Randi Weingarten phoned Michelle Rhee Wednesday with the news: “Congratulations,” she said. “We have a ratified contract.”
Michelle Rhee is getting most of the credit for the contract that was ratified this week by D.C. teachers. The new contract does give D.C.’s school chancellor discretion to hire and fire teachers and to reward the ones deemed successful, based on test scores and her evaluation.
But Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), comes out a big winner, too. In many ways Weingarten had more at stake and more to lose in the negotiations. A player in the national teacher’s union for decades, she arrived in the capital last year and immediately found herself in the middle of a nasty local scrum.
Consider how her rising star might have fallen if she couldn’t even negotiate a contract in a tiny jurisdiction such as D.C.?
The Washington Teachers Union, the local AFT affiliate, was already deep into negotiations with Rhee’s DCPS when Weingarten moved from New York to D.C. Rhee had proposed her color-coded system of rewarding “green” teachers with fat raises but taking away tenure; and letting “red” teachers keep tenure but giving them a smaller compensation package.
At that point it seemed as if the union was about to be broken. It was hardly a robust group. The WTU was known for its corrupt former president, Barbara Bullock, who embezzled $5 million in dues so she could buy furs and fancy baubles.
George Parker, the new president, was seen as perhaps too affable.
Facing an impasse, both the union and Rhee invited Weingarten to the table. From the outset, Weingarten got bad press. The media cast her as a big-footing outsider. Malcontents within the local union tried to knife her in the back.
Weingarten had put in a dozen years as president of the New York City public schools union. She already had negotiated contracts that dealt with the most difficult issues, such as mutual consent and performance pay. When she came to the table here, Parker and Rhee had already agreed that teachers could no longer be assured of a job if they were bumped from a school. Mutual consent was gone.
In the end, Weingarten was able to keep compensation high for teachers, but she forced Rhee to scrap the two-tiered color-coded system. Rhee still gets to evaluate teachers through her Impact system, but that was not negotiable: D.C. law gives Rhee the power to assess the teachers.
The teachers voted 1,412 to 425 to accept the contract. It’s an affirmation of both Rhee, who helped raise funds to pay for the raises, and Weingarten, who got raises for teachers at a time when they are losing jobs and wages nationwide.
Says Weingarten: “I think we’ve given teachers the tools they need.”
Will Weingarten stay involved in local union matters?
“If the Washington teachers want us to be involved,” she says, “we are here for them.”
If she wasn’t here for them, Rhee might have broken the union into a thousand pieces.
Harry Jaffe’s column appears on Tuesday and Friday. He can be contacted at [email protected]
