Feb 8, 2006 4:47 PM
AFT-affiliated teachers unions across the country will be protesting on March 8 against a Jan. 13 “20/20” report that maligned teachers and teacher unions.
Petitions are circulating in New York City schools condemning the hour-long report, titled “Stupid in America,” which vilified public education while advocating for private-school vouchers.
UFT members will deliver the petitions at a demonstration outside ABC headquarters on the Upper West Side on March 8 starting at 4 p.m.
The rally will take place in lieu of the March Delegate Assembly.
That same day, teachers will be holding rallies elsewhere in New York State as well as in other cities, including Chicago, Providence, Atlanta, Detroit and Gary, Indiana.
“We want to make sure that ABC hears the voices of incredibly hard-working teachers,” said UFT President Randi Weingarten, who helped motivate the national campaign. “The network needs to hear how unfair and biased those of you in the trenches believe their broadcast to have been.”
One 20-minute segment of the hour-long “20/20” report, produced by co-anchor John Stossel, portrayed the New York City school system as a “union-dominated monopoly” where “hundreds of teachers that the city calls incompetent, racist, dangerous, guilty of sexual misconduct have been paid millions” because the union contract makes it “almost impossible” to fire them.
Stossel held up as a model the management practices of Jack Welch’s GE, where the best workers are rewarded and the bottom 10 percent “have to go.”
Of a city teacher’s work day, Stossel snidely asks the television audience, “How many of you work a uniform six-hour, 40-minute day?”
Stossel includes selective interviews with students that make it look like all teachers are lazy, bored and uninvolved. Only snatches of an exhaustive interview with Weingarten were included, none of which responded to charges made by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who was allowed to vent fully about how hard it is to get rid of bad teachers.
Stossel’s reporting has been criticized for years by media critics. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a national media watchdog group, called Stossel’s approach “careless and unethical. His reports are billed as news, but they sometimes rely on questionable methods such as deceptive editing that distorts arguments made by interviewees, the exclusion of facts that might conflict with his personal opinion and the provocation of guests so as to broadcast their reactions out of context.”
DVDs and videocassettes of the “20/20” show and petitions are available from chapter leaders in every city school.