For Immediate Release

Spring Conference Address of Randi Weingarten President United Federation of Teachers May 5, 2007

May 5, 2007 11:35 AM

You know how, when you’re busy running from one thing to the next, you don’t have a chance to get some perspective on where you’ve been and where you’re going? Too often, that’s how it is for me. But the spring conference forces me to take a breath and do some assessing.

(Sorry. There’s too much assessing going on. Let me change that to say reflecting.)

Anyway, this year when I reflected, I was pleasantly surprised. I looked back at recent spring conference speeches, and here’s what I had talked about: school underfunding; late contracts and uncompetitive salaries; rampant teacher attrition; shameful professional disrespect; neglect of safety and discipline; and classes that are just too big.

Not a pretty picture.

But here’s the pleasant surprise: This year we made tremendous progress on each and every one of these issues.

We heard a lot of tough talk, true. And we faced some serious threats – to job security, to tenure, to our pensions and health benefits, to name a few. But in the end, we fought them all off, protecting tenure and job security and maintaining all our rights and benefits. And, to boot, we secured an early contract, bringing the increase in salaries in six years to 43 percent and breaking the $100,000 barrier.

And just last month the City Council passed a whistle-blower protection law for educators by a veto-proof margin, despite opposition from City Hall and Tweed. Look, it’s important that the mayor has introduced a confidential survey to elicit teachers’ views. But equally important is a protection for individual members from retaliation when they speak out on behalf of children. I want to thank Council Members Robert Jackson and Eric Gioia and Speaker Christine Quinn for their leadership.

Of course, while we’re reviewing the year, we must highlight the work done by a broad coalition of parents, educators, labor and community activists and elected officials to win the Campaign for Fiscal Equity funding suit, and the political fight to get it implemented in Albany. More than $5 billion of additional aid over the next four years will go to our schools, much of it for the things we advocated, including those long-sought class size reductions!

Now we’re coming up on the system’s third version of Extreme Makeover. I’m beginning to understand what some of our veterans mean when they say that if you hang around the Board of Ed long enough, you start to feel like you’re watching old reruns. We had 32 school districts. Then we had 10 regions. Now press rewind, and while we are back to districts, in reality next year we’ll have some 1,450 autonomous schools, each an island unto itself.

Ironically, mayoral control was supposed to ensure top-to-bottom accountability, but under this plan it seems that the only ones being held accountable are those who work in schools – and that is a concern.

But just last month, again working with others, like some on the dais like Bill Thompson, Betsy Gotbaum, Scott Stringer -- publicly, at countless town hall meetings and rallies, and privately, making our case directly to the mayor -- we won an agreement that makes some major changes in this new reorganization plan. What are they?

· For the next two years, no school will lose money as a result of the new funding formulas. Successful schools will not be de-stabilized, and struggling schools will receive more resources.

· Senior teachers seeking transfers, and newer teachers seeking tenure, will not have the deck stacked against them. And if they do, we will not hesitate to grieve.

· Kids at risk will benefit from increased funding.

· Class sizes will start to shrink.

· Long overdue middle school reforms will be launched.

· And a new process that could potentially give greater voice to parents – a group that everyone in education should be embracing, not isolating or denigrating.

Small steps, perhaps, but significant enough to keep the focus on children’s learning for the next two years. And after all, children’s learning – not change for its own sake, or building national reputations – is our first obligation.

So we and Mayor Bloomberg declared détente to see if we can work together to educate our kids.

Will it make our jobs perfect? Far from it. I’m sure that, like the last reorganization, it will take some time to learn to navigate the new structure and figure out who’s in charge and where to go when a problem can’t be solved within the school.

We’ll also still have to fight the testing mania -- both here at home and in Washington, as No Child Left Behind comes up for reauthorization.

And, finally (as we’ve said before), well in advance of 2009, when mayoral control automatically sunsets, we must have a serious discussion about what type of school governance will foster effective teaching and learning in New York City.

But, among the changes we secured is one that overrides all – and that is voice, for ourselves and for parents.

Will they listen? I certainly can’t offer any guarantees. For now we are committed to trying to make the dialogue work. And if the promise to listen and work together proves to be illusory, then we will be on the streets again.

However it turns out, we gained something else in this battle -- something more valuable than any provision in any official agreement: We gained partners. Maybe the strongest partnership with parents and community in the union’s 47-year history.

