Eating Our Young

Like just about everyone I know, I'm delighted to have the August Punishment Days canceled. Some of my colleagues feel that was the most odious part of the stinkeroo contract part-time UFT President Randi Weingarten and her patronage mill cooked up in 2005. Personally, I think there are even worse aspects.

Nonetheless this was finally addressed via the despicable practice of "eating our young," or dumping on newbies, a practice much maligned by the UFT aristocracy in 2005, while selling the terrible contract to rank-and-file.

As James Eterno says so well on the ICE blog, this is yet another bad deal from Ms. Weingarten and her sycophants. Why on earth would you pay the city 2 billion dollars just to do something that actually saves the city money? Only our crack negotiating team could envision and carry out a notion like that. New teachers can count on losing 3% of their salaries for an additional 17 years under this deal, hardly the way to encourage people to become teachers.

And James is absolutely right that this is a Tier 5. Sure they don't call it a Tier 5. And they don't call the sixth class taught by most of my colleagues four times a week a class either.

But not all of us just fell off the tomato truck from New Jersey. And happy though we are over the canceled punishment days, there's no joy for me in treating young teachers like this. They deserve better, even if Ms. Weingarten is skipping town and won't have to deal with them anymore.