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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.
Ten years into Bloomberg’s education reforms, the New York City school system has come full circle and is now shutting down new high schools at the same rate as old ones. High schools established by Bloomberg represent about 40 percent of all existing high schools and 38 percent of the high schools on the closing list.
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.
With the mayor’s escalating attacks on the UFT, the proportion of members contributing to building the union’s political efforts is at an all-time high. For the first time, a majority of UFT members belong to the Committee on Political Education (UFT COPE), the union reported.
Enraged at the mayor’s threat to close 33 “persistently lowest achieving” schools and remove half the staff in each school, more than 1,000 UFT-represented educators descended on a Jan. 18 meeting of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy at Brooklyn Technical HS, disrupting the proceedings with whistles and chants before walking out in protest.
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.
In an intense Delegate Assembly on Jan. 18, UFT President Michael Mulgrew explained to delegates the competing visions of teacher evaluation held by the UFT and the city Department of Education that have resulted in the union being in Mayor Bloomberg’s direct line of fire.
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.
Legacy HS for Integrated Studies appears to have turned the corner under a new principal, but the Department of Education wants to yank the rug out from under the Union Square school before the new principal’s reforms have a chance to take hold, say staff, students and parents from the school.
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.
A Harlem institution with 111 years behind it, Wadleigh Secondary School for the Performing and Visual Arts may have narrowly escaped being closed outright by the Department of Education this year, but the school must now battle to save its middle grades from the DOE’s ax — and battling it is.
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.
The UFT hit the mayor hard in a new television ad that begins with a serious-voiced narrator looking back at Michael Bloomberg’s educational record: “Ten years as mayor, and Mike Bloomberg still doesn’t get it.” Headlines torn from newspapers appear on the screen as the narrator continues: “Cathie Black, fudged education test scores, closing schools, parents shut out of the process.
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.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo promised more money for city schools next year in his budget address on Jan. 17, a welcome reversal after three years of budget cuts. But he made the offer conditional: Local school districts, including the city Department of Education, will forfeit the funds if they do not agree with their unions on new teacher evaluation systems.
“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.
The UFT on Jan. 13 asked the state’s Public Employment Relations Board to order mediation to bring negotiations on a teacher evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools back on track, after the city walked out of the talks during the Christmas break week.
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.
The Celebration of Teaching and Learning, a two-day professional development conference that brings together educational experts and advocates and more than 10,000 educators, will be returning to New York for its seventh year on March 16-17 at the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan.
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