Weingarten to Rhee: Save the advice on N.Y.C.
The D.C. teachers' contract may be all but signed and sealed, but Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee and AFT president Randi Weingarten continue to argue about what it actually means. The latest exchange is in the form of dueling op-eds in The New York Daily News, whose publisher, Mort Zuckerman, has ponied up big money to support New York City Chancellor Joel Klein, a Rhee ally.
On Sunday, Rhee urged Klein and the New York teachers' union leadership to replicate what she called the "revolutionary bargain" she struck with the Washington Teachers' Union. The pact includes includes provisions for bonus pay, personnel decisions based on performance over seniority, and regulations that free principals to decide how to staff their schools.
"The contract is groundbreaking in many ways, and can serve as a roadmap for other districts - including, I hope, the largest and most important public school district in the country, New York City, where teachers have been working without a contract since October," wrote Rhee, who serves with Zuckerman and Klein on the board of the Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, which trains and recruits executive talent to run urban districts. Broad's philanthropic arm is also helping to fund Rhee's performance pay plan.
Rhee also called for Weingarten's intervention into the New York talks, calling her someone "very much able to see the direction the nation is heading in and the fact that unions need to be a part of the solution."
Weingarten responded Thursday with her own op-ed which said, in essence, that Rhee's victory lap was unwarranted and naive.
"It's all well and good that Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, who just negotiated her first labor contract, has a first-time bargainer's pride of ownership and....is offering unsolicited advice to New Yorkers about how to resolve the current teachers contract impasse," she wrote. "But a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and so is trying to apply simplistic lessons from the D.C. contract to New York."
Then she added a not-so-subtle dig at Rhee's commitment to standardized testing.
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Mayoral politics slowing early childhood center?
Back in March, it looked like the pieces were in place for construction of a $12 million early-childhood education center in the Parkside neighborhood of Ward 7, financed by a philanthropy run by the daughter of billionaire investor Warren Buffett.
The Buffett Early Childhood Fund announced on March 23 that it hoped to break ground this summer on land adjacent to Neval Thomas Elementary School. All that remained was agreement on a land lease from the District, which Mayor Adrian M. Fenty was expected to send to the D.C. Council for approval within two weeks.
But in the nearly three months since, that lease has yet to make its way from the mayor's office to Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray. The Gray camp privately attributes the slow walk to primary politics, with Fenty loathe to facilitate anything that will make his opponent look good. Pre-K and early childhood issues are a political sweetspot for Gray, who has championed several initiatives on that front. And Ward 7 is his home turf.