New York City Teachers Stand Up for ATRs

Part of the demonstration outside NYCDOE headquarters, Nov. 24.

By UFTers in Class Struggle Education Workers

Hundreds of New York City teachers and supporters rallied at the headquarters of the New York City Department of Education headquarters at Tweed Courthouse on November 24. They were protesting the DOE offensive, echoed by the media, against 1,500 teachers placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool due to the endless school “reorganizations” ordered from Tweed. Another 100+ first-year Teaching Fellows faced dismissal by December 5 if they do not find positions. (As a result of a grievance filed by the union, this deadline was pushed back to the beginning of February 2009.)

The teacher bashing is ultimately in the service of union-busting, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein take aim at teacher tenure. Those placed in ATR status include some of the most experienced and dedicated teachers in the system. This is no accident. Klein wants these teachers “terminated,” as he put it. Partly it’s to save bucks, so they can hire two beginning teachers for the price of one senior teacher. Partly, Klein wants to pit senior teachers and newer teachers against each other, just like he wants to foster “competition” between teachers with so-called “merit pay.” And in large part, it is to uphold the corporate principle that the principals run the school and can hire whomever they want, seniority and tenure be damned. That is, until “underperforming” principals as well get axed by the management “experts” at Tweed who know nothing of education.

An Ad Hoc Committee to Defend ATRs was set up last September following the DOE/media threats against these teachers. The Committee issued a fact sheet that was widely distributed around the system, and launched a petition campaign calling on the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) to hold a citywide union mobilization to defend the ATRed colleagues. Hundreds of teachers at more than 100 schools signed the petitions. As a result of this work, the UFT agreed at its October 15 Delegate Assembly to sponsor a rally to show support for ATRS and demand that no new hiring take place until ATRs receive permanent placements.

However, seeking to undercut the mobilization, which it only reluctantly agreed to in the first place, a few days before the rally the UFT and DOE signed a side agreement to encourage, but not require, the placement of ATR teachers. On the day of the rally the UFT leadership held an “informational session” at union offices to explain the side agreement, and even stationed some flunkeys at Broadway and Chambers to re-route arriving teachers away from the rally. But despite this active sabotage, as the UFT tops were sipping wine and munching cheese at 52 Broadway while patting themselves on the back for their “victory,” some 225 teachers rallied in support of the ATRs at Tweed Courthouse. After 1 hour and 45 minutes, the suits finally arrived.

It was a real teacher rebellion. Numerous teachers, social workers, counselors, school staff and supporters spoke from the open mike about their ideas, their stories, their struggle. Every single person who came played an important role in building it at their schools, their committees, and among their friends. Speakers said that while hopefully some ATRed teachers will get positions from the agreement, it does not change the basic structure, which continually produces hundreds of new ATRs, as the DOE keeps shutting down schools, its favorite ploy to shirk responsibility for its own failure to improve education. The demonstrators vowed to continue to struggle for a job freeze until all ATRs who want them have positions.

When the UFT leaders showed up around 6:15 p.m. along with several dozen rank and file UFTers, the demonstrators started a spirited march around the DOE/Tweed Courthouse chanting. Facing shouted objections when she started to start the "official rally" while the march was underway, UFT president Randi Weingarten waited until they returned from the walkaround. After she had spoken, a request was made that Marjorie Stamberg of the ATR support committee be allowed to speak. This was angrily refused. Teachers started chanting to let Stamberg speak, and finally Weingarten had to agree. So the message of the rally was gotten out again, that it was grass-roots organizing in the schools that built this rally, and we need to keep up the struggle.

There were many chants and shouts of “Bring Back Seniority” directed at the Unity leadership--an understanding that it was the sellout of the 2005 contract which has in good part led to this mess we're in. After awhile, when the leadership kept repeating “Let Teachers Teach,” the crowd chanted back, "Place ATRs!"

At the speak-out, which lasted for well over an hour, there were many powerful voices. One of the first speakers was Dr. Lezanne Edmond, Ph.D. in education, literacy specialist and an ATR! She said "we have to stop making education a business and get back to the business of education." Among the speakers were John Lawhead from Tilden High School in Brooklyn, where they have lost many ATRs; Robert Bobrick who came with a group of teachers and students from Lafayette High School; Michael Fiorillo, chapter leader at Newcomers HS, colleagues from the “rubber room;” Christine Grassman from GED-Plus; Angela DeSouza from TAGNY, Keith Brooks from Restart. Dan Feldman spoke from the Teaching Fellows.

