around the uft
Showing her medal
Jun 5, 2008 1:01 PM
Weingarten (right) listens as Thomas James, provost and dean of Teachers College, gets set to present the medal. Looking on is Celia Genishi, professor of education and chair of the department of curriculum and teaching.
UFT President Randi Weingarten accepted the Teachers College Medal for Distinguished Service at the Master’s Convocation held at the Riverside Church on May 20. Focusing on relevant areas of the education landscape against a backdrop of philosophy and history, Weingarten spoke about the “sublime vocation” of teaching and referred to herself as a “recovering lawyer” whose former colleagues in the legal profession have turned around and now wish they had chosen education as a path to help children “open the doorway to their own lives.” She honored the legacy of John Dewey, whose roots include support of teacher unionism and ties to Teachers College, which Weingarten commended for “making more and more of a commitment to helping public schools.” In a critical vein, she excoriated No Child Left Behind as a “sanction-based system in which schools are threatened with closure if they don’t meet their metrics.” She added that excessive test preparation risks “the erosion of higher-order thinking skills that every child needs.” Noting how the educational environment and training has changed since her own mother attended Teachers College, Weingarten said, with tongue in cheek, that today’s teachers have to be “part Einstein, part Martin Luther King, part Mother Teresa, and part Tony Soprano.”
