Anger at UFT Building (Significant because NYC's UFT is the linchpin of control for AFT)

The UFT leadership are a smug bunch. They've been in power for a long time and the swagger they exhibit whenever they deign to come and talk to the rank and file makes me think that they think they're going to be in power for a lot longer... but I got an eye-opening look into something this week that I haven't seen much of in my 12 years as a UFT member - genuine outrage, anger and frustration aimed at the UFT leadership.

I graded Regents exams this week with teachers from a dozen different schools around Manhattan. Many of them expressed outrage over the DOE, anger at Bloomberg and Walcott...over the latest ed deforms that are wreaking havoc across the system. But there was also a lot of fire and brimstone aimed at Mulgrew and the UFT leadership for their collaboration with the deform movement and the DOE.

One teacher said, as we were talking about all the ways the UFT has caved to Bloomberg and the DOE since the infamous 2005 contract, "I can't think of one thing that they've really said no too that ended up really being no." And it's true - they say there's too much emphasis on high stakes testing, but then they help develop the APPR system; they give the okay on the Teacher Data Reports with the assurance that the numbers will never see the light of day in public and when the DOE decides to publish them in the media, they half-heartedly fight that with ineffective lawsuits and the TDR's end up in the papers with names attached.

One teacher, now working in high school but then working in a middle school said "I can't tell you how angry that made me, when they published the Teacher Data Reports - angry at Bloomberg for doing it and angry at the union for not stopping him from doing it." Someone else told a story about working in one of the SIG schools and how unhelpful and indeed toxic the union people were, almost as unhelpful and toxic as the DOE and network people were during the turnaround battles..."the union people never really want to hear from you. They want you to listen to them, not the other way around. And that makes me really, really angry. Why am I paying union dues? What am I getting out of this...?"

My sense is that Mulgrew and his Unity hacks think they can bullshit their way through the APPR fallout just the way they have bullshitted their way through the odious '05 contract and the '07 extension... all the closings and the turnarounds, the TDR reports and the naming of names in the papers, and now the evaluation negotiations... But the anger, outrage and frustration I saw at the grading sessions this week leads me to believe that the UFT leadership will have a harder time bullshitting their way through the APPR fallout than they have over the other stuff in the past.

First, because all this stuff has built up...second, because we are now seeing anger, outrage and frustration aimed at the UFT leadership from teachers who used to be pretty apolitical folk but have found themselves politicized by the crimes perpetrated on them by the Tweedies that the UFT either ignored or couldn't do anything about.... I think after a year or two (of more) devastation, the anger, outrage and frustration at the smug, swaggering Unity guys is going to be at a fever pitch and that will give some new blood - hopefully MORE - a real opening to do to Unity what CORE did to the entrenched CTU leadership.

http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/2013/01/anger-at-uft-leadership-is-building-in.html

According to several bloggers I read, UFT is the linchpin of the Unity Caucus's power over AFT (Unity being the caucus that's run AFT for something like 50 years).

It would sure be nice if there was a rebellion in NYC on the scale of what happened in chicago.

MORE is a caucus that wants to overturn Unity.

http://morecaucusnyc.org/