President's Perspective
2008: A year of milestones
May 22, 2008 3:26 PM
As we went to press, the speaker of the City Council, Christine Quinn, was delivering a speech spelling out her proposal to change mayoral control. Equally important, she joined our fight to make sure that City Hall keeps its promises to protect our students and the schools from budget cuts and to bolster education funding as the city and state pledged a year ago. A few days earlier, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver stood with us on the steps of City Hall asking the council and mayor to restore the promised funding. This marshaling of forces derives in large part from the relentless advocacy of the UFT and many other community groups in the Keep the Promises Coalition. The need for this kind of permanent, independent advocacy — to strengthen the parent-teacher connection and to ensure an ongoing voice for the community in education — was the point of my Spring Conference speech, which is excerpted here.
Good afternoon and welcome. I cannot believe that this is my 10th Spring Conference as president. Where did the time go?
For me, 2008 will always be the Year of my Midlife Crisis. It was the year of my 50th birthday and my 10th anniversary as UFT president, as well as the year our national president, Ed McElroy, announced his retirement.
Then, in the last few weeks, with the economy turning and a budget crisis looming, the DOE stopped singing Kumbaya and reverted to the blame-the-teachers routine, taking pot shots at the tenure process, ATRs, the union and virtually any-body or any-thing they could find to blame for the budget cuts.
Thus, my midlife crisis.
Actually, 2008 has been a year with some significant positive changes as well. This year we are finally emerging from the corrosive effects of the 1970s fiscal crisis — effects that diminished the quality of our schools and eroded the professional status of New York City’s educators.
Today, teacher pay and benefits have rebounded to far more competitive levels, as they were before 1975. On top of higher salaries, we secured pension equity, regaining a benefit that has seemed irretrievable ever since we lost it in 1973 — the ability to retire at age 55 with full benefits.
The schools, too, even with today’s troubling economy, are finally coming out of the chronic underfunding that plagued them for more than 30 years. Today, we’re in the midst of the biggest building program since the fiscal crisis. The school budget has grown by about 40 percent since 2002, and the 13-year-long Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit has reaped $5 billion more in the next four years — another seemingly endless fight finally won.
Well, almost. As it turns out, that fight isn’t quite over. Albany delivered big time, but now the city wants to renege on its share, despite the promises made only a year ago. Well, we can’t — and we won’t — let that happen.
The union, too, working with ACORN, broadened its reach with a historic organizing drive in the face of a shrinking national labor movement. As a result, we have grown to 200,000 members, the largest union local in the country.
So, it turns out that 2008 has been quite a significant year. We have made real progress on many of our goals of the last quarter-century — including those I have trumpeted in the last 10 years:
- building and maintaining a strong labor movement;
- achieving economic security for our members;
- fighting for the resources, conditions and professional respect you need;
- effecting continuous and sustainable academic growth for all our students.
But for today, let me focus on just one of our most important goals:
- re-establishing the connection between public schools and the community.
Schools and community
For public education to succeed it must be part of the community it serves. It must be seen, not as a business, not as just another government agency, but as a community value. That is the only way that our citizens and parents will continue to support our public schools as the bedrock of our democracy.
Whether you studied it in an ed course or in American history, you know that our public schools have always been strongly rooted in home, church and community. Those early one-room schoolhouses may not look like schools today, but they established a democratic tradition that is as true today as then: Schools operate under the community’s oversight and are an essential part of the community. You can no sooner take the school out of the community than you can take the community out of the school.
As teachers, we understand that home and school must go hand in hand if we are ever to reach our twin goals of universal access and universal attainment, something no other nation has ever accomplished.
Our union is firmly committed to these ideals. And just as we are finally emerging from the darkness of the 1970s fiscal crisis, we are also emerging from the darkness of the 1960s divide between educators and communities that opened during the turmoil of Ocean Hill-Brownsville.
At that time, as some of you recall and many of us regret, public school educators, and parents and community members were alienated from one another. What divided us, ironically, was something we actually shared — anger and frustration about the chronic underfunding of the schools and the system’s failure to meet the needs of all of our children. Rather than provide the resources needed, government pitted parents and teachers against each other.
It took years of hard work to repair relationships and rebuild trust from that rift. But we have made rebuilding community connections a priority because we know that it is key to everything else we want to accomplish.
Today, that divide, for all intents and purposes, has closed. Polls show that parents regard teachers as their most trustworthy source of information and help. Last June, a Peter Hart poll asked New York City public school parents how much they trust various players like the mayor, the chancellor and others to have the right approach to improving schools and making sure students receive a quality education. The top scorers? Teachers, with 78 percent of parents choosing them, more than double the mayor’s score and triple the chancellor’s. In the Department of Education’s own surveys of public school parents, 90 percent say they are either satisfied or very satisfied with their children’s teachers.
