Word: shanker
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...board wanted them to work an extra half-hour; it also wanted to cut some teachers' sick days from ten to five a year and reduce the number of their preparation periods. Most elementary teachers have two 45-minute prep periods a week; high school teachers have five. Shanker admitted that prep periods, which are nominally intended for schoolwork, are often used by teachers to "smoke, knit and shoot the breeze." But the union refused to compensate for a reduced number of teachers by raising maximum class sizes above the 32 students for elementary school, 33 for junior high...
...negotiations stalled on the first day of school, when the old contract expired, class size loomed as the principal issue. At this point, Shanker was prepared to ask the teachers to keep working under the old contract; but the board, unwilling to be locked into the old rules on class size, was not interested. Neither, as it turned out, were the teachers. At an afternoon meeting of the union's 1,270-member delegate assembly, teachers stood up one after another and told horror stories. One reported that she had 60 pupils in her class-"six-oh"-and elicited...
When the delegate assembly voted overwhelmingly for a walkout, Shanker went off to the Garden to seek a strike vote from the membership. "The issues have never been clearer," he declared. "The issue is conditions in the schools. Not only is there no education, but there is danger to the babies and the baby sitters...
...pickets had hardly hit the streets the next day when the school board obtained a temporary restraining order under a state law preventing strikes by public employees. Although this raised the possibility that Shanker could be jailed if the walkout continued, at week's end the court postponed enforcing the order in the hope that the strike could be settled quickly...
...What Shanker did was to resort to demagoguery. He predicted that the school board's budget cuts of $300 million would make New York City's schools "far and away the worst in the entire United States." Classrooms would be packed with as many as 45 pupils, causing "many youngsters to explode, throwing their classes into chaos, vandalizing their schools or assaulting their classmates." Finally, he stated that "any parent who possibly can will now leave the city"−a warning that could only do more harm to the image of a city already in deep trouble...