Reality check

The UFT released a television ad the week of Jan. 23 that is bluntly critical of Mayor Bloomberg’s management of our schools. As I travel around the city and visit schools, educators and parents who have seen the ad have thanked me for taking on the mayor and sounding an alarm about the state of our schools. But people who aren’t in schools — and who don’t get to see every day the consequences of the mayor’s policies — have asked me why I decided to run such a “negative” ad.

We created this ad to help people understand that Mayor Bloomberg is running our school system into the ground.

There has been a concerted campaign of lies and distortions emanating from City Hall and Tweed, and we are setting the record straight. While the mayor continues to blame teachers for the failures his policies have created, we are shining a light on what the real problems are — and showing the way to the real solutions.

The reality is that it’s been a decade of educational disaster on Bloomberg’s watch. Class size keeps going up. Test prep has crowded out teaching, and children are learning to fill in bubbles rather than learning to think critically and become productive citizens.

Four out of five New York City high school graduates who enter the city’s community colleges are not college-ready. The DOE has no plan and no program to help struggling schools except to close them down. They have given up on high-needs learners and warehoused them in schools where educators are left without adequate resources to teach our city’s most vulnerable children.

This is the harsh reality that our fellow New Yorkers need to understand if we are going to be able to work together and address the problems. We are trying to move education forward, but to do that we need to start from the reality we face now, not some politically motivated fiction.

We have a real chance in New York to build a new teacher evaluation system that helps teachers continually improve throughout their careers, a system that focuses on instruction and pedagogy, that helps children learn.

We’ve been everywhere from Albany to Washington to PERB to the pages of the Daily News with an open letter to parents to help make this happen. But the mayor and his DOE have been so ideologically obsessed with the need to “get” bad teachers that they’ve refused to understand how an evaluation system strengthens teachers and teaching and thus far, they’ve refused to come to an agreement with us.

The policies that the Bloomberg administration has pursued and championed — be it high-stakes testing, merit pay, punitive evaluations or school closings — have hurt rather than helped education. They have been repudiated by academic studies, by the experience of school districts elsewhere in this country as well as in other countries and above all by reality on the ground here in New York City schools.

But all across the city, educators are working hard every day to do right by the children of our city despite the obstacles and the misguided policies. Teachers, parents, students and administrators are fighting for the resources and support they need, fighting against school closings, fighting to have their voices heard — fighting with all their might to make a difference in children’s lives.

This is our fight. It is who we are as educators — dedicated to helping children, fighting for the educational future of our city. That’s why we ran this ad, because we need to enlist as many people as possible in that fight.