Testimony of Randi Weingarten, President, United Federation of Teachers (UFT) Before the City Council Education Committee on Proposed Whistle-blower Legislation

Mar 2, 2006 12:00 AM

Thursday, March 2, 2006

The UFT has a long and proud history of advocacy on behalf of New York City’s public school students. In this tradition, I come before you today to urge the passage of legislation protecting “whistle-blower” educators in our city’s schools.

School-based educators are the system’s canaries in the coal mine. Schoolchildren and parents depend on them to sound the alarm when special education students are not getting appropriate services, when dangerous school conditions threaten children’s safety or health, when a school budget and programs are mismanaged to the detriment of services for children.

It is no secret that many have complained about the lack of information and transparency at the Department of Education. Former Speaker Gifford Miller’s CFE Commission suggested an independent institute for research and accountability to evaluate the educational reform initiatives and track the use of CFE funding, and others, including Diane Ravitch and me, have suggested other changes. With such a lack of open communication to parents, to the press, and to education watchdogs, it’s often left to classroom educators to tell people what is going on in the schools. Yet more and more these days, my members are reluctant to speak out. They are afraid of reprisals, and given that many of them are new (more than half have been in the system five years or less), that’s not surprising.

The proposed legislation builds on the city’s 2003 whistleblower law, which protects city employees from retaliation for reporting corruption, criminal activity and conflicts of interest.

It would enhance protection for educators, given their unique circumstances and responsibilities, in the following way:

• The scope of whistle-blowing would be expanded to cover city educators who report a school policy or practice that, while not illegal, nevertheless hurts the health, safety, general welfare, or educational welfare of students.
• School employees who believe they have suffered an “adverse personnel action” in retaliation for making a complaint can inform the school system’s Special Commissioner of Investigation.
• The commissioner has three months (six if necessary) to complete an investigation and produce a written report of his findings.
• If the commissioner substantiates the complaint, the chancellor would have three months (six if necessary) to take remedial action. If the chancellor doesn’t act, the commissioner must relay the matter to the mayor.
• A school employee can file a civil lawsuit to seek redress if either the commissioner dismisses the complaint or the chancellor refuses to act on the commissioner’s finding.

In this hearing, you will hear from a number of courageous educators who became targets of retaliation and retribution because they refused to be silent about practices that harmed their students and schools.

They are representative of the dozens more who came forward wanting to tell their stories, and there are hundreds throughout the school system with their own stories of the repercussions that they faced for speaking out on behalf of their kids.

Let me tell you just a few of the many distressing personal stories that my members have told me.

In January 2004, Philip Nobile, a former journalist who taught political law at the Cobble Hill School of American Studies, sent a memo to his principal alerting him to a pattern of grade tampering. Specifically, he said there was evidence of a pattern of raising failing grades to a passing level in Regents exams in global and American history, subjects that fell under the purview of Theresa Capra, the school’s assistant principal for humanities.

Two weeks later, Capra dropped into one of Nobile’s classes for a while and then gave him an “unsatisfactory” rating for the lesson. Over the next few months, Nobile sent Principal Lennel George a series of memos contending that Capra “systemically directed the changing of Regents grades.” In return, he says, he was bombarded with U ratings. Nobile complained to state officials, who ordered the Department of Education to investigate. An ensuing probe found that Capra tampered with Regents exams and George covered it up. Several teachers who were given immunity told investigators they had “scrubbed” some grades – meaning they moved up grades which were just below the passing mark of 65. Others said they raised some grades from the low 50s to passing. Capra resigned during the probe and George was removed as principal last July.

Nobile says he was the target of continuing harassment, even after Capra left. At one point, Nobile told the New York Times, George reassigned him out of his specialty because “your passing rates on the Regents aren’t high.”

Robyn Harland, a veteran special education teacher in Queens, discovered that teachers and children were being put in harm’s way by the failure of the Department of Education to provide protective equipment, training and vaccinations to educators at risk of exposure to life-threatening pathogens in blood and other bodily fluid.

So when a special ed paraprofessional in her school contracted Hepatitis C, she filed a complaint with the state’s health and safety bureau about the lack of protection, not just for staffers but also for children. Remember, these are the most severely ill and mentally challenged children. Some bite and scratch. Staff change diapers, wipe noses, clean scrapes, sometimes without a chance to wash their hands before turning to another child. Since her filing, the state has issued 13 citations against the DOE and levied fines totaling more than $100,000, and yet the DOE continues to turn its back on the problem. Wouldn’t this money be better spent on children rather than on fines?

And what did the DOE do when confronted with such a whistle-blower? They removed her from her school.

Then there is the story of Frances Strutt and Susan Werner, senior-class guidance counselors at John F. Kennedy HS who discovered that several students who tried to enroll in September for courses they needed to meet graduation requirements had unbeknownst to them actually graduated. Those anomalies impelled the pair to undertake a review of all the students on the August graduation list. They found that up to a third of them on the list had been fraudulently certified for graduation. Someone had tampered with the student transcripts, including adding passing grades for classes that the students never took.

The day after our union rep asked the principal to account for these irregularities, Strutt and Werner were suddenly excessed out of the building. But the story gets worse. Each counselor had over 20 years on the job, so to comply with the contract’s seniority rules, the principal excessed two more counselors with less experience as well. A total of 1,200 students were deprived of counseling services. One of the excessed counselors worked with special ed students, and the remaining special ed counselor was reassigned to take the caseload of one of the excessed general ed counselors, leaving 135 special education students without any guidance counselor. Two students were hospitalized for threatening suicide during that time. All this to punish two educators who were simply trying to uphold the academic standards of the school and report suspected wrongdoing.

School-based educators should not have to choose between saving their careers and acting in the best interests of their kids and schools.

We rely on school-based educators to be the eyes and ears of parents and the public who don’t have full access to schools. These educators need to know that they can advocate on behalf of children and families without putting their careers at risk. Parents need to know that they can count on teachers to protect their children and fight for what their children need and deserve. And most of all, children need to know that they can trust their teachers not to let anything bad happen to them.

This education committee cannot undo the damage done to the brave teachers testifying before you today. But by passing this legislation, you can help the next Philip Nobile or Frances Strutt when they step forward to blow the whistle on behalf of their students.