feature stories
Documenting success
May 11, 2006 2:52 PM
Film, previewed at Tribeca Film Festival, shows risks and delights of UFT Elementary Charter School
“I just want you to know how much I loved this movie,” U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton told the packed house at Stuyvesant HS April 28 after viewing a new 35-minute film chronicling the first months of the UFT’s charter school in East New York.
“It [the school] is a place that allows teachers to do what you do best, as you watch the magic of learning in children’s eyes,” the senator said at the event, a fund-raiser for the school and a part of the Tribeca Film Festival.
For the UFT, founding the school was either-put-up-or-shut-up time in the battle against critics who claim unionization is the problem with public education, so creating the UFT Elementary Charter School, something no union has done, was a gamble and a handful.
School leader Rita Danis (right) interviewed by NYU filmaker Barbara Malmet.
“Climbing to the Crest: The Risk and Promise of a Teacher-led School” chronicles the successes of the UFT, staff and parents in modeling a charter school that demonstrates the kind of educational practices the UFT advocates — like small classes and teacher voice in decision-making — and is also run under a union contract.
UFT members, parents, students and other guests joined the senator and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (standing in for the mayor) at the red-carpet fund-raiser. Many of the school’s kindergartners and 1st-graders — the brand-new school started with those two grades this year with higher grades to be phased in over several years — were seen sporting sunglasses, giving interviews and signing autographs (to the degree they had signatures) as they luxuriated in directors’ chairs.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and UFT President Randi Weingarten join staff and students of the UFT Elementary Charter School at the Tribeca Film Festival showing.
Once the audience was settled, the children served as escorts for presenters, “just like on television,” one little girl said
The Rev. H. Devore Chapman, area minister at Bright Light Baptist Church and a major community supporter of the school said the event was “celebrating the birth of a baby.” And the baby got some good gifts.
The fund-raiser netted $675,000 to support the school. Those funds were necessary because in March 2005, when the UFT Delegate Assembly authorized the union to apply for the school, Weingarten had pledged to raise money from non-dues outside sources to compensate for the fact that charter schools get less aid than regular public schools. Supporters included many luminaries in business, public service and labor.
UFT Charter School students dazzle onlookers.
In her remarks, Weingarten said that many had asked why the union undertook the project and ran the risk.
It was “to show what works in public education — for all students and for all educators,” Weingarten said.
She noted how the film dealt with more than the one charter school, that it spoke strongly “about what respect and collaboration and educational partnerships with parents can accomplish. It’s about what systematic reforms like smaller class sizes can do. It shows that a labor contract is an asset, not an impediment.”
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, squired by two of the film’s stars.
But it was the movie that event-goers came to see. It was written and directed by veteran movie-maker Barbara Malmet, a film professor at NYU, and produced by Scott Gerber, a former Malmet student. The two did extensive filming over the fall term to produce a balanced, music-filled and lively presentation.
The film shows in minute detail what works in a school where even before it opened there were 600 educators applying for 12 teaching positions, where the day-to-day school director, Rita Danis, is not a principal but a “school leader” — whose last job was as a Teacher Center specialist — and where adequate resources, small classes, a dedicated staff and committed parents are revolutionizing education in one of New York’s most hardscrabble communities.
“We are being watched across the entire country,” Weingarten would remark later. “A lot of people see non-union charter schools as the new voucher debate. We must play a critical role in showing that a unionized public charter school can succeed brilliantly and then tear down the ideologists’ wall that has stopped the unionization of charter schools.
“The Department of Education wants to model practices for us? Well, we’re modeling practices for them.”
