President's Perspective
What we do for kids
Oct 1, 2009 2:16 PM
The passion and dedication that our members have for our profession is, more than anything, what binds us together. Like most of you reading this, I became an educator because I wanted to make a difference in children’s lives; to give back and help kids reach their dreams. No matter how hectic or complicated our professional lives get, it’s important that we never lose sight of those important goals.
As always, we are facing great challenges, and there are big issues, including budget deficits and a new federal education agenda, to deal with. Cynicism about unions, and teacher unions in particular, is rampant these days, as I’m sure most of you have noticed. Even some of our “friends” have signed on to the dictum that unions care only about the adults in schools, not the children.
Of course, anyone who actually spends some time in schools knows that’s false. Parents, for example, see teachers as allies, unbiased information sources and advocates for their children. Opinion polls show this time and time again. What management may view as adversarial — like grieving oversized classes, or suing for well-maintained facilities, or publicizing overcrowding — most parents and other public education supporters see as good for kids. And when UFT members turn out in the rain and cold to protest school budget cuts, or travel to Albany for state school aid, the community is right there by our side because they know that above all else, our work is about the kids and the classroom.
Here’s another often overlooked fact about labor unions and education. If you want to raise student achievement levels, the single most effective strategy would be to erase poverty. And nothing is better at that than labor unions, which raise the standard of living for workers and their families through higher salaries and benefits like health care.
A 25-year slide in the size and strength of America’s union movement has paralleled a 25-year decline in workers’ wages in our country. Today, just 12 percent of American workers are represented by unions.
Over the last 25 years, income for the bottom half of American households rose 6 percent, the Congressional Budget Office tells us, while the income of the top 1 percent skyrocketed — by 228 percent.
The American union movement created the largest middle class in history. The erosion of that movement, and today’s soaring unemployment, will further widen the gap and threatens the nation’s future. So I wear my union label proudly — and perhaps no more proudly than I did in late September, when the UFT again demonstrated its commitment to the city’s children, especially its poor children, in three separate ways.
First was a request from the Coalition for the Homeless and WPIX-TV to participate in a campaign to provide school supplies to some of the 16,000 children who with their families sleep in city shelters each night. They certainly came to the right people.
Many of us at some time in our careers have discovered that a student of ours was among those shelter families. If you’re like me, you were probably staggered just thinking of the tremendous odds that kid faced to make it to school every day. The only positive was knowing that you provided a little bit of the stability and predictability that was helpful to those children and their families.
So when the Coalition called, our staff and volunteers went to work, putting together two van loads of notebooks and other school supplies. And we were not alone. Dozens of public schools, led by their teachers, were doing the same thing. A few union officers and I went to an after-school program at the Coalition’s headquarters to give out backpacks to a group of children, and we were joined by Mr. G., the Channel 11 weatherman who, not coincidentally, is a former city public school teacher himself. We all sat together on the floor and talked about their teachers and the importance of working hard in school. I had the time of my life.
An event at the bustling headquarters of our Dial-A-Teacher program gave me the same feeling. It is an amazing place to be. When 4 p.m. hits, the phones start ringing off the hook and four dozen conversations break out. The questions come in all shapes and sizes from students as young as kindergarteners and as old as seniors. The staff experts can give answers in any one of 12 different languages, and a new program through the public library system even allows teachers to communicate and share material with students online. These patient, articulate teachers keep talking for three hours straight, four days a week, and for that alone they deserve an award, especially when you realize that this is after a full day of being in the classroom.
Dial-A-Teacher, which has been around since the 1980s, is another example of teachers who thought about what more they could do to help kids and came up with a great idea. Knowing that many children went home to empty houses and no adults to help with homework, they started an after-school homework helpline. Eventually it garnered City Council financial support and is now funded by the city and the UFT to visit schools, conduct parent workshops and answer 1,000 anxious calls a day.
What I especially like about Dial-A-Teacher is that instead of replacing parents, as some thought it might, it actually increases parent involvement. Parents are frequent callers, asking how they can help their kids with their homework or sometimes seeking advice about a child’s difficulties in school. And if a parent is not on the line, the teachers can often hear them in the background prompting the young caller along.
That parent involvement makes Dial-A-Teacher another one of our critical links to the community — and another reason why parents know that for us teachers, it’s really all about the kids.
Excitement is building in our office for another program that we are helping to develop that will help kids in a different way. As the incidence of childhood obesity, asthma, heart disease, diabetes and other environmentally related ailments continues to rise, teachers are becoming increasingly concerned about the effects on children’s school attendance and academic performance. So the UFT is teaming up with the Department of Health, the New York Academy of Medicine and several community organizations in the South Bronx and Harlem to develop and implement a variety of wellness programs in the area’s schools.
For teachers this may mean training in how to incorporate exercise into the already-packed school day. For activists, it may mean advocacy for salad bars in school cafeterias. For parents it may mean signing up their youngsters for the school breakfast program. Exactly what is done will depend on the priorities of each community and school.
The UFT is proud to be a partner in this effort and to devote our resources to its success. Add it to the list of the things we do for kids. These kinds of parent and community outreach will continue to be one of my foremost priorities for our union. “Teachers want what children need,” was one of the UFT’s original slogans, and it is still true today.
