Time magazine has once again invoked the ire of teachers unions across the country.
Last week, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten joined parents and teachers at the Time-Life Building in Manhattan to deliver more than 100,000 signed petitions asking Time’s editors to apologize for its recent cover, which they said cast teachers as “rotten apples” who needed to be smashed by Silicon Valley to enact education reform.
Joining Weingarten were United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew, New York City-based teacher Sara Berger, New York City-based parent Natasha Capers and North Bergen, N.J., teacher Laurie Troiano.
“Obviously, we can debate a lot of things about public education,” Weingarten said at the event. “We can debate if there’s enough money. We can debate how to attract, retain and support teachers. We can debate the kind of parental engagement we need. We can debate whether we need more art and music. We can debate the role of testing. What shouldn’t be debatable is whether a cover that suggests that teachers need to be smashed is appropriate.
Since last week’s delivery, more signatures have been collected.
The petition in question reads: “Time magazine’s latest cover blames teachers for the problems in America’s schools. This outrageous cover doesn’t even reflect Time’s own reporting. While the cover article looks critically at tenure, it also questions the testing industry’s connections to Silicon Valley and the motives of the wealthy sponsors of anti-tenure lawsuits. The articles inside the magazine present a more balanced view of the issues. But for millions of Americans, all they’ll see is the cover and a misleading attack on teachers. Our educators deserve better treatment.”
Weingarten echoed similar sentiments.
“A cover that suggests that teachers need to be smashed is dead wrong, and that’s why over 100,000 people have signed petitions in less than a week, saying and asking Time to apologize for its cover,” said Weingarten. “Frankly, of those 102,000, over 11,000 are Time subscribers and over 64,000 are people that use Time magazine in schools.”
The story accompanying the Time cover explored David Welch’s fight against union-negotiated job protections. The Silicon Valley millionaire said the current rules make it hard to fire teachers and that “bad apples” continue to rot in classrooms, hurting students’ right to a good education. In June, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Rolf M. Treu sided with that argument and struck down teacher tenure, inspiring a similar lawsuit in New York that has inconclusively been linked to a couple of big names on Wall Street. The Los Angeles case is on appeal.
In response to the controversy, Time.com published various responses to the cover, including a response by Weingarten. Time also made the article available for free online (it was previously behind a pay wall).
This isn’t the first time that Time has faced a backlash from teachers. In 2008, a cover showed then-Washington, D.C., Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee standing in a classroom holding a broom with the headline “How to Fix America’s Schools” with a subheadline that said, “Michelle Rhee is the head of Washington, D.C., schools. Her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education.”
From 2007 to 2010, Rhee instituted an evaluation system in D.C. schools that linked standardized test scores to the evaluations of almost every adult in a school, including the custodians. She eventually left amid allegations of cheating by teachers and principals who knew that she gave out bonuses attached to high performances among their students.