BETRAYAL
On Labor Day, the day we celebrate working men and women and their unions, the Newark Teachers Union said this to the anxious parents of New Jersey’s largest city: “We cannot be seen as aiding or abetting anything that would disrupt the operation of the Newark Public Schools. ”
In short, the NTU told Newark’s parents that, as they face the anxieties of an opening day in a school system in which an inept megalomaniac named Cami Anderson holds the system’s rudder, they are on their own. The one organization that might have brought down the whole rotten infrastructure of state control of the city schools decided to bail. It did offer these, well, not so encouraging words:”We are in solidarity with the organizers”–of the boycott.
In some ways, I understand and sympathize with the letter sent to “Brothers and Sisters” by John Abeigon, the NTU’s director of organization. He warned that a strike in behalf of the boycotting parents could be seen as “conduct unbecoming” a licensed teaching professional and NTU members might be fired, maybe even face the loss of their licenses.
The way Newark teachers did more than 40 years ago. At that time, teachers were jailed, some for up to six months. They faced dismissal and loss of their licenses. They were beaten. For two months they struck.
Two months. It was rough but they didn’t lose their licenses.
I also know the NTU faced a practical as well as a legal problem. If it sought a strike vote and failed, or if the vote passed but the strike failed, then the union’s leadership certainly would have to resign and the union itself might collapse. I was presenBETRAYAL | Bob Braun's Ledger: