News Archive

UFT President Michael Mulgrew announced at a Feb. 3 press conference at union headquarters that the UFT will donate $125,000 to Planned Parenthood, the nation’s largest provider of reproductive health services, as well as inaugurate a special online fundraising effort for the organization among its approximately 200,000 members. Planned Parenthood is a lifeline particularly for low-income and uninsured women, most of whom would have no other access to life-saving preventative screenings and other important health care.

In 2011 some 5 million Americans were denied the right to vote, through laws or executive orders, in 14 states - states that represent 171 or 63% of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency. Bills to restrict voting right were introduced in 38 states, with more to come this year. These measures hit people of color, low-income voters, students, youth, immigrants and seniors most.

An administration which has “never stopped congratulating itself for ending ‘social promotion’ has created a new program — ‘social graduation,’” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the City Council Committees on Education and Higher Education on Jan. 19.

For a movement that prides itself on quantifying results, most studies of charter schools are shabbily done, according to a review in the Jan. 13 issue of Science.

Teachers in Chester, Pa., who said they would be willing to work without pay to keep classroom disruption to a minimum after their school district reported in early January that its cash reserves had dipped below $100,000, scored a small victory on Jan. 10 when a federal judge approved an advance on the district’s state school aid pending the outcome of a lawsuit to force the state to provide adequate funding.

Even though almost two-thirds of school guidance counselors nationwide report having been trained in college and career-readiness counseling, only one third (just one quarter in high-poverty schools) say they are spending sufficient time on such activities, according to a poll by Hart Research Associates.

The UFT on Feb. 2 filed a class action suit against the city’s Administration for Children’s Services and the Hunts Point Multi-Service center — a non-profit social service agency — to recover an estimated $100,000 in funds that the organizations have refused to pay more than 40 home day care providers in the Bronx.

Mayor Bloomberg’s surprise move to close down 33 “persistently lowest-achieving” schools has swept up schools that are already making substantial progress. It would also close schools that are confronting problems not of their own making. All but a handful were in a federally funded school improvement program that was in its first of three years.

It’s a strange education reform policy that opens a school to great fanfare, allows it to founder and then shuts it down, say staff and students of the Manhattan Theatre Lab HS. Opened in 2004 and touted by the Bloomberg administration as one of the new small schools of the future, the Upper West Side school is an open-enrollment performing arts school — no audition is required for admission — housed in the basement of the six-campus Martin Luther King HS and now on the chopping block.

The staff and parents of Far Rockaway’s PS 215 — one of the 25 schools on the mayor’s original hit list for this year — paint a picture of a school crippled by four years in a row of budget cuts.

For more than five years, the Department of Education has turned a deaf ear to the persistent complaints of the staff that PS 22 Principal Carlen Padmore-Gateau has harassed, humiliated and driven teachers out of the Prospect Park school.

In testimony before state lawmakers on Jan. 23, UFT President Michael Mulgrew made a forceful case for additional funding for New York City schools while setting the record straight on teacher evaluations and the struggling schools that the mayor has abandoned.

In response to pressure from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the Department of Education has resumed talks with the UFT on the issue of teacher evaluations in 33 restart and transformation schools, nearly a month after the city walked away from the negotiating table. UFT President Mulgrew said the union hopes the governor's assistance "will lead to an evaluation system that helps teachers get better throughout their career, offers help and a process to remove teachers who are not successful in the difficult job of teaching, and is done fairly."

UFT President Michael Mulgrew testified before the New York State Senate and Assembly Joint Committees On Education and Finance

“The mayor seems to be lost in his own fantasy world of education, the one where reality doesn’t apply,” declared UFT President Michael Mulgrew in response to the mayor’s State of the City speech on Jan. 12, in which, among other proposals, he threatened to fire half the staffs in 33 schools receiving federal School Improvement Grant support.

The UFT negotiating committee met on Jan. 5 at union headquarters for a confidential discussion about what next steps to take to reach a settlement in stalled contract negotiations. Mediation has failed to resolve the serious differences between the UFT and the Department of Education.

In an important victory for parents, children, teachers and other school personnel, the City Council on Dec. 19 passed two bills to require the Department of Education to provide public notification and reporting on PCBs in city schools. More than 700 public schools in the five boroughs could contain PCBs — toxic chemicals linked to cancer, developmental disabilities and birth defects — in their light fixtures.

In order to keep the UFT Welfare Fund’s benefits secure not only for the present time but also for the future, changes have been made to the prescription drug plan and the dental plan, reported the Fund’s Executive Director Arthur Pepper. Members were sent a letter and information outlining these changes in December.

Testifying at a Dec. 12 state hearing, UFT Family Child Care Providers Chapter Chair Tammie Miller made clear her union’s concerns about both funding cuts to early childhood education and a new city initiative, Early Learn NYC, which threatens the livelihood of many of the UFT’s 28,000 providers.

“As major stakeholders in our schools, parents need to be engaged and respected,” Anthony Harmon, the UFT director of parent and community outreach, told the City Council Education Committee on Dec. 15 as he detailed the UFT’s varied efforts to help parents voice their concerns about their children’s education.

The UFT on Jan. 9 joined community, labor, student and faith organizations calling on state lawmakers to close corporate tax loopholes that are costing the state more than $1 billion a year. “What we’re asking for here are very reasonable solutions,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at the Albany press conference.

A year after big clashes between Republican governors and public-sector unions in Ohio and Wisconsin, the battle has shifted to Indiana, where Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels is seeking to pass “right to work” legislation designed to undermine private-section unions and workers’ rights protected by collective bargaining.

