Schools Chancellor as Warlord
Yanking his pet demon, the United Federation of Teachers, out of his bayonet-lined hat is the piece de resistance of  New York City's Schools Chancellor Klein’s traveling Black Magic Expo. Practicing their art, he and his posse of sorcerers have lifted their own prints from every crime scene on the educational landscape and replaced them with the Union label. But why?
Is he spooked by the labor union’s bold pursuit of palpably real academic standards against the backdrop of his palatable optical illusions? By stubbornly resisting social promotion, is the Union a thief for stealing the Chancellor’s ambiguous thunder? Is Klein vamped by the Union’s linking the restructuring of schools to the provision of human and material resources needed to make it more than another sleight-of-hand? Has the United Federation of Teachers sparked a one-sided feud for pleading for a workable student-teacher ratio, buildings with architectural integrity, post-diluvian books, and direct help to students bedeviled by failure? What effrontery!

Is the UFT enfeebling the Chancellor by monitoring the industrial hygiene of schools with asbestos and other airborne contaminants? Is Klein’s prestige undercut by the Union’s role in producing Safety Plans to invoke when the school community faces emergencies? Are seventy thousand educators with advanced degrees out of their depth by engaging the wizards at Tweed in unsolicited dialogue about protecting obedient children from the agents of anarchy?  Without the UFT, the Discipline Code would be a secret code and remedial bomb making might be a major subject.

What galls the illusionist chancellor? Is it the rumblings of the UFT’s Dial-a-Teacher, which each day services thousands of students with free homework help in eight languages?  Is he fretting over the Union’s successful agitation to persuade the City Council to override resistance to allowing parental access to school crime statistics? Does he chafe at the fortune in scholarships that the Union awards every year to needy and deserving students? Is the UFT’s alliance with humanitarian agencies the bone that sticks in the magician’s throat?

What ails this creature of vexation?  When the Chancellor’s moral vault is opened, why does unalloyed malice escape? Is his enmity directed at the UFT’s Cancer Help Line, the Victim Support Program, the encyclopedic range of its professional committees, its ethnic associations, or task forces on human rights issues?

Is it because the Union has sounded the alarm against privatization, which has been implicated in failures from educational systems to the Challenger space disaster? Maybe Klein’s beef is simply with the Union’s open-mic poetry readings or discounted mortgage counseling. In another movie he would have been an exorcist.

There is no silver bullet to pierce the mystery of Klein’s anti-unionism. The armor is thick and political. But we cannot penetrate it without first suspending belief in his innate decency. We are rightly reluctant to give up on any man.  It is hard to do and not for the squeamish. Such abandonment was never provoked by any prior chancellor, regardless of whether he was a harsh negotiator or power- hungry boss.

Chancellor Klein sees red because educators demand and require that their professional dignity be inviolate and the practical wisdom from their training, expertise, and classroom trials not be mocked.

He resents their lobbying for children and, heaven forbid, their own prosperity. He is so identified with equating collaboration with anathema that this unbalanced thought should be copyrighted in his name. Contracts are observed in the breach. He knows that the mayor’s press office and the tabloids’ editorial boardrooms will back him in his defiance of binding contracts, so the rule of law has unraveled. He negotiates from the barrel of a “Saturday-night special.”

The Chancellor would like to deep-six the collective bargaining Agreement and have principals summon teachers, one-by-one, beyond closed doors, to impose in effect private secret contracts with a “ scratch my back I’ll scratch yours” clause. One man’s godsend may be another’s degradation.

Klein wants to single out and target teachers who insist on contractual compliance, isolate them from their mates, make them skittish like lost antelopes, and then crush their throats.   Klein may not be a rogue predator but certainly he boasts the instinct to cull.

I have paid my dues to the union and paid my dues in the trenches. It is true that for the sale of one’s soul there can be no price. The UFT is not asking to buy, but it surely would be a relatively legitimate purchaser. And as for Chancellor Klein and his cutlass-crusted hat, let him chuck it.  Warlords don’t need to be magicians.
Posted by redhog on July 30, 2005 at 12:43 AM |