News Archive

Teachers and staff at the Academy of the City Charter School in Long Island City have announced they will seek to be represented by the United Federation of Teachers.

Alarmed by Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to reduce the Department of Education’s current obligations to report on class sizes and temporary classrooms, the UFT on May 14 gave written testimony to the City Council registering its opposition to the mayor’s recommendations.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew told a packed room of City Council members attending the union’s annual legislative briefing on May 15 that its top priority for the budget for the coming year was retaining the more than 14,000 child care slots for low-income families that the mayor wants to eliminate.

Following months of negotiations between the state’s teachers unions, legislators and Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy on how to overhaul public school policy, the governor announced on May 8 what all parties agreed was a “historic compromise.” Among the bill’s particulars: an additional $100 million in state funding for schools.

The state-appointed School Reform Commission’s recently announced plan to privatize most of the Philadelphia School District — the commission calls it “decentralization” — is drawing fire from teachers, parents and community members. If approved, the plan would close 64 neighborhood schools in the next five years and send thousands of students to charter schools.

High school students taught how to read historical documents with an eye to reconciling conflicting accounts of history significantly improved their understanding of history, retention of facts, and reading comprehension compared to similar students studying history using a traditional lecture and textbook approach, according to a study.

From promoting compassion to reinventing the school model, from exploring new technology to implementing dynamic teaching practices, the workshops at the 2012 UFT Spring Education Conference reflected the changing landscape of education. “We’re moving away from the concept of teaching as an island unto yourself,” said Mitch Godkin of Russell Sage JHS in Queens.

He never expected to be elected to the New York City Council and chair its education committee. “Robert Jackson always fought for the right thing, never acting out of a political plan, but got where he was fight by fight,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew, presenting Jackson with the John Dewey Award, awarded for excellence in education, on May 12.

UFT members got their annual chance to grill the experts on some tough education questions at Operation Soapbox, the opening event of the union’s Spring Education Conference. UFT President Michael Mulgrew and Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University, were on the hot seat.

More than 200 educators came to UFT headquarters on May 10 for a conference on combating bullying that was jointly sponsored by the union and the Council for Unity. The conference featured a keynote address by the director of the documentary “Bully,” an array of workshops, and a panel discussion with activists from a wide range of backgrounds.

In a speech to the Association for a Better New York on May 17, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that, absent a new teacher evaluation system, the city would move to fire all teachers who receive U ratings two years in a row. He also proposed offering buyouts to teachers who have been in the ATR pool for over a year.

The UFT resolves to oppose the current NYPD “stop and frisk” practices as ineffective and counter-productive means of crime prevention and as violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of thousands of innocent New Yorkers, and to support the June 17 national march against Stop and Frisk on June 17.

The state Public Employment Relations Board on May 15 rejected an appeal by the city’s Department of Education of PERB’s earlier decision to appoint a mediator to help resolve the issue of teacher evaluations in 33 schools. In the ruling, PERB said that the attempts by the Department of Education to change the improvement model it planned to use for the schools “does not nullify its obligations” to negotiate with the teachers’ union.

High housing costs and restrictive zoning practices block low-income students from attending schools that attain high average scores on state standardized tests because their parents cannot afford to live near such public schools, says a new national study from the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

Eadie Shanker’s name is often followed by the description, “wife of the late UFT and AFT president, Albert Shanker.” But the former Queens teacher blazed some trails of her own — which is why she was named a winner of the Not For Ourselves Alone: The Sandy Feldman Outstanding Leadership Award at the NYSUT Representative Assembly in Buffalo on April 26.

The UFT has long criticized the Department of Education for relying on progress reports to close schools or make other high-stake decisions, using as they do questionable state tests for 85 percent of the grade. Now an independent city budget agency has concluded that the progress reports do not accurately measure annual academic achievement.

Almost two years into the federal Race to the Top program, states are spending their shares of the $4 billion prize at a snail’s pace.

At the giant May Day rally in Union Square, UFT members joined tens of thousands of other union members and Occupy Wall Street supporters in defending immigrants’ rights and building on what working people struggling for economic and social justice have won.

Mayor Bloomberg’s final budget proposal for the coming fiscal year, released on May 3, restores 2,570 of some 6,000 teaching positions lost over the past five years — marking the first time in four years that the city will be replacing teachers who leave.

At the UFT’s second annual faith-based breakfast on April 19, the Rev. William Barber, the pastor of the Greenleaf Christian Church in North Carolina and president of that state’s NAACP, electrified an audience of clergy of all faiths, labor and community leaders and educators with a history, civics and theology lesson that charged that the United States has lost its way.

Chanting “No cuts to child care” and “Yes we can,” 500 UFT-represented family child care providers rallied against the mayor’s plans to cut subsidized child care for close to 16,000 low-income children, at Harlem’s historic Alhambra Ballroom on April 24.

Charging the mayor and the city Department of Education with politics and arrogant indifference in their march to close schools, community activists, parents, political leaders and staff from August Martin HS pointed to the steady rise in graduation rates and test scores at the Jamaica school over the past three years as they stepped up their fight to save the targeted school.

“The majority of New York City public school students who are in need of mental health services do not get them,” Lila Ezra, the UFT’s director of clinical counseling and victim support, told a joint hearing of the New York City Council’s Education and Mental Health Committees on May 1.