All in all, it has been a productive year. Let me applaud you for all the work you’ve done in making that so. And while we’re at it, give yourselves a round of applause; you rarely get the recognition you deserve.

[applause]

And there are others we must applaud, too. Take class size, for example. We couldn’t have accomplished what we did without allies. That was no one-shot deal. In fact, there were some – even among you – who by the second round of petitions were beginning to think we were on a fool’s errand.

But the parents did not waver. When some editorials tried to divide them from the union — by playing the “all the UFT wants is more members” card – parents didn’t take the bait. “This is not about them,” the parents said. “It’s not even about us. It’s about our children.”

In addition to the parents and community activists, and of course our members, who gathered petitions, sent faxes and visited their legislators, we cannot ignore our friends in Albany who made it all happen. Governor Spitzer’s leadership was critical, both on CFE and on making class size reduction a mandate for NYC.

And one lawmaker stands above the rest in the help she gave us on the class size issue. Way before others were ready to grapple with the hard question of how to use the CFE money, the chair of the Assembly Education committee, Cathy Nolan, who also happens to be a proud NYC public school parent, sponsored a bill to use a chunk of that money to reduce class size. With her and Speaker Silver’s leadership and Assemblyman Rory Lancman’s help, class size became the Assembly’s signature issue.

We all know the African proverb about how it takes a village to raise a child. Well, today, we are presenting the John Dewey Friend of Education award to the village. To the people who worked so hard with us, shoulder to shoulder, to secure CFE funding and put the public back in public education.

Will the representatives of the 13 organizations please stand? And Assemblywoman Nolan, will you also please stand? Let us give them a hand.

[applause]

[Later I’ll ask our awardees to join me so we can officially recognize them.]

Let me use the next few minutes to talk about where we go from here.

Today we are honoring parents and community leaders who had to shout to be heard and demonstrate to be seen. It shouldn’t have had to be that way. They should be listened to because of who they are. The same is true of educators and this union. After all, we know a thing or two about what works in our schools.

We proved that with the Chancellor’s District, which used our ideas about what our children needed – and it worked. And the main reason it worked was that everybody involved in those schools bought in; they were invested in it and felt responsible for its success. So teachers, administrators and parents worked together. Educators initially had a choice whether to stay or go, and those that stayed chose the best staffs they could and supported them on the job. They designed their own professional development, shared common planning time, and reached out to parents. In other words, they built genuine learning communities.

The new reorganization could have done that, too. In fact, most parents and teachers believe in many of the things that this new reorganization strives to accomplish.

· We believe that the best decision-making is at the school level.

· We believe that funding should be equitable and reflect children’s needs.

· And we believe that all children should have the very best teachers we can give them.

So what’s the problem? As usual, the problem is not so much with the goals, but with how we get there.

For instance, Chancellor Klein talks a lot about the importance of good teachers. But we must really work hard to make sure that every child has a good teacher and every public school is a school of choice for parents and educators alike.

Let me be clear. Research has shown that the children who need highly skilled, experienced teachers the most get them the least. And we know that highly skilled teachers, especially two or three in a row, can make a tremendous difference in a child’s success.

Obviously, experience has a lot to do with a teacher’s effectiveness. Of course, there are some brand-new teachers who are amazing! But let’s be honest. Most of us – including me – remember all too well the struggles and mistakes of our first year or two. It takes time to master the many skills that make a great teacher.

So when the statistics show, as they do, that because of high teacher turnover, there are many more inexperienced teachers in schools with high concentrations of at-risk youngsters, then that’s a concern. NYC is no exception to that national pattern, although the disparity is less than in many other places.

This “unequal distribution of experienced teachers” has become a big part of the debate over No Child Left Behind. Yes, there is a growing consensus that urban schools are under-funded, but many educators and advocates say that, even if the money were there, the job would not be complete until all children have equal access to the most valuable education resource: highly skilled, experienced teachers.

The union bashers have seized upon this issue as yet another reason to get rid of teacher unions. If there were no unions and no union contracts, they say, they could force teachers to go wherever they wanted them.

Isn’t it ironic? The same people who denigrate seniority are the ones singing the praises of experienced (aka “senior”) teachers.

How many times have we heard the pundits call for involuntary transfers right here in New York? Talk about a solution that creates many more problems than it solves! Thankfully, it was not an issue raised in the last negotiation, but it remains a line in the sand for us.

So the newest idea of the day for forcing teachers to move is a school funding formula that follows the child, and then on top of that, gives schools more money for their at-risk students. So far, so good.