There were speakers from ICE (Independent Community of Educators), Teachers for a Just Contract, Progressive Labor Party, the Class Struggle Education Workers (CSEW), a student from the CUNY Internationalist Clubs, the Support Committee for the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR), and others. Everybody wanted to talk, and did. There was a class of 30 students with their teacher from the Harry Van Arsdale Labor Studies Program at SUNY, who came to observe labor struggle in action.

At the speak-out, and again from the UFT bullhorn, Marjorie Stamberg of the CSEW called to “smash the Taylor Law” which keeps us from exercising labors powerful weapon – the strike. The main way the labor bureaucracy ties workers to the bosses is through what Daniel De Leon called “the labor lieutenants of capital.” We need a class- struggle leadership, a break from the Democrats and Republicans, and a workers party and workers government, she concluded.

The union leadership wanted to have at most a celebration of their side agreement. Hundreds of union rank and filers showed they were determined to keep up the struggle, not just for the ATRs but against all the anti-union attacks coming down the pike in this economic crisis. There is a lot of work to do, but November 24 was a great beginning.

After November 24...

After November 24…
(A Contribution to the Discussion)

Recent postings by Angel Gonzalez and Sean Ahern underscore a broader discussion that has gained force in the wake of our successful demonstration in defense of teachers being held in the limbo of the Absence Teacher Reserve this past November 24. After years of givebacks, as the UFT leadership abandons one gain after another while critical voices in the union are marginalized; in the face of a broad offensive to gut public education, which puts children last and ensures that no vendor is left behind, how can we take the readiness to fight that energized everyone on November 24 and go forward.

What gave the mobilization for the ATRs its energy was that it was a united-front action built by union activists which drew in several opposition groups, as well as many unaffiliated teachers – because we all understood the common danger and the need for a powerful response. The slogan, “If you’re not an ATR today, you could be tomorrow” summed it up. That’s why we fought for it to be an official union demonstration – this affects everyone. And that’s why teachers and other school workers turned out in a real teacher rebellion despite the best efforts of the UFT leadership to divert and derail the struggle.

As both Angel and Sean note, the ATR issue is the “tip of the iceberg.” It is the current point of attack of the privatizers and corporate “reformers” who are waging a frontal assault on public education. A few months ago, the issue was “merit pay.” Tomorrow it will be teacher tenure. But it’s important to see the big picture: that beyond the particular attacks, there’s a war going on here, a class war. And if it’s “one-sided class war,” as many have commented, that’s because of the role of the labor bureaucracy in keeping workers in check. It’s not about Randi Weingarten personally.

The united front is a method for common action. It is not the basis for building an on-going opposition to the present Unity Caucus bureaucracy, which is busy selling out what union gains are left. For that, we need leadership based on a class-struggle program, and that is what we need to build now.

Angel links the teachers’ struggle to the current financial/economic crisis, the worst since the Depression of the 1930s. This is quite correct – teachers are under attack while the government is showering $8.5 trillion to save the Wall Street banks. To fight this poses questions of class, power and leadership. Sean's posting emphasizes how the struggle against the corporate education “reformers” is a multi-faceted struggle. His emphasis on the racist hiring policies of the Bloomberg/Klein administration is a key element of what we need to fight.

It's also true that the response to this has been fragmented, with a number of different blogs, caucuses and groupings struggling on issues of class size, ATRs, high-stakes testing, union democracy, police brutality against minority students, etc.

The answer is not to simply amalgamate all the opposition groupings in one big mega-caucus. The result will be mega-confusion. Many colleagues were greatly encouraged by the turnout and militancy of the November 24 demonstration. Those of us involved in organizing it were taken by the power of the response, despite the active sabotage by Unity. Running off endless leaflets, and distributing them all over the boroughs more than paid off, as it touched a chord of struggle among teachers.

A common action is one thing, and there will be others. A common caucus, or coalition or “rank-and-file” movement is something else again. The rule in such coalitions is that the program gets determined by the “lowest common denominator,” where everyone can agree. And that LCD will be simple trade unionism. But simple trade unionism in this period where working people are under attack across the board, where every union gain is being taken away, is impossible. In this period of capitalist decay, reformism is a dead-end: if you are not prepared to fight the system as a whole, you are destined to fail.

