Weingarten and Van Roekel Represent the Antithesis of Social Justice Unionism

Bob Peterson has in interesting piece at Common Dreams on the need to move teachers' unions toward social justice principles and practices.  I could not agree more.

However, near the bottom of the piece, Peterson offers this fabrication, or thought disorder, claiming that Weingarten and Van Roekel represent and promote social justice:

Support for these types of move towards social justice unionism appears to be coming from the highest levels at both the NEA and AFT.

At the 2012 NEA Representative Assembly NEA Executive Director John Stocks called on members to become “social justice patriots.”  NEA President Dennis Van Roekel has promoted the Great Public School initiative that encourages unions to move in these progressive directions.

Randi Weingarten has been arrested protesting school closings in Philadelphia, and this past March she spoke at the newly formed Network for Public Education conference in Austin, Texas, during which she announced she would recommend that the AFT no longer accept money from the Gates Foundation.

Here is my brief response posted at Common Dreams:

Dennis van Roekel and Randi Weingarten are the greatest stumbling blocks to the kinds of social justice unionism that your piece would seem to advocate. Both of these misleaders support the central tenets of corporate education deform, including test based teacher evaluations and bonus pay, segregated charters, Common Core, and more intrusive data collection. With leaders like this selling teachers and public education down the river, who needs Bill Gates? Until the members of NEA and AFT dump the six-figure traitors that represent the antithesis of everything that social justice stands for, the national teachers' unions will remain part of the problem.

Can a Weingarten Stamp of Approval Mean Anything Good for NYC Teachers?

The saddest part of Randi Weingarten’s rainy day trip to Lake Placid to get some press press photos of her protesting at the DFER ed deform meeting is that the Misleaders of the AFT and NEA have endorsed most of the agenda of the hedge funders inside the meeting, whether it is bonus pay for test scores, teacher eval based on test scores, segregated corporate charter reform schools, and the Common Core. It’s all good with Randi and Dennis.

Joe Williams, head of DFER, has everything he needs from Randi and Dennis already. Why would he make them uncomfortable by putting down placemats for them at a meeting whose agenda the union misleadership has already endorsed? After all, Randi needs the pretense of supporting teachers and children as she goes about her business of trying to replace Cuomo with a corporate politician more to her liking.

See this for a teacher perspective from Newark, who is now living with a reality that Weingarten approved.