Randi Weingarten Spring Conference Speech 2005

May 14, 2005 1:29 PM

Each year, we use our spring conference as a time to celebrate.

> We celebrate our students, their challenges and their accomplishments.

> We celebrate our profession. We pay tribute to your dedication to helping young people reach higher and go further.

> We celebrate our union, its proud history, and its continuing struggles on behalf of our members and the children we serve.

Take the themes of our recent conferences. They have all been positive, forward-looking themes of aspirations and hope.

In contrast, today’s theme, “Lost Opportunities,” turns its focus on the recent past. It may touch you as wistful, even sad. To me it is. Because this year, our profession has taken a hit. Our ability to act as the professionals we are has suffered.

We’re battling to turn that around, and we have every intention of succeeding. But right now, too many members feel their pride in their work slipping away. Rigid, lock-step teaching mandates have squelched their creativity, sometimes requiring them to use programs and practices they know don’t work.

Some see a return to the bad old days, when the principal was in total control and teachers had no voice. Perhaps from the administration’s point of view, that is the ideal; it’s often called the Golden Age of New York’s schools.

But the reality was a far cry from that comfortable myth: schools were crowded and crumbling; gangs ran rampant; and half of all students never graduated. The frustration with a distant, insensitive, highly centralized bureaucracy eventually led teachers to unionize and communities to press to decentralize the system. Lately, some of us wonder if we are doomed to repeat that tumultuous, bitter part of our history.

As for our students, although we expect their test scores to rise, which is a good thing, we worry that the fixation on test scores exacts too steep a price from them.

As a direct result of test fixation, the well-rounded education we want to give them has fallen by the wayside.

The values we want to impart, the love of literature, the fascination with science, and an appreciation for the beauty of music and art we want them to have – even the practical arts and career exploration -- all sacrificed on the altar of test preparation.

And to make it even harder for children, they are struggling to achieve higher and higher test scores under conditions that do not support deep learning any more than they support good teaching.

> They vie for attention in classes that are too large and in buildings that are too crowded.

> They watch their backs in the halls and cringe when chronically disruptive, even violent, students are returned once again to their classes.

> And, they struggle with curricula that often don’t match their needs.

It is very clear, my friends, we have our work cut out for us.

Up against these circumstances, we keep fighting for the resources promised to our children under the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision, in Albany, in court, in City Hall, and in my case, even in jail.

One way you can help is to pick up petitions, and join with the parents in your community to make smaller classes the law, once and for all. Please support the effort we launched two weeks ago, in coalition with parent and advocacy groups, to force the city to lower class sizes across-the-board.

It’s obvious from our forum on overcrowding and our protests about school safety how children are hurt when classes they need are full and hallways are packed.

And right now, thousands of educators across the city are filling out report cards on the Bloomberg/Klein administration, measuring the results of Children First. If you haven’t completed your report card yet, please do so. Those results are key. Because on June 2nd, at Madison Square Garden, we will release the grades you’ve given this administration. Then the public will hear from the people who live and breathe Children First every day what’s really happening in our schools and classrooms.

The bottom line? We will not be discouraged. These battles have waxed and waned for years. But throughout our history, we have always worked hard for our students and fought hard for our own professional recognition. And over the years, we have made great gains. I promise you, this period will be no exception.

How can I be so sure? Because remember, as I said at the outset, we are celebrating our union today. To quote a familiar refrain, our union makes us strong. We have strength in numbers and support from one another. If anything, the disrespect we get from the administration has brought us closer and made us stronger.

Personally, I take tremendous pride in the 3,764 school and regional actions that you have taken since February 1st. The ones you have helped dream up have been fabulous. The theme is always serious, but you have made it your own. I laughed out loud at one slogan, “TWEEDle-dee, TWEEDle-dum, and TWEEDle-dumber.”

What your actions have demonstrated is not just your solidarity, but your creativity. It’s a shame the powers-that-be do not let you exercise more of that imagination and creativity in your classrooms; if they did then they’d see what the kids lose out on.

So that’s what our theme of Lost Opportunities really means. We regret what could have happened in our schools in the last three years but didn’t; we mourn what our students are missing.

Think for a moment about what could have been.

Only three years ago, in June 2002, the outlook was full of promise. Three developments made us hopeful:

First, we had just negotiated a contract that made a significant dent in the 25-year gap between our salaries and those in the surrounding area. Although too many of our colleagues were retiring, we hoped that the jump in starting salaries would attract many new, fully-certified teachers — and it did..

