The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the dominant teacher union in urban districts, took umbrage with the blame-the-teacher aspect of reconstitution, but it concedes that drastic reform is sometimes necessary. “If a school is so bad that you wouldn’t send your own kids there, it needs to be shut down and redesigned,” says Janet Bass, in public relations for AFT. “San Francisco and Chicago started badly because they blamed teachers and didn’t use them for input.”
