Mulgrew’s message focuses on teachers’ value

Miller PhotographySharing the stage — and the limelight — after their well-received TV ad are UFT educators (from left) Peter Cohen of PS 163 in Manhattan, Geoffrey Tulloch of Food and Finance HS in Manhattan, Noemi Medina of PS 188 in Brooklyn, UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Christine Wong of PS 1 in Manhattan. In the ad, the teachers talk about their passion for their work: “My students inspire me,” Wong says as the ad opens. The ad concludes with a message from Mulgrew: “Work with us for better schools and a brighter future for all our students.” UFT President Michael Mulgrew opened the Feb. 15 Delegate Assembly on a high note, introducing the four teachers who are spotlighted in a new and upbeat UFT ad that began airing that week.

“We want to show the public what we do,” Mulgrew said in describing the commercial.

He said that the public already has a strong sense of the value of teachers and their union, as evidenced by the recent Quinnipiac poll that found that New Yorkers trust the UFT more than the mayor, 56 percent to 31 percent, to advocate for students.

“The public is on our side, and we’ve known that from our own polling,” Mulgrew said.

Mulgrew updated delegates on the latest developments in Albany, where negotiations on the statewide teacher evaluation process and the New York City appeals process for teacher ratings were reaching a critical point.

Mulgrew vowed that the UFT would not agree to an appeals process for an ineffective rating unless it included independent third-party review of the principal’s judgment.

Blasting the mayor’s all-out campaign to have the right to remove teachers rated ineffective without any independent appeal, Mulgrew said a more pressing issue is actually the difficulty in retaining good teachers.

Mulgrew blasted the mayor for seeking to close the 33 city schools eligible for School Improvement Grants after the city did not get its way in negotiations on the appeals process in the evaluation system for those schools.

He announced that the union is mounting a “blue ribbon campaign” to support these schools, sending out boxes of ribbons, buttons and placards that call on the mayor to stop “holding these schools hostage.”

Mulgrew gave the delegates the bad news that the union had no more legal avenues available to it to stop the release of flawed and discredited Teacher Data Reports.

“We’ve come to the end of the road,” he said. “If we had a way to take this to the Supreme Court, I wanted to get there, but we don’t have an avenue.”

Of some consolation, he said, is the fact that the Department of Education has discontinued the TDR program and the chancellor has also come out against shaming teachers in public.

“But let’s be clear, the newspapers will take these reports and do bad things with them,” he said.

He said that the union will be sending out letters to members and parents and holding meetings in borough offices to support the affected teachers — about 12,000 math and English language arts teachers in grades 4 to 8 — and to discuss ways to deal with the issue.

The principals’ union, he noted, is also an ally in this issue, vowing to stand with teachers and work collaboratively on addressing public misperceptions.

“The truth is our best argument,” Mulgrew said for dealing with these reports with inaccurate and misleading data. “For members who have wrong information put out in the public, we will meet with our lawyers to discuss strategies and support.”

Mulgrew also reported that the union’s training sessions on the Danielson Framework for Teaching, which are being conducted at UFT offices in the five boroughs, are a huge hit. Nearly 450 principals and chapter leaders attended the most recent training in the Bronx, and calls for more training sessions are coming in from principals and teachers throughout the city, he said.