Web Corner
EdWize helping teachers have an effect on education debate
Dec 8, 2005 3:59 PM
I recently read a 1995 article by former UFT President Sandy Feldman about the union’s first foray into cyberspace. In 1995, the UFT joined the AFT to host a space on America Online to share information with members, becoming one of the first labor unions to embrace the Web as a communications tool.
In February 1997, the UFT ventured onto the World Wide Web on its own (www.uft.org) and now gets upward of 2 million hits per month. With the launch of its blog EdWize (www.edwize.org) this summer, the UFT embraced an advocacy tool that has gained popularity over the last few years, especially in political campaigns and among citizen pundits during the 2004 elections.
In the sometimes-counterintuitive world of new technologies, blogs represent a milestone for creating a common-sense tool that anyone can use with little specialized knowledge. A blog is nothing more than a Web page with an interface that easily allows a user to post information without having to learn the language of Web design, HTML. Most of these tools are free, and anyone can create a blog for free by visiting services such as Blogger (www.blogger.com).
In designing EdWize, the UFT decided that it wanted to create a forum to affect the public debate about education policy. Education policy think tanks, like the conservative Manhattan Institute, try to influence the way legislators and the public view public education issues.
The problem is that some of these institutions are more focused on furthering ideological goals than researching good education policy. Other think tanks fail to account for what one educator e-mailer called “the classroom test” of whether policy proposals conform to the basic realities that teachers face in the classroom.
With the launching of EdWize, however, the UFT has a voice in that conversation, while injecting the opinions of teachers and their advocates into the debate.
When EdWize went live to the public on Aug. 19, we were quickly treated to an article in the New York Daily News about the project, as well as two opinion pieces in the rabidly anti-UFT New York Post (one of which surprisingly declared war on our disclaimer, which says the views expressed are not necessarily the official views of the UFT).
When former Rudolph Giuliani speechwriter Josh Greenman wrote an editorial in the Daily News bemoaning teacher pay schema, UFT researcher Maisie McAdoo wrote a blog post titled “Beware of the Giuliani Solutions,” about how Greenman’s editorial seemed to be advocating for a merit-pay system that was designed to pit teachers against one another.
Greenman came into the blog to defend his editorial, saying, “And it should be clear to everyone reading this that no performance pay plan being contemplated would ‘pit teacher against teacher’; that’s a myth. The key here is finding new ways to make sensible quality distinctions — and give excellent teachers a genuine career ladder to climb. Also: thanks for posting a conversation on the op-ed. I honestly appreciate the feedback.”
At the time, EdWize was still in its infancy, and besides the thoughts of one teacher on the subject, no other teachers chimed in on the debate. That dynamic began to change dramatically after school came back into session.
Since the middle of August, we’ve slowly brought in a cadre of first-year teachers to write about their experiences and thoughts as they begin to teach in New York City. A middle school teacher wrote about her experience in the classroom, the reactions of her close friends to her new career, and her work with her students.
Another new teacher, nicknamed “BimSmile,” wrote about her ups and downs since starting teaching, the experience of getting to know her students only to have her program change two weeks into the school year, and then the experience of being excessed illegally four weeks into the year.
Her blog post about her excessing and the subsequent front-page New York Teacher story had an impact. After the bureaucrats at Tweed read the story, they immediately called the UFT, acknowledged the excessing was illegal, and sought to correct the situation.
When teachers have a voice in the debate regarding public education, they tend to propose the most common-sense approaches to issues that affect their classrooms. There’s a reason why, outside of technology, law and politics on the blogosphere (the name for the collective universe of blogs), education fosters heated debate and real discussions — about the work of teachers in the classroom.
These teacher bloggers and public education advocate bloggers had been around for years before the UFT quietly launched EdWize, and more and more continue to come online with their own blogs daily.
The citizen journalism found on blogs is having a giant impact on our culture, as well as on the public discourse on a wide range of issues. The UFT, with EdWize, is on the cutting edge of how a union can use technology to have an impact on the very public debate about how we educate children.
Hopefully, the days when think tanks and politicians can formulate policy without the voices of the teachers who educate our children are drawing to an end.
Kombiz Lavasany, a UFT Communications Department staffer, coordinates the UFT blog, EdWize.