Second, we finally had a victory in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. At long last, we thought, our schools would have the funding to provide all our students with the sound, basic education that is their constitutional right.

Third, after years of a school governance system that had outlived its time, we had a new mayor who was willing to take responsibility for and be held accountable for the schools. For that I gave him credit, and I still do.

We never under-estimated the size of the task, but with the mayor’s commitment, the CFE money, and a renewed public interest in education, we thought the stars were aligned for a bright future for our public school students.

We wanted to believe.

We wanted a mayor who valued teachers, and this one said he did.

We wanted a mayor who would negotiate a contract that was fair, and this one said he would.

And we wanted a mayor who could immunize the school system against the infection of politics and allow us to do our work, and this one seemed capable of doing that.

Of course, I’ve since realized that his confidence was built on his success as CEO of a privately held company, a culture that is very different from the school community that constitutes our world. Having lived in both worlds, I know you can’t take the same strategies used to fight Microsoft or produce desktop financial information and transfer them whole-cloth to educating children.

Sure, giving him control was taking a chance, but the legislation seemed to provide adequate checks and balances, and we thought the benefits would outweigh the risk. But now it seems a mid-course correction is in order.

For instance, remember when we first heard the new chancellor’s Children First plan? It was supposed to trim the bureaucracy and unify the curriculum, but as it turned out, it was heavy on the multi-layered bureaucratic structure and very light on what would actually happen in schools and classrooms.

Remember? ROCs and LICs, RISs and LISs … we had to learn a whole new language. It was all supposed to save money that would be re-directed to classrooms. Two years later a suspicious City Comptroller combed the books; the savings were less than half what the chancellor had claimed.

Maybe that original plan should have tipped us off that this administration was more comfortable with creating organizational flow charts and hiring six-figure executives than with the real day-to-day work of teachers and students.

Even with that unfolding scenario, we still kept faith. Our Delegate Assembly endorsed the Children First plan. But we qualified our approval, demanding no less than 11 changes. In preparing this speech I went over that resolution, and I was amazed at how prescient we were.

We talked about smaller classes; greater teaching flexibility; a leaner, more open and accountable structure; enforcement of a fair but strict code of student conduct; more parental input; greater teacher voice; and many other concerns that foreshadowed the very problems with Children First we face today.

Of course, this administration did not listen to us (or to anybody else), and a few months later, at the 2003 spring conference, right here in this hotel, we officially withdrew our support for Children First.

At the time, that pull-back may have seemed premature. Now, two years later, the public sees what we saw then. According to the polls, most people believe that the school system is no better today than it was before mayoral control.

Look what happened. We knew that a top-down command-and-control management and rigid, lock-step teaching mandates would be demoralizing. But I must admit, I never expected we’d be counting the staples in bulletin boards! And I never imagined that guidelines for, say, the workshop model, complete with its limit of 10 minutes of direct instruction, would devolve into orders to use it every day, for every lesson and every group of students.

Who ever expected the city’s chief lawyer to toss back to Albany $5 and-a-half billion dollars from the CFE case, arguing the city would rather turn down the money than pay even a dime toward a settlement? Talk about cutting off your nose … and the noses of a million schoolchildren!

For sure, we knew that getting a fair contract wasn’t going to be easy. It never is. But remember, Candidate Bloomberg proclaimed the importance of negotiating contracts on time. That was when he was running for office during our last contract battle. Could any one of us have predicted the irony that today, four years later, he’d be criticizing us for trying to reach closure on an agreement!

The truly sad thing is it didn’t have to be this way. Imagine instead what could have been had Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein not squandered so many of the opportunities handed to them.

Our union — your union — has made a number of proposals that would have improved our schools, and at the same time, shaped a contract agreement that meets the needs of the city, our members, and our students.

What is so frustrating to me is that the chancellor rejected every one of those proposals, even when they addressed the very problems he loves to complain about, the ones he says are caused by “the union contract.”

You know, speaking of that, no one has ever explained to me, if unions, tenure and our contracts are the cause of all that ails education, how come there are public schools in the city that do so well?

And why is it that so many students excel in the surrounding suburbs with the same tenure laws, and contracts similar to ours?

And how come, in states that don’t allow public-sector collective bargaining, students can’t hold a candle to ours?

