Believing he was among friends, UFT boss Mike Mulgrew showed what he’s really made of during a closed-door meeting with union activists — spewing hatred toward education “reformers” and charter schools, and even admitting he sabotaged teacher evaluations.
“We are at war with the reformers,” Mulgrew said bluntly in an extraordinary admission during a gathering of 3,400 union delegates who voted for a new labor contract Wednesday night.
“Their ideas will absolutely destroy — forget about public education — they will destroy education in our country.”
The Wednesday night meeting of union delegates was closed to the press — but Mulgrew’s comments were forwarded to the website Chalkbeat.
In another provocative admission, Mulgrew said he deliberately “gummed up” the implementation of teacher evaluations last year during negotiations with the prior Bloomberg administration.
He lobbied to have teachers rated in 22 different categories, presumably to make it easier for teachers to contest bad ratings. The new labor contract reduces the number of rating categories to eight.
“It was a strategy decision to gum up the works because we knew what their lawyers were trying to do,” Mulgrew said of city officials.
“That’s things I don’t get to say in public when I’m doing them, because we knew they had a plan to use the new evaluation system to go after people.”
Mulgrew launched his attack against education reformers while discussing his support for the creation of 200 experimental public schools to rival charter schools.
Mulgrew saw the teachers contract as an opportunity to settle scores rather than as a tool to improve schools for kids.
- Jenny Sedlis
The labor leader’s remarks were startling given that Mayor Bill de Blasio has negotiated a fragile truce with the independently managed, publicly funded charter schools.
Unlike regular public schools, most charters are staffed by non-union teachers — and the United Federation of Teachers considers them a threat.
School-reform leaders were outraged by Mulgrew’s remarks.
“Mulgrew saw the teachers contract as an opportunity to settle scores rather than as a tool to improve schools for kids,” said Jenny Sedlis of StudentsFirstNY.
Parent activist Campbell Brown fumed, “He argues in favor of making life harder for educators by increasing the complexity of the evaluation system for purely political reasons.
“It is so cynical and proves that this is someone who does not care about kids,” she said.
UFT spokeswoman Alison Gendar said the union does not comment on closed meetings.
This isn’t the first time the union leader has spouted off to his rank and file.
Mulgrew once called former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “Chancellor Numbnuts” at a delegate breakfast in Washington, DC.