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Topics in the News:
political action
Alarmed by Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to reduce the Department of Education’s current obligations to report on class sizes and temporary classrooms, the UFT on May 14 gave written testimony to the City Council registering its opposition to the mayor’s recommendations.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew told a packed room of City Council members attending the union’s annual legislative briefing on May 15 that its top priority for the budget for the coming year was retaining the more than 14,000 child care slots for low-income families that the mayor wants to eliminate.
A new coalition of labor, community activist and progressive organizations on May 17 announced its vision of what it will take to create excellence in public schools — and vowed to support mayoral candidates who will lead New York’s public schools in a different direction than the Bloomberg administration has.
The Delegate Assembly of the UFT on May 23 recommended the endorsement of the following candidates for Congress. The recommendations now go to the union’s state affiliate, the New York State United Teachers, which makes the official union endorsements for congressional races.
At the April 18 Delegate Assembly, UFT President Michael Mulgrew warned the delegates to brace themselves for the mayor’s attempt to continue his “educational reform” policies beyond his third term.
“The majority of New York City public school students who are in need of mental health services do not get them,” Lila Ezra, the UFT’s director of clinical counseling and victim support, told a joint hearing of the New York City Council’s Education and Mental Health Committees on May 1.
The UFT is supporting new federal legislation sponsored by Queens Rep. Joe Crowley
Just before the Supreme Court heard arguments about the constitutionality of the Affordable Health Care Act, Barbara Easterling, president of the Alliance for Retired Americans, gave UFT retirees a pat on the back for their part in supporting the historic health care measure that has proven so valuable to seniors.
A letter criticizing this column’s content and style set me to thinking. The member quite legitimately questions, based on my portrayal of primary presidential candidates, whether this union is wedded to one political party over the other.
“If any elected official says ‘special interest’ to you, you tell them you mean the millionaires and billionaires who only want more,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the approximately 1,200 teachers, family child care providers, paraprofessionals and parents who descended on Albany for the UFT’s annual Lobby Day on March 21.
Outraged teachers, parents, students and community and political leaders rallied in every borough on March 15 in a Day of Solidarity to protest the Bloomberg administration’s decade of mismanaging the city’s schools.
In the wake of the barrage of attacks against New York City’s public school educators by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the tabloid media, more than 20 city and state elected officials expressed their support for teachers and their union at a March 8 press conference outside City Hall.
Disgusted by the Department of Education’s release of its highly inaccurate Teacher Data Reports, parents and children at PS 277 in Brooklyn’s Gerritsen Beach section rallied on Sunday, March 4, to show their support for the school staff and their rejection of the TDR data.
Teachers reacted with dismay and anger when they returned to school on Monday, Feb. 27, after the release of deeply flawed Teacher Data Reports that ranked them against their colleagues based on student test scores.
Blue ribbons on trees and fence posts, posters blasting the mayor in neighborhood stores, buttons and school-based protest actions are the markers of a blue-ribbon campaign launched by the UFT in concert with the teachers, parents, students and community members at 33 “persistently lowest achieving” schools, who refuse to sit by while Mayor Bloomberg moves to gut their staffs.
Testifying at a City Council hearing, UFT President Michael Mulgrew on March 1 took the Department of Education to task for its failure to claim more than $500 million in Medicaid reimbursements for services provided to students with special needs each year.
Mayor Bloomberg’s drive to close Flushing HS, the city’s oldest public high school, isn’t happening without a fight from the community it serves. Queens State Sen. Toby Stavisky joined an array of local politicians, parent and community leaders at a Feb. 24 press conference to denounce the mayor’s move and to detail how the school has improved over the past three years.
Thirty parents and protesters occupying an elementary school on Chicago’s Northwest Side set for closing called off their weekend action after receiving promises of a meeting with the entire city school board. The effort did no good; the school was closed anyway after the Chicago Board of Education voted on Feb. 21 to replace staff there and at nine other “underperforming” schools.
The UFT resolves to join with NYSUT and the AFT in a continued effort to lobby and fight for a teachers’ job bill as well as a bill for jobs for other unemployed Americans.
The AFT executive council voted unanimously on Feb. 7 to endorse Barack Obama for U.S. president.
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