Mayor Bloomberg isn’t one for eating his own words, but he’d probably like to have back his weekend comparison of the United Federation of Teachers to the National Rifle Association.
Predictably, howls of outrage ensued — most of it of the manufactured variety, designed purely to deflect attention from the fact that the teachers’ union is once more hard at work protecting incompetent teachers at the expense of New York’s public-school pupils.
Mayor Mike needs to apologize, the union demands — and so he should.
But to the NRA, frankly.
Think what you will of the nation’s largest and most powerful gun lobby, at least it doesn’t purport to be something other than what it is.
As opposed to the UFT, which camouflages its contempt for the best interests of city kids with saccharine rhetoric and vicious TV attack ads aimed at Bloomberg.
The mayor last week opened fire on the UFT for abandoning talks aimed at establishing a teacher-evaluation regime based partly on student achievement, as required under a state law passed last June.
Never mind that city schools stand to lose $450 million in funding if a deal isn’t reached by Jan. 17. Reforming the city’s teacher-evaluation system will be a blessing for students citywide and for teachers, who deserve to be rewarded for their best work and better monitored and trained.
But UFT boss Mike Mulgrew has unilaterally ended months of negotiations and nearly ensured the money will be lost.
“It’s typical of Congress, it’s typical of unions . . . where a small group is really carrying the ball,” Bloomberg said on his Friday radio show. “The NRA is another place where the membership, if you do the polling, doesn’t agree with the leadership.”
Bloomberg rightly refuses to apologize.
Many of his would-be successors, however, are eagerly lining up to drink the UFT Kool-Aid.
The top four Democratic candidates for mayor have all joined a noxious petition attacking Bloomberg for his comments.
(Of course, they won’t say a word about how Mulgrew torpedoed the teacher-evaluation talks.)
The petition says Bloomberg “vilifies New York City teachers,” but he did the exact opposite, drawing a distinction between bosses like Mulgrew — who could not care less about New York’s kids — and the main body of teachers, which the mayor contends “doesn’t agree with the leadership.”
That’s the word straight from the mayor’s mouth: Don’t blame the educators, don’t blame City Hall — the schools are going to lose half a billion dollars because of Mike Mulgrew and the UFT.
Will the union apologize for that?
Fat chance.
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