The work our union has done together with parents and community members on behalf of our children is the work I am most proud of. For almost all of the last decade’s accomplishments — the fight for more resources for schools and the fights for a fair contract, professional treatment and better conditions for teaching and learning — were made possible by coalitions of parents, community members and educators speaking with one voice.
This is a partnership that benefits us all, but especially the kids. Take the most obvious example: UFT support for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity — including everything President’s perspective from legal and financial assistance to lobbying, rallying, and even civil disobedience — helped win that groundbreaking case and helped us do right by our students.
Then there is New Yorkers for Smaller Classes. With the combined strength of many child advocacy organizations, we succeeded in securing a real class-size reduction program backed by state law.
Finally, in the last two years, we have had the Keep the Promises Coalition to spearhead the fights against some of the abuses of Children First. Our shared concern about the latest reorganization brought many of us together a year ago. Among us were groups that had been shut out for years, unable to get their concerns addressed, whether those concerns were immigrants who were English language learners, or underfunded middle schools, or special education, or the arts.
And now, in the current budget fight, this growing coalition is poised to keep our promise to children, to champion their cause and to fight to protect them when others fail to do so. You proved that in March when you came out to City Hall in the rain by the thousands.
Clearly, the more-than-40 groups in the Keep the Promises coalition do not merely talk the talk about how it takes a village, they walk the walk.
You know, that maxim is so broadly accepted now, it is almost cliché.
Except, apparently, among the powers-that-be in New York City.
An advocacy voice
The Bloomberg/Klein administration, for whatever reasons, has shut the community out. There is a difference between access to a parent coordinator to answer questions about the progress of one’s child, and having a real voice in educational policies, whether for one’s own child, the whole school or systemwide.
For example, if a child should be in a Gifted and Talented program, and such programs have been eliminated from the local school, what venue is there for the parent to protest or to work for their restoration? The same with pre-K or access to special education services. It takes a major public relations disaster, like when the bus routes were changed midyear without first consulting parents, to get the DOE to change an announced policy.
And as far as schools reflecting the priorities and values of the collective community, as is our tradition in the American system of locally run schools, there is simply no channel for that to happen in New York City. How much test prep is the right amount? Are double periods of math and English necessary for all middle-schoolers? What about cell phones: How can we balance the need for parents to be in touch with their children against the need for kids to focus on learning and not on texting their friends during class time?
Major decisions affecting parents, children and the community are simply announced via press release. No hearings are held before decisions are made, no opinions are sought.
In fact, what we have in our city, as Diane Ravitch and I wrote in 2004, is public education minus the public. We have all the outward trappings of a traditional public education system — a citywide board of citizens, community councils, even school-based teams — but no decision-maker is answerable to any of them, or anyone else, except on that one Election Day when an incumbent mayor runs for re-election.
When we first supported the governance change, we believed a mayor who has clear responsibility for the state of the schools would be more likely to make them a priority. And while times were good, our prediction proved correct.
But as we all know, true commitment isn’t really tested until hard choices must be made. In other words, when times are tough, who will really put children first? Without an independent school board, without an independent chancellor, who will stand up and make the case for our public school students? Without a community voice, who will protest if central administrators protect their own, while forcing schools to make painful cuts? Without checks and balances, how will fairness be served?
Those questions and others will be addressed next year when the Legislature reconsiders mayoral control. Please, don’t misunderstand me. I am not signaling a position on mayoral control. Like our members, I am waiting for the UFT governance committee to complete its deliberations.
But regardless of what system governs the schools, we will always need a strong, independent advocacy voice. And that’s why the work of the Keep the Promises Coalition is critical, bringing together educators, parents, elected officials and community to be the champions children need.
In the last few years we have depended on an ad hoc network of coalitions to be that voice: one for CFE, one for smaller classes, one for middle schools, one for better school budgets. The enthusiasm and success of these groups testify to how badly they are needed.
What if that voice was institutionalized? What if there were a cohesive umbrella organization to serve as the people’s voice? It could be the voice of all the people who care about their schools, a venue for the community to express its needs and priorities, an ongoing check and balance to the unfettered authority of the Department of Education, a vehicle for bringing together different views, in mutual respect, always looking for what’s best for children.
With that in mind, the UFT and several other members of the Keep the Promises Coalition announced yesterday that we will explore creating a permanent coalition whose mission is to ensure that our city and state make good on the promise that children come first.
Why formalize it? Because it takes more than just reacting to a crisis to effect continuous, sustained student growth. You need an ongoing presence, you need research, you need a mailing list. You need to inform and educate the public — and you need this not just with this administration, but with future ones as well. So our Keep the Promises Coalition would have as its job, Keeping Children First — not sometimes, but for all time.
I feel like I’ve come full circle. When I started this job, teachers needed the community back. Now it’s our turn to help the community get its schools back.