The problem is that if this is a zero-sum game, the schools that work get penalized. Schools that have been successful at keeping their experienced teachers lose funding, so they can no longer afford their experienced teaching force. And hard-to-staff schools become the only schools that have the budgets to hire and keep senior teachers.

This is what the city announced in January, but now, because of the intervention of the UFT and our Dewey Award winners, it has significantly changed. That’s a good thing, because otherwise, many solid, stable schools -- including some serving poor communities – would have been destroyed.

And, it never would have worked! You cannot turn around a low-performing school by forcing teachers to work there. Success happens in a positive, committed learning community where everyone feels invested.

We all want all children to meet high educational standards, and we all recognize that children of color and those in poverty often have the longest way to go. If we are to close that achievement gap, we must make sure that the children who are furthest behind have the teachers they need to help them catch up.

So we need to get more experienced teachers into high-poverty schools. And we can! Through the collective-bargaining process, we have gone a long way already. Between expanding transfer opportunities, introducing incentives to staff SURR schools, enforcing certification standards, and fighting for higher salaries, we now have — by the mayor’s own admission — one of the most highly qualified teaching forces in this nation.

As a result of all these efforts, there’s been a noticeable increase in experienced teachers in our highest-poverty schools. Schools with 80%-plus poverty levels now have the same proportion of teachers with more than 5 years experience as schools with less than 80% poverty. Not that the critics would actually let the facts intrude on their rhetoric.

Still, the clamor to recruit more experienced teachers into high-poverty schools is unabated. But does anyone ask you, the teachers, what would bring you into low-performing schools? Nor do very many of those policy wonks bother asking teachers in struggling schools what would help children most and make your professional life better, so you’d want to stay.

I’ll bet you can think of half a dozen ways low-performing schools could attract and retain more good teachers. Indeed, thousands of you have already gone to hard-to-staff schools – or at least schools that by their demographics should be hard to staff. In every district there are examples of great schools with great teachers in tough neighborhoods – schools with a staff that stays, works hard, and succeeds. They are the stuff that legends are made of.

How do those schools do it? What makes a school a place where teachers want to teach and children want to learn? What would make every public school a school of choice for parents and educators alike?

Three years ago, at our spring conference, I laid out a blueprint for turning around low-performing schools. We proposed a comprehensive array of strategies and conditions including collaborative planning and decision-making; small classes; safety and discipline; adequate resources; good facilities; health and guidance services for kids and families.

Call it the school of dreams. (With spring in the air, I can’t resist a baseball analogy, despite the Yankees losing streak.) Build schools like that and they will come.

But today I’d like to go further than those recommendations. I’d like to focus specifically on incentives to attract teachers to traditionally hard-to-staff schools and keep them there.

One factor that clearly keeps experienced teachers in tough schools is the quality of the leadership. We all know principals who know what they are doing and who are so supportive, or so inspiring, that their staffs would follow them anywhere. We need more of those principals. If every hard-to-staff school had a collaborative leader like that, there wouldn’t be any hard-to-staff schools.

Unfortunately you can’t mandate that. And holding student test scores over the heads of principals won’t accomplish that goal either. It will only create tension, not collegiality. If the DOE really wants to find out if principals are effective, ask their staffs. The new staff satisfaction survey is a good step in that direction, but for a real check and balance, we need 360-degree evaluations in every school, and especially in hard-to-staff schools. Flattening the management structure that way helps to build the collegial communities in which students and teachers thrive.

And here’s a simple, common-sense incentive. Teachers, like everyone else in New York, need a reasonable commute. In fact, most teachers transfer in order to be closer to home.

Well, maybe you can’t move the school, but with three-quarters of our members living in the city, they must rely on limited mass transit routes within and between the outer boroughs, or they must drive. Countless hours are spent circling the school every morning looking for a spot or rushing out at lunch to change sides. Parking could solve that.

And while we are talking about commutes, how about incentives for people who volunteer to work in hard-to-staff schools, like discount MetroCards or E-Z pass or housing allowances?

These are the kinds of things we’ve been talking about for years – the kinds of things that, if asked, any teacher would mention.

Today I’d like to propose three new ideas that will create a healthy balance of newer and veteran teachers in hard-to-staff schools.

Number 1: A basic strategy for improving the learning of struggling students and reducing the anonymity that leads to dropping out is personalizing instruction. That means tailoring lessons to the individual learning needs of each child and offering more one-on-one attention in class. But when a teacher works with more than 150 secondary school students every day, or teaches five or six subjects a day in an elementary school class, that individualization becomes impossible. Classes are too large and time is too short.