By rejecting our overtures the chancellor and mayor have lost many opportunities. They lost them for our children, for us, and even for themselves and what they say they want to accomplish.

What were those opportunities? Let me describe a few of them.

Lost opportunity #1: Instead of educators grappling with an approach to reading that wasn’t designed to help struggling students, we could have had the Education Enterprise Zone for low-performing schools that I proposed at last year’s spring conference. Then those students — the 63% of Level 1 students who are in 38% of the schools — would have had the qualified teachers, appropriate curriculum, smaller classes, extra instructional time, and all the support services they needed. They wouldn’t have spent hours and hours doing test prep instead of real learning. And today, they’d be well on the road to achieving at levels we all want to see.

Lost opportunity # 2: If the chancellor had adopted that Enterprise Zone proposal rather than fighting with us about how to attract great teachers to low-performing schools, there would probably be no shortage of teachers in those low-performing schools. Instead, parents and educators would have been banging the doors down to get into them.

Lost opportunity # 3: Listen and decide, which would have been the better choice for our kids? Is it better for the mayor to be pushing for a sixth teaching period in the secondary schools, and for our members to be suffering through 100 minutes of often irrelevant professional development twice a month? Or, should he have accepted our proposal and given children 20 minutes a day more instruction — the equivalent of three weeks, without lengthening the school year a single day? The answer is obvious.

Lost opportunity #4: We often hear the chancellor and others claim that teachers who are incompetent or accused of sexual abuse or other egregious misconduct can’t be fired. This could be a moot point — if the chancellor had agreed to the streamlining proposals I made a year-and-a-half ago and the zero-tolerance proposal we made in November. But instead of protecting the safety of children by solving this problem now, it’s more politically advantageous for him to ignore our plan, and try to kill the state tenure system.

The 5th lost opportunity concerns a pet peeve of the chancellor, the mayor and some in the media — and that’s the lack of any so-called incentive or reward for the best teachers. The administration could have had the career ladder we proposed right from this stage five years ago. Under that plan, teachers would earn more and take on greater responsibilities as they gained skills. Then maybe many of our most experienced colleagues would not have retired as soon as they were eligible, or gone into administration.

Ironically, that career ladder idea has recently spawned similar programs. One of them is the Lead Teacher experiment in the Bronx, which the chancellor says he wants to replicate. I don’t get it! We agree on the problem; we even agree on the solution. So, why is it that working with us, not against us, listening, not lecturing, remains beyond their reach?

Listening is clearly not Joel Klein’s strong suit. Heeding the voice of classroom teachers, looking openly and honestly at what has worked and what has not, is beyond an administration that cares more about public relations than public education.

The chancellor came in determined to wipe the chalkboard clean (even to remove the chalkboards entirely). He decided that the p.r. benefits of a “fresh start” outweighed the benefits of preserving what was working. After all, if Tweed couldn’t take credit for it, what value did it have? Thus, the elimination of the nationally acclaimed Chancellor’s District. Right program, but wrong chancellor. So it had to go.

But changing direction every few years with each new administration takes its toll. Children become confused. Teachers have to give up successful practices they worked hard to develop. The system careens from pillar to post.

Sadly, that has been the pattern in New York. As Debbie Meier, who founded one of New York’s first small high schools back in the ‘70s, told the Times recently, “Every school reform comes to us as if it has no history.”

How can this pattern be avoided? How can we make sure each new administration, whether it’s every year, every four, or every eight years, doesn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Unfortunately, as the City Council Commission report on implementing CFE recently pointed out, there is no way under the current structure to do that. There is no objective, independent evaluation of existing programs to help us determine what to keep and what to discard. Congress has a Government Accountability Office; the City has an Independent Budget Office; but no parallel exists for the NYC Department of Education.

This has to change.

Justice DeGrasse, in the CFE decision, specifically required a “system of accountability” to measure whether adopted reforms actually provide the “opportunity for a sound basic education” that the court had ordered.

Yet, the city contends that existing accountability mechanisms are sufficient. What are those? Well, there’s only one that I know of, and it happens once every four years on a Tuesday in November. (I wonder if the mayor would think that a contractual clause that permitted supervisors to evaluate staff members only once every four years is a good idea?)

When there was an independently appointed board of education, at least it was a vehicle for obtaining and assessing information. Now, even that check and balance has been eliminated. What data are available are produced, massaged and selectively released by the same folks who have a stake in proving that their ideas worked.

