An open letter to New York City parents

As educators, we know how crucial a new evaluation system is for helping New York City students move forward. The UFT is committed to creating a new system that gives teachers the feedback they need to continually hone their skills and improve instruction. It is why we helped pass the 2010 legislation calling for a new system, and it is why dozens of UFT officers and staffers canceled their holiday vacations to try to conclude negotiations with the DOE for a new system in the 33 schools targeted for federal School Improvement Grants.

Unfortunately — to the great detriment of our children and our schools — it is not a commitment the mayor or his DOE share. They walked away from those negotiations and launched a media campaign of lies and distortions to obscure the plain fact that they have no interest in negotiating a system that treats teachers like professionals — a campaign that culminated in the mayor’s attack on New York City educators in his State of the City address on Jan. 12.

But while the mayor prefers to play political games rather than exercise leadership and order the DOE back to the negotiating table, the UFT will not stand by and watch the city torpedo a new evaluation system. Our students deserve and need a better education, but we need the tools to give it to them. What we have asked for is an evaluation system that continually helps teachers get better throughout their careers and that treats teachers fairly. We have filed for impasse at PERB to force the DOE to conclude these negotiations with us.

We will also not stand by silently while the mayor and his public relations minions bash teachers and blame educators for failures that his policies created. It has been a decade of disaster for New York City children and schools on Bloomberg’s watch, and now as the legacy of the so-called “education mayor” is going up in smoke, he is looking for scapegoats and distractions from his record. I wrote the following letter to parents, which ran as an ad in the Daily News on Jan. 9, to set the record straight.

Thank you for everything you do for the children of New York, and for continuing to do it under such difficult circumstances.

New York City is losing its teachers.

More than 66,000 have either resigned or retired since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools.

Teachers leave one of the toughest jobs in New York City for a variety of personal and professional reasons, but the most common single reason is a lack of support from supervisors and the Department of Education.

Teaching is a craft that is acquired over time, and teachers desperately want to improve their skills. That is why the United Federation of Teachers led the campaign to create a better teacher evaluation system, one that put a priority on helping all teachers do their job better. The UFT’s role was critical in creating the new system, and in going to Washington, D.C., to help get federal funds for it through the Race to the Top program. Starting last spring, many of our members with expertise in evaluation worked for months on the state subcommittees designing the new system.

We have been trying to work with the Bloomberg administration to iron out the final details of the new system, but the administration has refused to engage in meaningful talks about teacher and principal improvement. Instead it has focused on ensuring that administrators have unlimited power over their employees. If we agree, it will mean that supervisors’ decisions can never be properly reviewed, much less overturned. This would be true even if their negative rating of a teacher or a principal can be proven to be the result of their refusal to inappropriately change a student’s grade or to give students credit for courses they have not properly completed.

Make no mistake about it: The administration has put tremendous pressure on principals to make their schools appear to be successful. But any claims of success ring hollow in the light of national tests that show very limited student progress for the system as a whole, and state measures that show that while the high school graduation rate is increasing, the number of graduates ready for college is only about one in five.

The sad truth is that Mayor Bloomberg’s “reform” agenda — raising class size across the system; closing schools and “warehousing” the neediest students; pushing art and music out of the schools to make room for more test prep; turning a deaf ear to parents’ concerns; and appointing a completely unqualified publishing executive to be chancellor — hasn’t made our schools better.

A real teacher evaluation system that helps all teachers improve while providing checks and balances is a critical step toward stopping the hemorrhaging of our teaching force and making our schools more effective. At the same time it would help ensure that teachers who cannot succeed in the classroom leave the profession.

We have an open offer to the administration to continue our negotiations on this issue, or even to take it to binding arbitration. It’s time the administration sat down with teachers and principals to come up with an agenda that will actually help our children learn.

Sincerely,

Michael Mulgrew
President
United Federation of Teachers