As I said yesterday, tenure is just the sort of thing unions are built to protect, which means that Mike Bloomberg’s intent to reform the tenure process got a lot of attention.  Joe Williams has UFT prez Randi Weingarten’s rebuttal here (summary of her remarks: tenure isn’t automatic, and principals shouldn’t be sidestepped) and has this to say about the the union:

Also worth noting that the plans for toughening teacher tenure are not the slap at the UFT that some have interpreted. If anything, it is a belated acknowledgment that management hasn’t been doing its job in terms of evaluating the workforce. The contract doesn’t need to be changed, management just has to start doing what it is already allowed to do. But even though this is the case, “following the contract” will still be called union-busting. Just watch. Hopefully, they will do what they can do under the existing contract and the next mayor/chancellor can take up any necessary changes in the next contract. Bloomberg folded early in the UFT contract negotiations, so he’s done.

Amazingly, he seems to be in agreement with the AFTies on tenure being more a matter of properly evaluating teachers before granting tenure than a rewrite of the rules.  Not so amazingly, Edwize has shown that Joe didn’t have to wait long at all before hearing claims of union-busting, along with a promise of a major fight (”fooling with tenure is a line in the sand for us”).  

If Joe and the AFTies are right that “reforming the tenure process” means simply following the contract, Bloomberg should win by default; if not, the contract will quite plainly be worth little more than the paper on which it’s written.  The real battle will come if Bloomberg gets ambitious enough to actually loosen up the rules under which teachers receive tenure.  And it looks like that’s about to happen: today Klein elaborated a little bit on how the new tenure process would work, saying “a small team of retired principals would be hired to help make tenure decisions in a more rigorous fashion.”