Editorials

A ringing endorsement of a sound idea

May 24, 2007 5:35 PM

The Chief, the civil service newspaper in New York, covers city events as they relate to municipal employees. So its opinions have resonance with New York’s labor force — and therefore are also influential with the city’s leaders. The Chief has not only endorsed the proposals for improving low-performing schools made by UFT President Randi Weingarten at the spring conference but in one case has gone a step further.

“There is no disputing,” The Chief said in its May 10 editorial, “that in the hard-to-staff schools there are likely to be more children in need of individual attention and that teaching figures to be more demanding than in schools where most students are high-achievers. Given those realities, it makes sense to reduce class size or allow teachers to have one fewer class, as Ms. Weingarten proposed.”

The paper also saw the value of group transfers: “Allowing groups of teachers to transfer as a team into those schools also is a sound idea … Going from a high-achieving school to a struggling one is a daunting task; it would be less so if teachers did so with colleagues whom they trust and can lean on for feedback.”

And then The Chief went Weingarten one better: “If anything, her call for discount MetroCards and EZ-Passes is too modest. Police officers are permitted to use mass transit for free because their presence on trains and buses is viewed as a public benefit. Wouldn’t the same principle be at work for teachers in the city’s more difficult schools? A bill to give free EZ-Passes to law-enforcement personnel has stalled in Albany because of questions as to how you could determine when they were using the privilege for work, given their rotating work schedules. That shouldn’t be a problem with teachers, who work set schedules on weekdays.”

City leaders, are you listening?