NYT piece on Weingarten: "Despite Image, Union Leader Backs School Change"

[alp227]

In “Waiting for Superman,” the new education documentary, the union leader Randi Weingarten is portrayed, in the words of Variety, as “a foaming satanic beast.”

At a two-day education summit hosted by NBC News recently, the lopsided panels often featured Ms. Weingarten on one side, facing a murderer’s row of charter school founders and urban superintendents. Even Tom Brokaw piled on.

It’s nothing personal, really. Ms. Weingarten happens to be the most visible, powerful leader of unionized teachers, and in that role she personifies what many reformers see as the chief obstacle to lifting dismal schools: unions that protect incompetent teachers.

A combative labor leader who does not shrink from the spotlight, Ms. Weingarten has been fighting back. She issued a written rebuttal to “Waiting for Superman,” and she has publicly debated the film’s director, Davis Guggenheim, arguing that teachers have been made scapegoats. More to the point, the portrait of Ms. Weingarten as a demonic opponent of change — albeit one more likely to appear in a business suit and cashmere V-neck sweater, with a Cartier Tank watch and a red kabbalah string around her wrist — is out of date, according to many education experts.

Full story (including many suppressed reference links): http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/16/education/16teacher.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[madfloridian]

1. Watch this video of her mocking teachers who booed Bill Gates

at the convention. There is no doubt where she stands.

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/madfloridian/6471

[Dinger]

3. It's Why SHE'S The One On T.V. All The Time

and not Dennis Van Roekel, the NEA president.

[adnelson60087]

2. She talks about a "seat at the table", but what good

is it when the enemy is carving you up and eating you, piece by piece. I'm AFT, and hope our membership holds her feet to the fire with these "reformers".

[proud2BlibKansan]

4. I'm torn.

On one hand I appreciate her voice. She defends us passionately. Compared to the invisible NEA president, she's terrific.

On the other hand, she caves in to the reformers too often and her insistence on finding common ground and collaborating is often infuriating. I also can't get over having Bill Gates be the keynote at our convention.