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MARGIN NOTES
December 3, 2009
UFT president says he’ll fight mayor’s new proposals
More than week after Mayor Bloomberg handed Chancellor Joel Klein a to-do list of items anathema to the teachers union, UFT president Michael Mulgrew is promising a fight.
In an email sent to United Federation of Teachers members this afternoon, Mulgrew said the mayor’s proposals will “damage the schools and the children of this city.” Though the subject matter is well-covered ground, the tone is angrier than usual and there’s a sense that the UFT has been badly burned.
Bloomberg’s announcement, which came mid-UFT contract negotiations, has “raised the temperature” of contract talks,” a source said.
Referring to Bloomberg’s directive to Klein to use test scores in teacher tenure decisions this year, Mulgrew writes that the UFT was already working with the city and the Gates Foundation on a teacher quality study.
“Chancellor Klein was supposed to be our partner in this potentially much more effective approach.”
In the letter, Mulgrew also blames the Department of Education for mismanaging the city’s rubber rooms and pool of excessed teachers, which the mayor has proposed to reduce through layoffs of teachers who’ve been in the pool for more than a year.
He calls Bloomberg’s proposals “simplistic” and “sheer fantasy.”
A response to the letter from DOE spokesman David Cantor follows Mulgrew’s letter.
Dear colleagues:
New York City’s students deserve a high quality education. What’s more, the students deserve and their parents expect that their mayor and their schools’ chancellor will use their power to enact real reforms and overcome obstacles to learning.
Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg’s recent speech in Washington, D.C. did nothing to help meet these goals.
As New York prepares to compete for federal “Race to the Top” incentive funds, all stakeholders in the public schools should be working together to best position us to win this precious new resource. But Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have chosen to focus on and promote fake reforms, simplistic “solutions” and sheer fantasy as the answer to our schools’ problems.
Let’s start with some of the issues you as educators know full well.
ATRs: Hundreds of our teachers are now working in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), a pool of educators whose schools or programs have been downsized or closed. There is no better example of the Department of Education’s mismanagement and failed leadership than this group of dedicated and experienced teachers.
When the ATR pool was created we warned the DOE that faulty implementation of the process would leave hundreds or even thousands of teachers without permanent assignments. Our warning went unheeded and our prediction has been proven correct. Recently we joined with the DOE to create a policy that in similar circumstances was remarkably successful - the assignment of teachers displaced by the reorganization of alternative high schools to a school with vacancies, subject to approval by both the teacher and the principal. The DOE has not only rejected our recommendation to expand this to all districts, it has not made substantial efforts to place ATRs; it has refused to schedule school interviews for them; it has also demonized them in the press, making it difficult for many to find permanent jobs. Meanwhile, the department’s continued hiring of new teachers, including paying bonuses to recruiters, has made a bad situation even worse.
Now, when the DOE’s own data has shown dramatic increases in class sizes, it is unconscionable that the system allows over 1,000 teachers now working as substitutes rather than to help bring class sizes down. This is an inexcusable waste of human capital and mismanagement of resources.
Rubber Rooms: If the DOE’s ATR policy is the leading example of management ineptitude, the so-called “rubber rooms” are a close second.
We work with children, and we agree that we must err on the side of caution to protect children. Accusations may lead to people being temporarily removed from their schools while the investigation takes place. But no reasonable observer could find any reason other than gross mismanagement for leaving teachers to sit in rubber rooms without charges for months, or even years at a time.
On average, teachers now wait in excess of 200 days while allegations undergo an initial investigation - all without any formal charges. There is no reason these investigations can’t be completed in 30 to 60 days, at the maximum.
The rubber room debacle has been wholly created under the stewardship of Chancellor Klein. Under prior Chancellors, educators who had been removed from classrooms worked in office or non-teaching positions where they could make some contribution to the system during investigations. That policy should be reinstated.
The rubber rooms do not work for the students or the teachers in NYC, and we have always stood ready to fix them. Contrary to the picture the Mayor and Chancellor have painted for tabloid editorial pages, the UFT has met with the DOE on numerous occasions to try to make the necessary changes and expedite this process. But the administration has preferred to grandstand on this issue rather than solve it.
Student test scores: The idea of using student scores as the principal means to evaluate teachers is a classic political crowd-pleasing stunt. Unfortunately, as anyone who really understands education knows, it’s a cheap shot.
