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Friday, September 14, 2012

AFT President Randi Weingarten Slams Rahm Emanuel Over Chicago Teacher’s Strike | FDL Action

AFT President Randi Weingarten Slams Rahm Emanuel Over Chicago Teacher’s Strike | FDL Action:


AFT President Randi Weingarten Slams Rahm Emanuel Over Chicago Teacher’s Strike

Update II: Dave Dayen reports that Rahm is blinking, under pressure from the Obama campaign to settle the strike so it doesn’t interfere with the election.
Update: Rahm thanks both Obama and Romney for supporting him against the Chicago Teachers.
Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers, smacked Rahm Emanuel around last night on Bloomberg TV for his perceived mishandling of the Chicago teacher’s strike.
Al Hunt asked her if things would be different under former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Replied Weingarten:
“I think that Mayor Emanuel did a lot of poking in the eye that he ought not to have done. He ended up taking away a raise, trying to unilaterally implement a longer school day and doing a lot of poking in the eye…I think what we’re seeing, unfortunately, is 15 years of lots of reform go amok. So I’m not going to do the kind of compare and contrast between Daly and Emanuel. But what I am going to say is that I’ve watched in Chicago people being really frustrated that they don’t have the tools they need to do their job.”
Weingarten’s assessment of Rahm’s performance is charitable compared to others, who have accused the Chicago Mayor of taking badly needed money meant to repair inner city schools and funneling it to his billionaire political cronies like Penny Pritzker and Hyatt Hotels.
Paul Street rips into Rahm for waging a war on inner city children, calling his proposals “noxious” and “neo-