Diane Ravitch Is Wrong. Teachers Need to Hammer So Called "Union Leadership."

When Diane Ravitch, Saint Diane as I prefer to call her, admonishes us small folk for criticizing our so called union leaders she reveals a shockingly incongruous side of her persona many of our number simply choose to ignore. That someone so tuned into the machiavellian hijinks of the ed reform class, so articulate in her dissemination of the testing fetishists and so well informed on the big picture of the assault on public education could be so deadass wrong in advising chalkboard grunts to stand behind the likes of Weingarten and Lily strains credulity. In some perfect world where the labels are correct and all the lids fit she would be correct. But here on 2014landia that idealistic advice is about as useful as citing your pedestrian's right of way in a crosswalk at 4:30 on a Friday with an empty cement mixer headed back to the batch plant bearing down you. Your loved ones will wonder what made you suspend your disbelief. The right of way you believed was yours will get washed out with a hose like some 21st century turret ball gunner. St. Diane will not criticize Rhonda Weingarten. Nor will she abide critical remarks by chalkboard grunts. It causes division, she insists.
No, Diane, division is already well established. When a woman collecting over half a million annually on the backs of teachers consistently sides with corporate ed reformers like Bill Gates and defends an anti teacher, anti union pogrom like Common Core, she has divided herself very deliberately from the dopes who keep paying her to betray them. The division has already been cast and Randi Weingarten is its architect.
When teachers criticize her corporate friendly concession based version of unionism it divides nobody, nothing. This criticism only serves to address and recognize the divisions already perpetrated by Weingarten. To remain mute out of some misplaced sense of teacher omerta is to acquiesce to Weingarten's ceaseless penchant for selling out her constituency in order to further her own interests whatever the hell those might be. To refrain from criticizing her is to give tacit approval of her supporting CCSS, negotiating merit pay in Newark and standing onstage with Arne Duncan beaming an idiotic self serving mile wide grin. And call me a mind reader but about now I don't believe a whole lot of rank and file classroom grunts are in any hurry to stamp their endorsement on that kind of behavior. The quaint bygone notion that griping about lousy union representation is akin to biting the hand that feeds us belongs to some other era. This is about slapping the hand that keeps biting us and telling us it's for our own good. Weingarten's mealy mouthed 2 cheers for Arne Duncan -- see, everyone, I withheld a cheer?-- and her frothy support of CCSS are the most recent bite marks many of us are in no mood to overlook. When Newark's teachers were bogging down in negotiations Weingarten inserted herself into the mix. Here is the result:

If you step into a deal with a car dealer to help me out since I don't seem to be getting my way and the result is the car dealer telling anyone who will listen "This is the greatest day of my career" I have to believe you just sold me the f- out. Weingarten's handiwork in Newark is scurrilous. To go along with a merit pay scheme when there are dozens of studies over decades detailing its complete failure is not only Vichy Quisling leadership it's also completely fucking stupid. Anything to get the deal right Randi? Accent on anything...

The following is a comment I left on Jim Horn's SchoolsMatter.info blog. I was honored and surprised to see he found it worthy of converting into a separate post :

I think to take on St. Diane one must truly be uninvested in the business of advancing one's career outside of the classroom as a blogger, union hanger on, teacher book writer or any of the various forms of Celebucators we now see in this desperate scramble to cash in on the time spent as a classroom teacher. We have Teachers Speaking, we have Diontes Infernoing, we have BATS flapping and Schneider Schneidering her own with the best of them. It has come to me that none of our high profile Edufrontrunners are willing to call Ravitch out because they fear she or her minions could torpedo their book deal, union gig or spot on The Daily Show. After the putrid showings of NEA and AFT, electing another President who can't get over her Gatescrush and wagging a lawyerly finger at Arne Duncan -- I know people think Weingarten was a teacher but she's never been anything but a lawyer -- these self serving, Gates adoring Vichy Quisling union "leaders" have spit in the faces of their constituency yet again. If you listen to the only surviving union leader in captivity, that rare flower blooming in the manure fields of Rahm Emanuel's Chicago, she will tell you what makes CTU work. It's member driven. It's member driven. It's member driven. Period. NEA and AFT are contemptuous of their members. At AFT's convention it was noted by another eyes-wide-open member of CTU that teachers spoke against Common Core while Union insiders and "leadership" spoke in favor of it. What exactly is Diane Ravitch waiting for before she will acknowledge the turncoat elephant in the room and admit that our two biggest unions have abandoned us and are under the sheets with Gates, Murdoch, Koch, Blooomberg and anyone else with a checkbook who can fatten it by putting the wood to rank and file teachers? Why does she insist that we support these "leaders" who have done nothing but sell teachers out and shove us under the bus at every single turn? I aspire to last until retirement. I have no hopes for a book deal and aside from my mother I think I have about 4 readers of my blog. My local union is infested with slugs looking to worm their way into any gig that will cut down on their teaching time, my President did not even know what TFA was when the local paper asked his thoughts on welcoming them to our district. I am purely disinterested as it gets and I say it's time for Diane to do something courageous and call our union leadership out for the disreputable and disgraceful collaborations they've engaged in at teacher expense. As I plan to live til retirement however I am not holding my breath. Thanks for hitting some notes nobody wants to go near.