And at that game of manipulating the numbers, no one beats Tweed. Despite their professed love of hard data, this administration has done all it can to obscure its operations and spin its results. Last year, the State Education Dept itself couldn’t find out what class sizes were, and the State Comptroller could not verify that state class-size reduction funds had actually been used for that purpose.

Without full disclosure, …

without a watchdog,

without venues for parent and community input,

without consultation with front-line educators,

… Tweed has taken the public out of public education. And we — all of us — need to fight to put the public part back in.

The school system must not be an evidence-free zone. Facts, not whims or even beliefs must guide our choices. It’s time to establish a separate evaluation and accountability mechanism to verify for the public what’s really going on. An independent, nonpartisan monitoring agency with the authority and the resources to analyze both programmatic and fiscal data. This evaluation agency, with its governing board of respected citizens, would then issue reports identifying proven, effective programs that deserve continuing support. And, based on the evidence, it would tell the public about ineffective programs that should be dropped.

Certainly no one who knows me well would accuse me of being a protector of the status quo. I don’t shrink from change; I always believe we can do things better, and I imagine the mayor does too.

But I am a teacher of social studies, and I often told my students we study history so we can learn from the past. That is what education is all about, learning and growing.

So I ask Mayor Bloomberg, if there is no basis for judging our schools, if each new administration must start from scratch, how can our schools make progress?

Join us, Mr. Mayor, in supporting true accountability, accountability that transcends any individual administration or political need of the moment. It is not too late for us to work together to fix what is broken and to expand what works. Instead of regretting the past, we can build the future.

So let me suggest one last opportunity, Opportunity #6, and this one must not be squandered.

Chancellor Klein, Mayor Bloomberg, you have to negotiate a fair contract with us.

Imagine the possibilities if you do that:

What if, instead of a demoralized, underpaid staff, fed up with being denigrated and demeaned, there were a contract that respects teachers’ judgment in the classroom? What if our voices were actually welcomed in the offices of Tweed? The mistakes that have been made could have been avoided —

mistakes in curriculum choices,

in high school admissions policies,

in testing,

in the headlong rush to open small schools without considering the effect on crowding and safety.

The mistakes in the configuration of the school day,

in the school budget formula (that they just had to scrap),

and in dismantling special education procedures with nothing to replace them.

Those mistakes, large and small, hurt children and destabilized the system.

> Instead of losing thousands of teachers every year to retirement, to the suburbs, or to another profession entirely, there could be a contract, with competitive salaries, so people can stay where they chose to build a career in the first place, and still support a family and live a middle-class life.

> Instead of pitting principals against teachers and creating adversarial conditions in schools, they could be combining their efforts, focusing, as I like to say, like a laser, on children’s achievement.

> And instead of an angry work force to contend with as election time nears, you, Mr. Mayor, could have a renewal of the spirit that has always made all of us proud to be educators in the greatest city in the world .

I ask you not to let this opportunity pass you by. Our kids have few enough opportunities; they can’t afford to lose any more. Each and every one needs and deserves the most highly qualified teachers we can recruit and retain.

With a record-breaking $3.3 billion dollar surplus, and CFE dollars on the horizon, the opportunity is at hand to give them those teachers and to make our schools their gateway to the American dream. There is no longer any legitimate excuse not to craft a deal that accomplishes that goal.

Really, Mr. Mayor, you know how to do a deal. You found a way to save the Plaza Hotel; you’ve done everything possible to get a football stadium done. It is almost hard for me to believe we’re negotiating with the same administration. That kind of “let’s roll up our sleeves and get this done” commitment is missing from our bargaining table.

At this point, it’s been two years with absolutely no progress —

- two years when we’ve proposed a solution to every issue you raised only to see our remedy rejected,

- two years when your side has not proposed one creative solution or moved an inch from your original core demands,

- two years when teachers have not stopped for a moment from working their hearts out hours and hours beyond the school day for our children, despite your administration’s lack of recognition and respect.

This is a profoundly tragic situation for all New Yorkers.

But, as I said, I’m a student of history, and history tells me that’s not the last word. History shows this union has never shirked a challenge, and we won’t start now. We have fought proudly for the children of New York City as we have for all working families. As the New York Times said last year, we have been part of every positive reform in the city’s schools.

The chancellor and mayor may want to ignore this legacy, they may try to close their ears to us, but we will not let them. Our voices will be heard.

And this I promise all of you, if history is a guide, we will prevail.