It was child’s play for the almighty United Federation of Teachers: Destroy attempts to reform lax tenure rules — and then brazenly write the very law that preserved the status quo.
Last year, UFT President Randi Weingarten’s powerful lobby killed a rule passed by then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer — and supported by Mayor Bloomberg and school boards statewide — to allow principals to factor in students’ test scores when evaluating teachers for tenure.
Weingarten’s relentless assault so buried the issue that a special commission, which was supposed to be created to study how test scores may be used, hasn’t even been convened, an apparent violation of state law.
“The commission was BS,” said one veteran on the losing side of the tenure battle.
The panel was supposed to set up as a compromise between the union and then-state Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.
The battle over tenure involved the 2008 budget.
Thanks to the UFT’s influence, “there suddenly appeared language in both [the Senate and Assembly] budget bills that would have forever banned the use of student performance data for making key management decisions,” said Timothy Kremer, executive director of the New York State School Boards Association, which supports including testing data. “This was not just a New York City fight, this was a statewide fight.”
Bloomberg had long wanted to include test scores in tenure considerations to weed out poor teachers.
But in mid-March 2008, an operative from the UFT contacted mid-level budget staffers for Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Bruno to insert a phrase into the budget that effectively eviscerated the tenure-reform effort.
“The union was claiming that the [phrase] would only clarify what was an already existing policy,” a Senate Republican insider said. “It turned out to be much more than a clarification.”
While Silver’s budget staff readily acquiesced, the Republican Bruno was stuck.
He didn’t want to anger the powerful UFT or its sister organization, New York State United Teachers, but the mayor had donated $675,000 to the New York State Senate Republican Campaign Committee since 2007.
“We have to support each other. If you’re there for us, we’re there for you,” one NYSUT vice president warned Bruno and his staff, according to a Republican insider. No direct endorsements were discussed, the insider added.
As the weeks went on, the tenure controversy became the last unsettled matter of the budget. “The compromise was a moratorium on the use of student-performance data with the idea of a commission . . . The commission that never occurred,” Kremer said. That compromise was reached late at night April 7, 2008.
Bloomberg called the compromise “meshugas,” or craziness, and a “disgrace” and an “outrage” in the days afterward. “It is the most nonsensical, damaging thing that this legislature has done in an awful long time.”
Ron Davis, a spokesman for Weingarten, said, “We forcefully advocated for the tenure language, and we make no apologies for this.”