Testimony of Randi Weingarten before The New York City Council Education Committee May 11, 2006
May 11, 2006 12:00 AM
Thank you, Chairman Jackson and members of the Council’s Education Committee for allowing me to testify on this crucial topic today.
The need for greater parent involvement in the public schools is hardly a secret. Everyone talks about it, but the hard part is finding realistic and effective ways to achieve it. The Department of Education needs to do far more, in my estimation.
We at the UFT have been trying to involve parents for years, because we know that parent involvement is key to helping kids both succeed academically and become good citizens. We know that for many reasons — because parents have so many other pressures on them — getting parents to become more involved in their kid’s schooling is a difficult job. But the UFT has had had a measure of success in that regard, so let me indicate some of the things we have done that have worked.
First, we have made parent outreach a priority. I should note that the DOE has never really done that. We developed a Dial-A-Teacher program many years ago — I know you know about that program because it is famous and has been the model for similar programs all around the country and even abroad — to help students and their parents with homework assignments. We don’t do the homework for the students; we help them learn how to do it themselves. And similarly, we teach parents how to help their kids do homework. That’s one of the first, most basic ways to get parents involved.
But there’s much more. The Dial-A-Teacher program conducts workshops for parents throughout the school year to help them understand the kind of work their kids are doing in class. These workshops are geared not only to explain to parents the whys and wherefores of their children’s academic programs but include many specific techniques so they can work with their kids, help them do the required work and go beyond it to expand their horizons and their interests. The parents who come to these workshops really become dedicated and really get involved with their kids’ schools.
The Dial-A-Teacher program goes still further. Every fall it conducts a citywide parent conference that is so enormously successful that for years we have had to turn people away. Last October we had more than 3,000 parents attend. This conference offers seminars and workshops on a variety of topics that help parents understand their kids, learn techniques to help them, learn how to get involved in their kids’ schools, learn how to prepare for Open School weeks and much more. The parents love these conferences and you can bet that those parents who attend make the commitment to being involved with their kids’ schoolwork.
The UFT, as part of its parent outreach program, has established a parent outreach liaison in every borough. These liaisons set up conferences and workshops to supplement the Dial-A-Teacher programs. They set up parent committees so that there is an ongoing dialog between parents and educators.
We have a quarterly newspaper for parents. The Home Team presents articles on things such as dealing with difficult boys or using the city as an academic resource. There’s a column by a psychologist who answers parents’ questions, plus tips on good books for different age groups, Web sites that offer interesting material and so on.
We have published guides for parents on Open School Week, what they should know, what to ask the teachers, and so on.
Our outreach to parents has resulted in such innovative developments as Community Collaborative 9, an exciting one-district project that now works in numerous Bronx neighborhoods as CC Bronx. It’s a model for how parents, guardians and the community can involve themselves in the schools. In that district, parents were concerned about teacher turnover. They wanted a way to attract and keep and support good teachers. Those parents researched, studied and worked with the UFT, and the result was the Lead Teacher Program. In the 10 schools in the original CC9 program, parents created Family, School, Community Partnership Committees, where parents, school staff and community leaders work together to tackle problems and create a spirit of community in the school. These committees have lobbied for traffic-calming speed bumps to improve traffic safety at their schools, brought new programs into their schools and found new opportunities for parent and community involvement.
The CC model was brought to Brooklyn where the Brooklyn Education Collaborative is targeting resources to schools that need them. They have Lead Teachers in classrooms, they have small classes. The Collaborative, an organization of parents, teachers and community leaders in three Brooklyn districts, developed a middle school model. These parents identified and concentrated on the dire lack of art, music and science in their middle schools. They surveyed the schools. They know which schools have science labs and which do not, or which have licensed science teachers and which do not. They got the DOE to order new science equipment for a dozen schools. Principals were calling parents to thank them for equipment they had not been able to secure until the parents intervened.
Now a new Brooklyn-Queens coalition is fighting for after-school programs in several underserved communities. In District 4, which includes Bushwick and a number of Queens neighborhoods, the new organization, BQ4 Educational Collaborative, is focusing on the lack of after-school opportunities. That’s something those local parents view as critical. Right now, just one in five district children has after-school activities.
On Staten Island, Ideal 31 is a powerful outreach to parents.
I have talked about the UFT programs not to blow our own horn — although I am very proud of them — but because we know that this kind of effort works. It can work on a much larger scale if the DOE did similar things. It should. Parent involvement in the schools is a goal that is achievable on a much higher level than we find at present — but it requires a commitment of time and effort. We would like to see that commitment by the DOE.
And that means much more than just a parent coordinator in every school. That’s just a tiny step in the right direction. As good as many coordinators are, many are not well-trained and not well-prepared to serve the community. They should be given the help and resources to bring parents to the schools, attend to their needs and help them get involved.
And then there’s the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council (or CPAC): Parents, who are true stakeholders in the system, need to have a real voice in the system, and not be made to feel as they they were simply rubber stamps. We understand that feeling; teachers have felt the same way. Teachers are constantly told what to do, and their comments about what works and does not work in their classrooms ignored. Worse, they are threatened with a charge of insubordination or something more drastic if they don't blindly follow bureaucratic orders about how they should teach, instead of being allowed to do what they think works best in their classrooms to help their students learn.
CPAC felt their parent voice had been so ignored by Tweed that it declined to go to Albany with the DOE to jointly lobby legislators. Instead they created an independent lobby day. It was the same day the UFT lobbied, and the move was seen by all as joint lobbying, because when parents and teachers really talk, we find much common ground.
Take the cell phone controversy for example. We understand why parents want their children to carry cell phones to and from school, and parents understand cell phones must not be used in schools—that they can be disruptive to teachers and to learning. So we found common ground in advocating for a reconsideration of the policy that would allow every school through the school's safety plan to devise a policy that would generally ban their use, but not their possession. It would also tailor that policy to the individual needs of a school. So whereas a school with lots of indiscipline and/or gang problems might still ban the phones, most would find ways for children to have them as long as they were out-of-use and out-of-sight during the school day.
That is what we mean by listening to parents and addressing the needs of parents and the educators at the school level.
And what better way to do this that through the school leadership team. But that means there has to be a functioning school leadership team in every school. In addition, the DOE should give the Community Education Councils some real information and some real training.
Class size is another issue, but more on that at another time.
In sum: Parents ought to be more involved in the schools. Many parents want to be more involved in the schools. We need to make sure that they are brought in. It requires that the DOE to make a real commitment to do so.
Thank you.