Teachers tell me all the time, “There just aren’t enough hours in the day” to do everything they want to do to improve the education they can offer their kids -- things like reaching out to parents; planning, polishing and modifying lessons; participating in a specialized program to hone their skills; or completing the ever-growing testing and data compilation now required. Indeed, we recently learned that mandatory assessments and related paperwork consume the equivalent of one day a week of instructional time.

So as an incentive in hard-to-staff schools, to enable teachers to effectively personalize and differentiate instruction, I propose that those schools receive funding to reduce their student-teacher ratio by 20 percent. The staff and the principal would then use a school-based option to decide exactly how to use these funds. Take a typical secondary school: Every class could be 20% smaller, or teachers could teach four periods and devote the additional time to work on agreed-upon educational tasks that are part-and-parcel of the school’s Comprehensive Educational Plan -- or they could design a combination of time usage and class size reduction. I’m sure elementary school teachers can envision countless ways to use a 20% reduction in student- teacher ratios. (These reductions, by the way, would be on top of the citywide reductions mandated under the new state Contract for Excellence.)

This is school-based decision-making at its best. The entire staff, including the principal, would have a say.

Why these two strategies?

Smaller classes let teachers make personal connections with every child and differentiate instruction accordingly. The new, small high schools were designed with this strategy in mind, and they have the lowest student-teacher ratios in the city.

On the other hand, changing teacher schedules could provide time for teachers to work together to analyze and address students’ needs. For example if a child is just not “getting” fractions, (a topic close to my heart, as I always struggled with math) teachers could share approaches they’ve tried and successes they’ve had in similar situations. They could review and help improve one another’s lesson plans for teaching fractions, or suggest appropriate materials.

Teachers who have many English language learners in their classes could meet with experts in English as a Second Language, and learn how to refine their teaching methods to better help those students.

The time spent on this professional work would help students, enhance teachers' skills and build the kind of community that is the hallmark of every successful school. And the extra CFE money for high-need schools should more than cover what amounts to about a 12% increase in a school’s budget.

So, for this first proposal, that’s the strategy, the implementation and the funding. For many teachers and their students, such a concept would be a dream come true – a school of dreams.

Number 2: Sometimes a struggling school has become resigned to failure, its staff discouraged and dispirited. It takes more than one person to turn such a school around; it takes a real change in culture -- and that may mean a group of teachers who have worked together before and want to stay together. I propose that hard-to-staff schools offer group transfers for two or more teachers who want to take on a new challenge. They must apply as a team, be hired as a team, and go as a team. And to encourage them to take the risk and make the move, the school system should offer them the assurance that, if the school should close, they could return to their home school or have preference in other schools.

Number 3: Let’s not ignore the allure of money. The recent CSA contract doesn’t. It offers $25,000 more to principals who volunteer to lead hard-to-staff schools.

We have previously proposed a hard-to-staff differential, but for all the educators in those schools. Now here’s a value added: What if we expanded that notion into a broader service differential so we could compensate teachers and others who go above and beyond for their students? A service differential is just like any other differential, but instead of taking courses to earn it, you provide extra service.

Perhaps you develop a unit of lesson plans for your grade or department, or you launch a school-wide parent involvement program, or you design and operate a school-to-work internship program, or an annual Earth Day program that takes on neighborhood environmental projects -- or any of the countless special initiatives that teachers would want to undertake. Those programs could earn you credits toward a differential.

All of these incentives could be negotiated for hard-to-staff schools first, and then expanded citywide if they are successful.

* * *

These proposals are powerful recruitment and retention incentives that would transform hard-to-staff schools into schools that teachers would gravitate to and parents would want their children to attend. And in recognition of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity legacy, we could call them Collaboration for Education schools, or CFE schools. Although I won’t hold my breath for the day the union-bashers see it this way, the results would finally put to rest the myth that the union contract hinders, not helps, children’s education.

These ideas are in the tradition of the grand alliance between public school educators, parents, labor unionists and civil rights advocates. Although educators are no more responsible for the inequities that exist in our public schools than we are for the injustices that pervade our entire social structure, we will not shy away from the fight to eradicate them. The UFT is, and always has been, committed to the principles of democracy and equality of opportunity that public education was created to advance. The proposals I’ve offered today are part of that worthy mission.

Thank you.