactly how many people get their licenses taken away for such trivial items? In other words, so what. These are just tools to keep the troops in line. No one is going to lose a license over this stuff.
And have fun. You might get that meeting, but you won’t change the LIF.
What decade is union management living in? A response these days not only won't get you anywhere, but could possibly make the principal even more combative. After all, many of these newbie administrators are very inexperienced people. Some are not even educators, and most are not in this game for the kids. If you are a good writer, you can really get under their skin. If you are a poor writer, better not show anything you put on paper to an arbitrator. It will certainly color his opinion of you as an educator.
