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Delegates pack headquarters with contract on agenda

by Michael Hirsch

Oct 1, 2009 11:13 AM

The first Delegate Assembly of the new term was the biggest in years, with hundreds of new chapter leaders and delegates attending and the overflow crowd watching the Sept. 16 proceedings from closed-circuit monitors outside the union hall.

Planned as a citywide chapter leaders’ meeting, it was turned into a special Delegate Assembly to consider the contract demands recommended by the UFT’s multipartisan bargaining team based on the results of a contract survey completed by 28,000 members this summer.

The contract discussion portion was closed to visitors. The union and the Department of Education had agreed not to publicly reveal any bargaining details until they have reached a tentative agreement, which must then be brought to the membership to ratify. The DOE’s demands were presented to the union at the first bargaining session on Sept. 10 and the union presented its demands at the second session on Sept. 21 after the DA approved them.

While not specifically characterizing the DOE’s demands, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said the two sides were far apart and had a long way to go to reach agreement.

Chairing his first delegate assembly as UFT president, Mulgrew welcomed John Liu, the comptroller candidate, Bill de Blasio, the public advocate hopeful, along with Daniel Dromm, a veteran Queens teacher and chapter leader who won a City Council primary in his Jackson Heights, Queens, district. All three thanked UFT members for their support in the previous day’s Democratic Primary elections [see page 4].

In his president’s report, Mulgrew stressed that delegates need to educate themselves about the provisions in the new school governance law. He said the real story was not that the Panel on Educational Policy remained in the mayor’s control, but the greater transparency in central operations and greater authority for school leadership teams and parent councils that the law provides.

“It does us no good to get changes and not understand them and use them, “ Mulgrew said. “We have to compel the DOE to do what they have to do, and that doesn’t happen because it’s on a piece of paper.”

In the fight to make sure New York is not denied its share of $4.3 billion in new federal education grants, Mulgrew praised Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand for pressing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan after he said that New York, with its solid track record of funding education and reforming schools, could be denied federal dollars because of its current tenure law.

“This issue is not going away,” Mulgrew said. He said the Measuring Effective Teaching Project, funded by the Gates Foundation, would “be very important to our profession” by providing third-party validation based on what happens in classrooms. He asked the delegates to help round up volunteers for the independent study so the debate on how to change the profession would not be dominated by “those who have never set foot inside a classroom but preach as experts from on high.”

On budget matters, Mulgrew said the state and the city are both projecting massive deficits.

He asked the delegates to watch vacancies and make sure that ATRs fill them.

“ATRs are good teachers,” he said. “We need them to be put in appropriate assignments. We would not be in this mess if the DOE didn’t mismanage the situation.”

When Mulgrew asked delegates whose schools suffered from oversized classes, nearly half raised their hands. He urged delegates to inform the union grievance department immediately.

“Tell principals they have to place people,” he said. “They have to get class sizes down.”