Study after study has shown that tests cover too narrow a field, and there are too many variables in a child’s life, school and classroom, from poverty to health issues to class size, to use one year’s test scores as reliable indicator of student success, much less the success of their teachers.
The Chancellor of the Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, and the New York State Commissioner of Education, David Steiner, have both said that the current state tests are in effect a broken measurement tool. Preliminary results comparing the state math scores to the most reliable national test have raised grave questions about their reliability of the state tests, and our members know that the focus on these tests has led to a misguided “teach to the test” approach rather than system-wide academic improvement. In addition, the DOE’s school progress reports, based on the state tests, are highly flawed and questioned by everyone.
We have been working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to create a valid, credible and measurable process that would capture the complexities of classroom teaching. Chancellor Klein was supposed to be our partner in this potentially much more effective approach.
The real problems: At a time when the economy has decimated our city and state budgets, it was the UFT that sounded the alarm about schools being harmed by education budget cuts at the opening of the academic year. We were the ones who rallied parents, education advocates and community organizations in a successful effort that stopped midyear reductions that would have cut services that schools and children are already receiving this year.
The members of the United Federation of Teachers have always been willing to work constructively with anyone who seeks to improve our schools and help children learn. But we will fight — with all the resources at our command — anyone whose policies will damage the schools and the children of this city.
Sincerely,
Michael Mulgrew
President
From David Cantor:
“The mayor put forward bold proposals to help New York City win President Obama’s Race to the Top competition, which will provide badly needed funds for our schools and students. While reforming some of these failed practices may make some of our partners uncomfortable, we need to do everything we can to draw down these dollars for the city’s school children.”
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December 3rd, 2009 4:55 pm
Give him hell, Michael! We can wait for a contract. It’s more important that we push back this crazy ideology.
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December 3rd, 2009 5:25 pm
It is time to show the mayor and klein that they cannot push the rank and file around. The Bloomberg/klein regime is a disgrace to education. They are conniving, underhanded, self-serving, lying parasites who’s main goal is to boast their egos and not help the children of NY. All members of the UFT let’s roll up our sleeves and show everyone at Tweed what we are made of! We are the educators who care for the 1.1 million children of NY.
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December 3rd, 2009 7:50 pm
This is a terrific letter and it should be placed in the NY Times.
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December 3rd, 2009 9:35 pm
Given our overall frustration with conditions in the schools -
- be it the overwhelming increase in (largely meaningless) (and often redundant on top of that) paperwork - be it the way new teachers are pushed around - be it the way senior teachers are poorly treated - be it the predations of aggressive principals from hell - be it the surge in unwarranted U-ratings - be it watching our schools and our colleagues schools being arbitrarily closed and “restructured” or parceled off to charters while the lives and careers of kids and teachers are disrupted -
- given all of this, we will find that the vast majority of teachers in this city appreciate the tone and content of Michael Mulgrew’s response. It’s time. And we may need a lot more.
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December 3rd, 2009 10:34 pm
I’d recommend that you watch what Mulgrew does, rather than what he says.
The Unity Caucus leadership is very adept at producing sound bites and committee reports for the consumption and pacification of the membership. However,it is terrible at defending its interests, as we are currently witnessing.
Everything that is happening now with the mayor’s aggressive attacks on teachers and the schools was predictable, yet it was the political cravenness of the UFT leadership, primarily in the form of Randi Weingarten, that enabled Bloomberg to eke out his election victory. As the Times reported after the election,”…Bloomberg aides said they had relentlessly promoted the mayor as invulnerable in the race when they knew differently… Said one top Bloomberg advisor…’If a poll had come out showing that the race was within five points, Barack Obama would have swung into town, the UFT would break for Thompson and Mike Bloomberg would not be mayor today.” (”Mayor Mends Fences After Slim Victory,” 11/4). Yet you really believe that these people are now going to stand up to Bloomberg’s (and let’s be honest, Obama’s) attacks? What actions on their part could possibly lead you to think so?
The Unity Caucus has controlled the UFT since its inception half a century ago. It is a one party state, and the last of the great political machines. In a bitter irony, Al Shanker, who initially gained his props by destroying the influence of the old Communist Party-led Teachers Union, ran the UFT much like the CP, with loyalty oaths and Democratic Centralism. Those traditions continue.
