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Albany budget fight far from over
Mar 4, 2010 12:31 PM
A contingent of charter school teachers who backed the UFT in its effort to reform state law to make charter schools more transparent, accountable and accessible to all students stand, at the request of UFT President Michael Mulgrew, and are applauded by the delegates. Mulgrew called them “the people who stand up in their schools, and they do it without the protections you have.”
In a sobering budget report, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the union’s delegate body on Feb. 24 that, should the state Legislature fail to produce a budget by April 1, the city and the Department of Education might propose layoffs in schools as a money-saving solution.
That prospect, he said, made the success of this year’s UFT Lobby Day on March 9 particularly important.
“Our message in Albany is, ‘We must get the budget done,’ and with a significant portion of education dollars put back into the budget,” Mulgrew said.
When asked how the city could furlough employees when the UFT contract prohibits layoffs, Mulgrew reminded delegates that “layoffs are allowed in an economic crisis” should the city declare a financial emergency.
Also in his report, Mulgrew spoke about how teachers have become the target of blame nationwide. He said that he had just returned from the AFT presidents’ meeting in San Diego, where leaders from around the country told stories about members pressed hard by underfunded school districts and scapegoated by opponents of public education.
Mulgrew said those reports persuaded him that the entire conversation on education needed overhauling.
Annie B. Martin, the president of the New York City NAACP and a partner in the UFT lawsuit over school closings, addressed delegates. In her remarks, Martin issued a challenge to Chancellor Joel Klein: “If you’ve been chancellor for eight years, and you have 20 schools that are failing on your watch you want to close, you should be unemployed! You’re the one who failed, not the schools.” She also pledged to delegates that “your fight is our fight, and whenever you need me, call me and I’ll be there.”
The UFT was successful in changing the argument on closing struggling schools to be about what the DOE should be doing to help those schools, he said. Likewise, he said, the union reframed the debate on charter schools to make it about transparency and equity.
Now, he said, the challenge is to project an educational vision for the future.
“We need to turn their argument from ‘What can we do to blame teachers?’ or, “What else can we do to teachers to fix education?’ to, ‘Where does education in this country go in the 21st century?’” Mulgrew said.
In initiating the new approach, he asked the delegates to consider doing an analysis of their school “in which we say, ‘Here’s what needs doing in every school to be successful. This is the type of children we have, this is what’s going on with their performance. We need this and this and this to be successful, and what are you going to do about it?’”
He continued, “And if we do that first, they’ll look like fools when they say, ‘We’re here to close you.’”
Mulgrew raised the spectre of New York State’s new persistently low-performing schools list. Compiling the list was a requirement for states to qualify for a share of the $4.35 billion in Race to the Top federal funding.
In Rhode Island, Mulgrew said, the Superintendent fired all the teachers in a high school that was on that state’s persistently low-performing schools list after teachers refused to work an extended day with no additional pay [see News Briefs on page 14].
“That’s another example of blame the teachers and the unions, and that’s why we need to go positive and move forward quickly with our own ideas,” Mulgrew said.
On reauthorizing No Child Left Behind, he said that it was good that the Obama administration was moving toward a “growth model,” but that “there’s a problem, too, in that the criteria for growth are broken test scores.”
What is needed, he said, is one consistent criterion to measure growth.
The meeting ended promptly at 6 p.m. so that the delegates could attend the Feb. 24 Panel on Educational Policy meeting on the Department of Education’s proposals to co-locate charter schools in district schools [see “DOE policy pits parents against parents” ].
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