It’s not just in New York City where students of color are more likely to be suspended than are whites. The most recent national figures, from 2006, show 5 percent of white students suspended, compared with 15 percent of their black classmates, 7 percent of Hispanics and 3 percent of Asians.

Middle-class children ask their teachers for help more often and more assertively than do working-class children and therefore receive more support and assistance from teachers, a new study in the American Sociological Review finds. Middle-class children come to school better equipped to interact with their teachers, which also gives them an advantage over poorer students.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew on Jan. 13 announced that the union has filed an impasse petition with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). If PERB finds that an impasse exists, it will appoint a mediator and force the city to participate in attempts to reach a new agreement on the teacher evaluation process.

Mayor Bloomberg in his State of the City address on Jan. 12 proposed merit pay for teachers, vowed to step up efforts to remove ineffective teachers, blamed the union for the breakdown of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system in 33 restart and transformation schools and announced that he would open 50 new charter schools in the next two years. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, "The mayor seems to be lost in his own fantasy world of education, the one where reality doesn't apply."

Letter to the New York Daily News from UFT retiree Vincent Gaglione.

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.

Declaring that “we need a new blueprint for education,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo in his Jan. 4 State of the State address announced that he will convene a statewide commission to recommend education reforms. UFT President Mulgrew said, "A bipartisan state commission on education is a very promising idea. Rather than do what New York City now does, which is to set its educational policy by a political agenda, the commission could look at the research about what really works in schools"

Civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois’ epigram — “The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?” — was the subtext of the Dec. 10 Stand for Freedom march and rally for voting rights that drew what rally organizers estimated were tens of thousands of demonstrators, including more than 700 UFT members.

Capping a yearlong political battle by the UFT and its labor and community allies for economic equity, the New York State Legislature on Dec. 6 passed legislation that brought a measure of fairness to the state tax code while providing a much-needed boost in education funding for next year.

Test scores for New York City students showed little to no progress between 2009 and 2011 on national exams — even as students in other cities improved — while the racial achievement gaps remain as wide as they were when the mayor first took office, according to new test data released on Dec. 7.

With Chicago poised to shut down or overhaul 14 of its public schools, the Chicago Teachers Union hosted a “teach-in” day of community organizing workshops for more than 500 parents, community organizers and union members to bolster grassroots opposition to closings.

In a victory for unions, the National Labor Relations Board voted two-to-one on Nov. 30 to speed up union representation elections by restricting legal challenges until after a vote occurs.

Even newly arrived immigrant students can overcome language barriers and consistently complete school assignments, researchers find. The key to success, says a new study in the American Journal of Education, is having developed study skills while in their native country

Advocacy on behalf of patients — in the face of relentless pressure for profits by hospital administrations — was a major theme that threaded throughout the 32nd annual Professional Issues Conference of the Federation of Nurses/UFT held on Nov. 18 and 19.

The UFT scored a big victory for paraprofessionals throughout the city on Dec. 13 when an arbitrator ruled that paraprofessionals, like other pedagogues working at schools and school-based programs including LYFE and hospital schools, do not have to punch in and out on a time clock.

The UFT and the Department of Education have been in intensive negotiations for the past two months over the details of a new teacher evaluation system for schools designated for the “restart” and “transformation” federal intervention models only. With a Dec. 31 deadline looming for finalizing an agreement, both sides are meeting in subcommittees and going back and forth on key issues.

PS 161, once the jewel in the crown of District 17 in Brooklyn, is about to lose grades 6 through 8, the middle school that parents fought so hard to have added to the original K-6 school back in the mid-1980s.

“I can’t thank you all enough,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told delegates at the Dec. 7 Delegate Assembly, of their role leading up to the state Legislature’s Dec. 6 agreement that will make the state tax system more progressive and earmark $800 million of the new revenue for schools statewide.

Demanding that the Department of Education “fix, not close, schools,” angry parents, community leaders and political figures representing 15 schools targeted for closure crowded the steps of Tweed on Nov. 22 in a final push to take their schools off the chopping block.

Linette Ebanks had always read storybooks to the children who attend her child care program, Little People’s Retreat, in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. But then she was shown the “picture walk,” a technique to more actively engage children during story time by showing them pictures from a book before reading it and asking them what they think it will be about.

The Department of Education has failed to provide the equipment, time, training and support that UFT members need to do work involving the Special Education Student Information System. The union is doing everything it can to force the DOE to come up with a sound and reasonable plan.

Anthony Harmon, UFT director of community and parent outreach, testified before the New York City Council Committee on Education.

The Department of Education announced on Dec. 8 that it would move to close or downsize 15 struggling schools, and that more schools would be added to the list. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, "This announcement... represents another stunning failure of DOE management. Rather than doing the hard work of helping struggling schools, the DOE tries to close them, making sure that the hardest-to-educate kids end up concentrated in the next school on the closure list."

The UFT resolves to support and participate in the Stand For Freedom march at 11 a.m. on Saturday, Dec. 10, 2011, United Nations’ Human Rights Day, from the offices of the Koch brothers, major funders of anti-voting measures, located at 61st Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, to Dag Hammarskjold Plaza at the United Nations located at East 47th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan for a rally at 12 noon.

The UFT resolves to initiate and support efforts to ensure that child care providers receive timely compensation with appropriate year-end tax statements, and to oppose blatant non-payment of compensation, unfair administration fees, poor program support services and any type of discrimination directed at network providers.