As currently led, the UFT is unreformable, and will bring itself, its members and urban public education down in the deluded thought that it can maintain itself by collaborating - their word, not mine - with people who seek to destroy it. Only a revolt by an informed membership, then aligned with parents and students to oppose privatization and corporate control, provides any hope of saving public education and teacher unionism in NYC.
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December 3rd, 2009 11:06 pm
how can the UFT continue to support teachers who no principal wants to hire? I never ceased to be amazed at the denial of reality, in a nation with 10% unemployment, the UFT thinks terrible teachers should be defended, paid with public dollars indefinitely, and given lifetime employment completely disconnected from actual performance. Unreal!
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December 3rd, 2009 11:21 pm
triple 3 the teachers are already “hired” since they are getting paid.. what they don’t have is positions because of the failed policies of the DOE
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December 3rd, 2009 11:31 pm
President Mulgrew’s zap of the DOE’s let-teachers-rot rubber room policy is welcome. But the UFT is a silent partner in DOE’s abuse of due process. For example, when accused teachers are interviewed by OSI investigators prior to reassignment, the standard counsel from UFT special reps is –say nothing lest the investigators twist your words and use them against you in your hearing, wait for the 3020a when you will have a lawyer and an arbitrator to protect your rights.
Of course, this passive stance allows investigators, who are often less finders of fact than prosecutors, a free ride to substantiate complaints with flimsy evidence and without explanation. “My job is not to tell you what my job is,” said surly OSI investigator Joseph Fiorello when I asked him last June whether he was a fact-finder or a prosecutor while he was grilling me about allegedly “racist” XMAS cards that I sent to my chapter members at Cobble Hill High School in Brooklyn.. The hand-made cards were paste-ups of Barry Blitt’s New Yorker portfolio of the President-elect in iconic poses (e.g., American Gothic, Adam on the Sistine ceiling, Jackie Robinson sliding, etc.).
Fiorello became so flustered that he fled the interview before I had a chance to defend myself against the concocted complaint by my hostile Principal who had condemned me, then the Chapter Leader, to the rubber room on trumped up corporal punishment charges the previous year. The Principal was presumably piling on because I had blown the whistle on his cover-up of three arsons at the school in early December 2008. Naturally, his crazy “racist” card complaint was substantiated, and without a murmur of protest from my special rep.
Topping off the rep’s meekness and mildness was his refusal to give me a copy of the post-interview notes that he took in private as Fiorello reeled off the details of the complaint. From what the rep told me Fiorello tampered with the evidence. I want to use those notes to charge Fiorello and OSI with official misconduct. No go. The rep said the notes are his ”property” and he will release them only at a future hearing. But I’ll never get a hearing on the Obama cards because OSI referred the case back to the Principal “for whatever action he deems appropriate.”
So what’s the big deal? I have shot at proving that OSI is corrupt and maybe have the equally bogus corporal cases tossed out, too. Yet the UFT won’t help. It is deliberately withholding exculpatory evidence without reason. If the rep were my lawyer rather than my pretend advocate, he would be legally bound to turn over the notes on demand. Clearly, the UFT is morally bound and thus my frustration with its lack of solidarity.
Finally, I have offered the UFT a chance at partial redemption. The Office of Equal Opportunity wants to talk to me about a recent incident in the rubber room. Normally, a rep would accompany me. But I am insisting on hardcore representation this time, not the submissive, collusive act of UFT tradition.
“I am requesting vigorous, even agitated DuBois-style representation, no more sitting like a potted plant, letting me do all the strategy and defense, and a promise of notes, you know, full, timely, reputation-saving representation of a falsely accused member, the kind of union advocacy you’d expect in my place,” I emailed Brooklyn Borough Representative Howie Schoor on December 2. I await his response. -
December 4th, 2009 2:29 pm
NYC Dept of Ed recruiters did NOT receive bonuses. In fact, NYC Dept of Ed was the only city agency that has not received raises. Where are they getting their information? No published sources. Just stating bogus claims to support their arguement.
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December 4th, 2009 6:18 pm
[...] Will the AFT embrace school reform? Based on its New York City affiliate’s response to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Race to the Top efforts, keep the money off the betting line. [...]
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