What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse?
New York City teacher , a UFT member and chapter leader at his Bronx high school, explains how the AFT's early presidential endorsement is stirring discontent.
LAST MONTH, with nearly 16 months to go until the 2016 presidential election and almost seven months before the start of party primaries, the Executive Council of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. This came even earlier than other recent AFT presidential endorsements--the union backed Clinton in October 2007 and didn't endorse Barack Obama for re-election until February 2012.
The early endorsement and the top-down process to arrive at it angered many AFT members and union activists. A petition calling on the union to rescind the endorsementgot 2,500 signatures within 24 hours.
There are various sources for the discontent among the rank and file. The most obvious is that the AFT leadership only went through the motions--if that--of getting input from members before tapping their favored candidate, Hillary Clinton, the clear choice of the Democratic establishment, over other contenders who are clearly more pro-labor.
But the debate within the union also goes to more basic questions about the AFT's relationship to a party that claims to defend unions and public education, but which has been as enthusiastic as the Republicans in pressing the corporate school "reform" agenda.
That reality--and the unanswered questions it poses for the AFT's political strategy--was thrown into sharp relief days after the union's endorsement was announced last month.
During debate in the Senate on legislation to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)--essentially replacing No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the Bush-era attack on public schools--the Democrats, along with their collaborator, Vermont independent Bernie Sanders, almost unanimously supported the Murphy Amendment, which would have kept the harshest punishments of the original law and mandated them on the federal level, instead of leaving these punishments up to the states, as the final version of the new law does. The amendment failed only because of Republican opposition.
Those are the kind of questions the union could be taking up as the 2016 election season gets underway, not anointing the Democratic frontrunner.
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AFT PRESIDENT Randi Weingarten sent an e-mail to AFT members which claimed that the union "conducted a phone survey calling more than 1 million members, commissioned a second major poll, and solicited your input online and in person." The AFT also What's behind the AFT's rush to endorse? | SocialistWorker.org: