President of the American Federation of Teachers Unions gets demolished on Reddit

Published On October 26, 2012 | By Reading The Score | Culture, News, Politics

Earlier today on the popular social news site Reddit, Randi Weingarten who is the President of the American Federation of Teachers Union, did an “AMA”. An “AMA” (or Ask Me Anything) is an open discussion thread where the Reddit community can ask the participant anything they want. Reddit is known for it’s strong liberal leaning, just a few months ago President Obama did an AMA which crashed the site and had it’s members gushing. It is common to have liberal politicians and public figures gain publicity through an AMA on Reddit.

So Randi was probably expecting a somewhat neutral/friendly crowd, she was wrong. The AMA gained thousands of comments almost all lambasting teachers unions and Randi for not answering questions like she promised. This was entirely unexpected due to the general leftist/progressive nature of Reddit. Here are some of the top comments from the Reddit community:

User snyben: Philadelphia public school teacher here. I worked in the school district my first year, and was laid off because of the union (PFT which is under the larger AFT umbrella). I now work in a charter school. The union’s argument was that if layoffs must occur, then they must proceed according to seniority. However, in my first year I saw teachers who would horrify any caring parent, most of whom were protected simply because they had managed to keep their jobs longer than 3 years. There were blatant racist comments, laziness to an extreme degree, rampant stupidity, and willful ignorance of any best practices for effective teaching. I’d say 50 percent of our 200 person staff was either incompetent or phoning it in. Why, then, did you advocate to fire me, a young and energetic Ivy League graduate, over some lazy racist bums making 100k to write math problems on the board and insult students?

User PatentAtty: On the one hand, most people in the private sector get job reviews, have little job security if they’re under-performing or do demonstrably bad work. Teachers in many areas, on the other hand, receive “tenure” after a few short years which makes removing similarly bad/under-performing teachers from their positions very difficult and costly. As a result, the right points to this issue as a leading cause for bad school performance (justifiably or not).

So, do you support allowing school districts and schools to have more say in personnel matters that does not necessitate costly arbitration/court room battles?

User Daddynasty: In my state we have charter schools. These schools overall have been very successful. Yet from my understanding the Teacher Unions are against them. Why is that?

Also how do you feel about voucher systems?

User …: Your union gave over $6,000,000 dollars to democrats this year, and not one penny to republicans.

http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=d000000083

Your organization currently ranks 17th out of 20,000 in political contributions in education (every penny to democrats)

You could have hired 153 teachers @ 40,000 a year. Or you could have used that money to pay down the pension issues you keep fucking states with.

In lobbying in the last 2 years your organizations ranks 315 out of almost 4,000 and you have spent over $2,000,000 lobbying.

There is another 50 teachers making 40K a year.

On top of all this borderline disgusting numbers your organization ranks 53 out of 200 in outside spending. Outside spending is money spend to influence elections.

You spent almost $1,000,000 on that in 2012.

There’s another 25 teachers @ 40k

Over the last 22 years your organization has given over $35,000,000 to the democratic party, and you made 1/2 a million this year.

Not all teachers are democrats isn’t it terrible that you force teachers to financially support positions they may not necessarily agree with, then use the politicians you’ve bought with political contributions to legislate that a teacher may not choose to disassociate themselves with your union?

Maybe you should be more worried about the teachers and kids and less worried about your corrupt shitty union. If I hear you complain about class sizes I’m going to come unglued, you could have hired 225 teachers this year alone, or built some facilities for kids who really needed it.

Instead you’re a lobbying arm for the democratic party while you hide under the guise of education and use kids to further an agenda that clearly doesn’t benefit them.