Case in point: Michelle Rhee and the Washington D.C. school system fight against teacher tenure, which is shaping up as the formative education battle of the next administration. If it’s broken there, the fight will come to New York. If you haven’t seen it, read Time Magazine’s chilling cover story of Rhee as the wicked witch of corporate education reform, complete with broomstick to “sweep away” teachers who don’t toe the line.

You can’t fight against these attacks within the framework of the capitalist system that created them. That is why the UFT leadership supports the thrust of the so-called educational “reforms” (read: union-busting) while trying to make them marginally more palatable. They are loyal to this system and the politicians who uphold it, from Democrat Eliot Spitzer, who enforced the Taylor Law against the TWU, to Republican billionaire Bloomberg, and now Barack Obama. Obama’s election represents a significant social shift in this country, which was founded on chattel slavery and has been a bastion of racism ever since. But Obama in the Oval Office will rule in the interest of capital, from bombing Afghanistan to keeping the U.S. in Iraq to “reforming” D.C. schools.

We also need to be clear on the nature of the union bureaucracy, which acts as a transmission belt from the bosses to the workers, what Daniel DeLeon called the “labor lieutenants of capital.” Randi Weingarten is carrying out the program of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg, while trying to sugar coat the bitter pill so we’ll swallow it.

It’s necessary as well to understand the role of the government and the state. Both the Puerto Rican teachers in their recent strike and New York teachers face draconian anti-labor laws. The minute we step out on strike, when we do, we’ll be hit in the face with the Taylor Law, just as the FMPR had their representation cancelled under Puerto Rico’s Law 45. The fundamental fact is that it is a class struggle, and what we need is a leadership with a class-struggle program and the determination to fight this through.

Program is key. It’s not enough to just oppose Michelle Rhee in D.C. – or Joel Klein as Education Secretary. Those who support Obama will be paralyzed when his education minister comes out for those policies or a soft-core form of them. Weingarten can’t fight them, because she supports the Democratic Party. That’s why she is busy “putting everything on the table,” from charter schools to “merit pay” to teacher tenure. And neither can union oppositionists who join the UFT bureaucrats in supporting Democrats mount a real fight.

Obama is in favor of “performance pay,” doubling money for charter schools, making it easier to fire teachers and reforming rather than abolishing No Child Left Behind. When the UFT/AFT switched its support from Hillary Clinton to Obama, they conveniently “forgot” these facts. Clinton, by the way, has supported “merit pay” since the 1990s when as a lawyer in Little Rock, Arkansas she got a $100,000 contract from one of the main organizations pushing for this.

Likewise, it’s not enough to be for “union democracy.” For example, in opposing Weingarten/Unity’s attempt to gag the opposition in the guise of prohibiting videotaping (which the union has a right to do), some have cited the Landrum-Griffin Act as an authority. This anti-labor law was passed after the Teamsters won the first national Freight Agreement in the mid-’50s, in order to control the labor movement, in the name of defending ... “union democracy.” We want to rip up these labor laws, not stand on them.

What’s next? Taking the union to the bosses’ courts like so many union caucuses have done over the past couple decades. What happens when they win? A new layer of bureaucrats get in, who proceed to sell out struggles because they “owe” the government. Just look at the TWU, and how Roger Toussaint called off the December 2005 strike that shut down the city, and has just signed a no-strike pledge.

These are just a couple of illustrations of why we cannot all “join together” in one big happy opposition family caucus. It will fall apart at the first test. A lot of colleagues have done a lot of good work on class size, on ATRs, on high-stakes testing and other issues. They should continue to do so. It’s necessary to address other issues as well, including immigrants’ rights. There has to be a serious discussion about the history and future of this union, from the “AFL-CIA” “state department socialist” Albert Shanker, to his wannabe imitators of the fourth reincarnation.

I am putting forward the program of the Class Struggle Education Workers, a newly formed group including members of the UFT, PSC and other education workers. The issue of public education today raises every question of racism, class and imperialism. As we fight on every issue of social justice, we need to understand their roots in and to struggle against the capitalist system as a whole. That’s why we call for a class-struggle workers party.

We will be proposing a public forum on the battle over public education, in the hopes of furthering this crucial discussion. In the meantime, I encourage people to read our CSEW leaflet that was distributed at the November 24 demonstration and the CSEW program on our web page: edworkersunite.blogspot.com.

Marjorie Stamberg
December 2, 2008