At the March 23 Delegate Assembly, UFT President Michael Mulgrew called for volunteers to work on behalf of Hillary Clinton in light of the increasing probability of a Clinton-Trump battle this fall.

“It’s now at the point that we know what’s in the best interest of the union,” Mulgrew said. He noted that both leading Republican candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, support scuttling worker rights, eliminating defined-benefit pensions, destroying unions and privatizing public education.

“We cannot have one of them [Trump or Cruz] in the White House,” he said.

The UFT will be running phone banks on behalf of Clinton between now and Primary Day on Tuesday, April 19.

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Mulgrew also spoke to the delegates about the need for a teacher evaluation system that does not put total control of a teacher’s rating in the hands of the principal while using measures of genuine student learning.

“Our issue is: How do we keep a check on principals who are not doing their job right?” he said. “We want authentic student learning inside teacher evaluation. If it is real learning, we’re OK with that as part of a teacher’s evaluation.”

President's report

The UFT supports the use of student portfolios, project-based assessments and other authentic measures of student learning in a teacher’s rating, Mulgrew said.

He contended that the state Legislature should give school districts local control over teacher evaluation since what may work for smaller, upstate school districts does not work for New York City.

With a four-year moratorium in place on the use of state test scores in teacher evaluations, Albany has a real opportunity, he said, “to get this right” in the next piece of legislation on teacher evaluation.

Contrary to the misinformation being put out by charter advocates, Mulgrew pointed out that New York City schools are closing the achievement gap with the rest of the state. An Independent Budget Office analysis of the 2015 state test results found that New York City public school students were reading about as well as the rest of the state and only lagged about 3 percentage points behind in math. In 2006, the scores of the city’s children were behind the statewide results by 11 percentage points in reading and 9 points in math. And after controlling for factors such as poverty and the number of children with special needs, New York City’s schools are doing better than the rest of the state, the report found, with reading scores that are 14 percentage points higher than the state’s and math scores that are 15 percentage points higher.

Mulgrew said that the union was negotiating with the city about paid family leave, but that the challenge was significant given the pattern set by the city’s nonunion, managerial employees. When Mayor Bill de Blasio granted the managers up to six weeks of paid leave at 100 percent of salary for parents who have or adopt a child, he unilaterally canceled a 0.47 percent raise for some managers and reduced the number of leave days for the city’s longest-serving managers.

“I know this is an important issue to a lot of our members and I am determined to get this done,” Mulgrew said. “We’ll keep pushing on it. We are not done.”