New Sheriff in Town, Julie Washington, LAUSD’s New Corporate Enforcer
Arne Duncan was in L.A. this week for an education summit. That can only mean one thing: promotion of his latest pet project, employee/boss collaboration. The details of this summit are summarized by Charles Taylor Kerchner (in John Fensterwald’s, Educated Guess).
According to Kerchner, Duncan told listeners that “Crisis gives us a perfect opportunity, not just a perfect storm.” Crises, we should remember, allow entrepreneurs to swoop in to clean up messes created by cumbersome government bureaucracies, as they so beautifully demonstrated in Iraq and Haiti. Crises make it easy to justify extraordinary tactics, even ones that trample personal freedom or common sense, like the idea that labor-boss collaborations will serve the interests of workers.
Yet this is precisely what Duncan was up to. According to Kerchner, incoming superintendent John Deasy and Julie Washington, the “new sheriff in town” at United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), will negotiate in an environment that