Free Strike for America by Micah Uetricht Page B

teachers unions. Former Mayor Villaraigosa, for example, is not only a former union organizer but also a former
teachers union
organizer who now, lulled by the calls of the neoliberals, has turned on his former employer. Despite his claim that “I don’t have an anti-union bone in my body,” he wrote op-eds as mayor saying that although he has attempted to reformeducation, “there has been one unwavering roadblock to reform:
teacher union leadership
[emphasis in original].” 11
    Won’t Back Down
, a Hollywood film widely panned as little more than a teacher-slandering propaganda piece (and a godawful one, at that), was screened at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 (and, incidentally, given an introduction by Villaraigosa). 12 It was technically an unofficial event but one that required approval from the Obama White House. That a particularly noxious piece of antiunion and antieducator agitprop would be given the green light straight from the top, to be screened at the party’s grand quadrennial event, says a great deal about how little the party seems to be concerned with maintaining even cordial relations with teachers unions.
    In case teachers unions didn’t get the message, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager for the 2012 elections tweeted, in response to Republican sniping about the president being supposedly beholden to teachers unions, “Obama’s relationship with teachers’ unions [is] anything but cozy.” It was a revealing statement: Democrats used to at least rhetorically claim their deep commitment to organized labor while betraying it behind closed doors; in the era of neoliberal education consensus, all such pretensions appear to have vanished.
    The message from Democrats has been fairly clear: Teachers unions are no longer a needed constituency within the Democratic coalition, so it’s now open season where they are concerned.
    Yet neither of the national unions appears capable of fighting back. The NEA has recently responded by beginning to fund some Republicans, like a state house candidate in Indiana who hadn’t spent much time on charter expansion or merit pay because he had been busy with bills to ban gay marriage and hunt down undocumented immigrants, or the Pennsylvania state representative who bragged that the voter identification law he helped craft would deliver his state to Mitt Romney in the election.
    The AFT has not started handing out cash to conservatives, but it has not changed its interactions with the Democrats either. Its president, Randi Weingarten, is of specific interest because she has positioned herself as one of the principal voices in education nationally. (A
New York Times
columnist even floated her name for secretary of education soon after the CTU strike.) 13 Weingarten has, in the words of education reporter Dana Goldstein, “tried to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy.” In doing so, she has ceded much ground to the reformers’ agenda. Goldstein called her the “marker of the moving center”—a center unquestionably shifting far to the right. 14
    In July 2012, for example, Weingarten praised a contract negotiated in Cleveland that introduced teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores before considering either seniority or tenure. She held up a contract negotiated in Newark, New Jersey, that introduced merit pay (paid for with a $100 million donation by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and specifically designated to institute the kinds of changes trumpeted by corporate reformers) as “a system of the future … that will help boost teaching and learning and will strengthen the teaching profession.” In 2010, she publicly supported a Colorado bill that went further in stripping teachers of tenure protections than any other piece of legislation in the nation in order to make the state more competitive in its bid for Race to the Top funds. 15
    And perhaps most jarringly, Weingarten