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Weingarten: Let’s create permanent coalition as advocacy voice for kids
May 22, 2008 11:01 AM
UFT President Randi Weingarten delivers her Spring Education Conference address ...
Speaking at the union’s annual spring conference held on May 10, UFT President Randi Weingarten announced a plan to explore the creation of a permanent coalition to protect the interests of the city’s 1.1 million schoolchildren and vowed to continue to expand the union’s work with parents and the community.
Weingarten said the Keep the Promises Coalition, formed earlier this year to fight school budget cuts, should become a permanent coalition to be an independent advocacy voice to champion the needs of children.
“We currently 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,” Weingarten said.
“With that in mind, the UFT and several other members of the Keep the Promises Coalition yesterday announced that we will explore creating a permanent coalition whose mission it is to ensure that our city and state make good on the promise that children come first. We are joining with ACORN, the Alliance for Quality Education, the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, New York City Coalition for Educational Justice, the New York Immigration Coalition and others in a partnership to fulfill this mission.”
Throughout her speech, Weingarten noted the union’s commitment to re-establishing the connection between public schools and the community — and guaranteeing that education is seen as a community value.
“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,” Weingarten said.
Referring to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict 40 years ago, when teacher firings by a community school board precipitated a series of teacher strikes, Weingarten said, “At that time, as some of you may 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 our children.”
She pointed with pride to the “years of hard work to repair relationships and rebuild trust from that rift,” efforts that resulted in a larger role for parents on School Leadership Teams; the union’s million dollar scholarship program for high-achieving high school graduates in need; an annual conference for thousands of city parents that helps them support their children’s education; the Dial-A-Teacher homework telephone help line; the creation of a Lead Teacher program in conjunction with District 9 parents; providing buses for parents to lobby their elected officials in Albany; the union’s ongoing activities in support
of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that resulted in $5 billion in increased aid for city schools.
“Today, the divide [between the community and the union] has closed,” Weingarten said. “Polls show that parents regard teachers as their most trustworthy source of information and help.”
Weingarten also pointed to events of the last century that helped connect the community to its schools. She said that the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown vs. Board of Education, argued by a former Dewey award recipient, Thurgood Marshall, “made it clear that the U.S. would settle for nothing less than universal access, and the groundbreaking 1983 report, ‘A Nation at Risk,’ declared we should accept nothing less than universal attainment.
“Teachers understand that home and school must go hand in hand if we are ever to reach those twin goals of universal access and universal attainment,” Weingarten said. Achieving both, she added, “is something no other nation has ever accomplished.
“The Bloomberg/Klein administration ... has shut the community out,” Weingarten said. “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.”
Noting that in the last decade coalitions of parents, community members and educators had stood together in “the fight for more resources for the schools, and the fights for a fair contract, professional treatment and better conditions for teaching and learning,” Weingarten said, “When I started this job, teachers needed the community back. Now it’s our turn to help the community get its schools back.”
Michael Mulgrew, UFT vice president for career and technical education high schools, learns the finer points of child care from teacher Debra Ann Bradley (center) and student Blanca Cortez of the early childhood care and education program at the School of Cooperative Technical Education.
Students from Alfred E. Smith HS and teacher Ricardo Salmon (right) work on a house frame at the exhibit fair.
Weingarten joins students from Food and Finance HS as they make crepes with help from teacher Lydia Sessoms (right).
Jane Addams HS teacher Debra Secor looks on as student Lalbachan Harricharran gives a haircut to Syad Khan.
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