Scores of parents and teachers rallied outside City Hall to protest the mayor’s school-closing policy on April 26, just hours before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy voted to shutter 24 struggling schools, dismiss their staffs and reopen them in the fall under new names.

The UFT and the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators on May 7 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to prevent the “sham” closing and restaffing of 24 schools that would be reopened almost immediately in the same buildings and with the same students. The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction that would be in effect until the issue can be resolved through arbitration.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew testified before the New York State Assembly Standing Committees on Children and Families; Oversight, Analysis and Investigation; Social Services; and the Assembly Taskforce on Women's Issues.

In the wake of a resolution passed this weekend by the Representative Assembly of NYSUT, the UFT will recommend that the city’s Teachers’ Retirement System (TRS) suspend any new investments with New Mountain Capital and union-busting Wall Street financier Steven Klinsky, whose Victory Inc. operates charters schools in New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois.

UFT Vice President Leo Casey testified on co-locations before the New York City Council Committee on Education.

The decline in the labor movement’s power and numbers has contributed significantly to rising wage inequality in the United States, according to a study published in the American Sociological Review.

A resolution has been reached in the monthlong clash between the Motion Picture Association of America, which rates the age-appropriateness of movies, and the makers of the documentary “Bully” over the film’s rating. The film was granted a PG-13 rating and released nationwide on April 13 after the producers agreed to edit out three uses of an expletive.

As state lawmakers in New York State mull changing the law to restrict the public release of future teacher evaluations, the two houses of the Tennessee State Legislature have unanimously approved a bill keeping teacher evaluation scores out of the public eye. Gov. Bill Haslam is expected to sign it.

Common sense finally prevailed: Yellow school bus service will be restored to 7th- and 8th-grade students in Staten Island and some inaccessible parts of Queens beginning in September 2012.

Thanks to UFT pressure, 45 family child care providers who worked for the Bronx-based Hunts Point Multi-Service Center for four months without being paid have received $174,956 in back pay. After the UFT and providers brought a lawsuit on Feb. 2, the city’s Administration for Children’s Services paid the overdue checks on what turned out to be a lucky Friday, April 13.

Fordham Leadership Academy for Business and Technology, one of five schools colocated at the Bronx’s Theodore Roosevelt HS Complex, is one of the 26 schools on Bloomberg’s list to be closed in the summer and reopened in September with half the original staff. The faculty says the school’s success was sabotaged by its former principal, Richard Bost.

The UFT resolves that, as educators and as parents, our deepest condolences go to the parents of Trayvon Martin, we oppose “stand your ground” laws, and we have a responsibility to ensure the safety of all our students and children, by teaching them how to protect and secure themselves and by tirelessly working to create a society in which all young people are judged “by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin.”

The UFT resolves to publicize the upcoming conference, “The Bullying Crisis: A Call to Action,” and encourage members and other interested parties and organizations to attend.

The UFT resolves to endorse and participate in the May Day for the 99% march and rally on May 1, 2012, and urge its members to support and participate in the events as well.

The UFT resolves to support all efforts by the New York City Council to recognize public school educators and celebrate their many and varied contributions to children and youths, families, school communities and the overall quality of life in New York City.

Researchers studying the Philadelphia school district, which has taken a business-model approach to school reform for years, find that such policies have nearly eliminated opportunities for public oversight and that little attention is paid to systemic issues.

Poor schooling puts the nation’s security at risk because the nation’s public schools aren’t adequately preparing young people to “fill the ranks of the Foreign Service, the intelligence community, and the armed forces,” warns a Council of Foreign Relations task force headed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

More than 20,000 public school teachers in California were given layoff notices by the state’s March 15 deadline for alerting educators they may be out of work next fall.

The state Public Employment Relations Board has named a mediator, at the request of the UFT, to help break the impasse between the union and the Department of Education over teacher evaluations in 33 schools.

Sporting school-color orange T-shirts and hoodies reading “We’re Open” superimposed over “Sorry, We’re closed!” the Sheepshead Bay HS community in Brooklyn is fighting for its life.

Mayor Bloomberg’s idea for a loan-forgiveness program to recruit talented teachers should be aimed at retaining teachers, not just hiring them, UFT President Michael Mulgrew warned as he called on the mayor and the Department of Education to negotiate the details with the union so that the plan accomplishes both goals.

“If any elected official says ‘special interest’ to you, you tell them you mean the millionaires and billionaires who only want more,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the approximately 1,200 teachers, family child care providers, paraprofessionals and parents who descended on Albany for the UFT’s annual Lobby Day on March 21.

The state budget, finalized on March 30, brought mostly good news for city schools. The state agreed to an additional $292 million for the education budget in New York City, even more than the governor originally promised.

The Department of Education announced on April 2 that it would not proceed with plans to shutter seven of the 33 schools that the mayor first targeted for closure in January after the DOE failed to reach an agreement with the UFT on a new teacher evaluation system for those schools. Those seven schools received an A or a B on their most recent School Progress Reports. Under the mayor’s proposed “turnaround” plan, the 33 schools were to close and reopen this summer, retaining their students but replacing up to half of the current staff. The city’s Panel for Educational Policy will determine the fates of the remaining 26 schools at its April 26 meeting.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew testified before the New York City Council Committee on Education.

“I celebrate myself,” the opening line of Walt Whitman’s famous poem “Song of Myself,” might serve as a reminder to UFT chapters that it’s time for them to celebrate themselves, to blow their own horns.