Fighting school closures, the kids be damned
By Joe Williams
(From New York Daily News, May 9th, 2012)
It’s springtime in the city, which means that once again the leaves are budding, the Yankees are trying to figure out some pitching issues and the United Federation of Teachers is filing another questionable lawsuit seeking to block Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott from managing the city’s 1.1 million-student public school system.
The annual rite of passage for the UFT’s lawyers shares the same goal that similar lawsuits have had in the last few years: to gum up City Hall’s push to simultaneously reduce the number of bad schools in the city while increasing the number of good schools available to families.
For the sake of public education in the city, this case needs to be tossed on the scrap heap alongside last year’s baseless UFT/NAACP suit, which sought to block the opening of many charter schools.
The new UFT lawsuit (the city’s principals union is also a plaintiff) seeks to stop the city from closing two dozen persistently failing public schools and from replacing up to half of the schools’ staff as part of sweeping turnaround efforts citywide.
But the ironies are thick — and reveal just how intellectually dishonest the union is prepared to be in order to stymie reform.
After months of unsuccessfully trying to halt the closures, after falsely complaining that the city’s sole education policy boils down to closing schools, the UFT’s lawyers are suddenly shifting gears.
The lawsuit filed Monday argues that what the city is doing isn’t actually closing schools at all, and therefore — based on the teachers’ contract — these schools ought to still be run according to a host of contractual rules and procedures that don’t give the chancellor power to do much of anything.