President's Perspective

Getting off to a good start

Sep 17, 2009 12:02 PM

As we begin a new school year, we also need to begin thinking in a new way about how we move our profession forward. First, we must continue to do what we have always done to help kids and keep the system running well, but at the same time, we must also work together to ensure that we help shape the discussion about teaching and learning in a way that reflects the real world experience of a classroom teacher.

We are already off to a great start. Welcoming students back to school is an exciting and sometimes daunting time, and as you and your colleagues get back into the rhythm of daily lesson plans, I want to take this opportunity to wish you the best of success and remind you that the union is here for you. As a teacher and a former chapter leader, I know there’s nothing like setting a good, positive tone to begin the year.

When that classroom door closes, that’s when it’s real. That’s when you can get down to the business at hand and do what you do best: engaging students and helping them achieve. These first few weeks are key, and that’s why we put so much emphasis on making sure you have what you need in terms of resources and support.
As I traveled around the city during these first few days, I was lucky enough to see first-hand the strong camaraderie and hard work going on in places like FDR HS in Brooklyn and PS 111 in Queens. I got to spend some time with teachers at PS 45 on Staten Island, where every parent was greeted with a smile, and helped hand out backpacks and supplies to ecstatic children at PS 86 in Brooklyn.

I’ve been in New York City schools for a long time, but moments like those never get old. And I know many of you feel the same way.

We get into this profession to make a difference, to help children learn and grow. When I first started, I couldn’t imagine making teaching my career, but after that first year, as hard as it was, I was hooked. I knew I was in this for life. Making kids’ lives better and helping them become productive citizens is like no other job on earth, and as an educator, I can’t imagine doing anything else.

Again, and I’ll say it over and over, the UFT is here to help you through good times and bad. We’re here for you, to help make things better, help enable you to do what you need to do and do best as educators. Get to know your chapter leader and all the services we offer. Whether it is help with pay and benefit problems, or making sure your working conditions are adequate and your rights are protected, or supporting your professional growth with advice, workshops and courses, the UFT can be a tremendous resource. And I say that to our new members and our veterans alike. Together we are unbeatable.

And together, we can take on challenging issues such as teacher evaluations, which are dominating the education reform debate from the White House to Tweed. Whether we like it or not, this is a subject we have to wrestle with — and soon! That is, if we want to have a voice in the movement.

Right now, the loudest voices in that debate are those of noneducators; people who may be well-intentioned and even sympathetic to public education (and some who are not), but who know little to nothing about what it takes to educate a child.

So, because they don’t understand the complexities involved, they fall back on simplistic solutions, most notably measuring how much students learn simply by their scores on standardized tests.

Worse yet, this is not just a theoretical debate. Washington wants to attach billions of dollars for local school districts to their willingness to assess teachers by this standard. Our own chancellor has made no secret of his desire to use a similar metric to evaluate teachers. And in these times of huge budget cuts nationwide, the idea of teacher layoffs according to student scores is rapidly gaining ground.

The fact is, data is neither good nor bad. What we have to do as a profession is make sure that data is both collected and used in the right way. Still, data alone can never tell the whole story. It’s great for objectivity — it won’t reflect a supervisor’s bias against an activist staffer, for example — but it cannot include all that a teacher may do for a child: the confidence she instills, the values he conveys, the work habits she builds. Being educated means much more than being able to pick the right answer on a multiple-choice test.

We believe these narrow, test-score-based, one-dimensional measures of a teacher’s worth are inaccurate, inadequate and unfair. What do we do about it? Just say no? Most teachers think that the present method of “evaluating” teachers is just as flawed, albeit for different reasons. And I for one could not defend a position that teachers’ work cannot or should not be evaluated at all.

Albert Shanker — the UFT’s pioneering second president who was way ahead of his time both as an educational reformer and a progressive labor leader — used to say, “You can’t fight something with nothing.” In other words, if you don’t like their solution, you’d better come up with a better one.

And that is just what the UFT has been trying to do, most recently by supporting and collaborating on an independent research study getting underway in six cities to develop valid ways to define, identify and measure good teaching — and to see if existing evaluation systems get equally consistent results. The project is being funded by the Gates Foundation.

We were looking for a way to assess teachers’ work in a way that captures the complexity of teaching and learning and is based on what happens in the classroom between teachers and students. We want it to be fair and true, and we want others to see it that way, too. So it had to be validated by an unbiased study, one without a predetermined viewpoint or political agenda, a rare commodity these days.

I recently sent you an e-mail or letter about participating in the study. I urge you to join if you are eligible. You can read more about the Measures of Effective Teaching study in this newspaper [see page 3] and on the DOE’s Web site. We will also be holding informational meetings in our UFT borough offices. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

Again, I want to wish you the best of luck this school year. Let’s work together to help children achieve and strengthen our profession. Be well.

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew
UFT President