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We now have a new contract — ratified and certified — that will allow us to transform education in New York City by placing parents and educators back in the driver’s seat in our city’s public schools.

The responsibility now falls on our shoulders to show the rest of the country how public education can and should work when parents and educators are empowered.

A lot is riding on our success. Educators across the country continue to be scapegoated by politicians looking to explain away the problems faced by their cities’ struggling public school systems that they have abandoned and starved of resources.

I had the chance to speak with local leaders from some of these cities at a recent meeting of our parent union, the American Federation of Teachers, in Washington, D.C., and the stories they told — of school closings, budget cuts, layoffs, oversize classes and other assaults on teachers, schools and students — were harrowing but also all too familiar.

Take just two examples: Philadelphia and Chicago.

In Philadelphia, crammed classes, lack of supplies and slashed programs are the new normal. There are no school librarians, painfully few guidance counselors and even fewer school nurses. The school system opened last September with roughly 3,000 fewer school staff and 23 schools — one-tenth of the total — shut down. And it’s about to get worse.

The city, veering on the edge of bankruptcy, must come up with an additional $216 million if it is even to maintain this bare minimum of school services in the 2014–15 school year. If it doesn’t, as many as 1,000 staffers, mostly classroom teachers, could be laid off, and class sizes could skyrocket to between 37 and 41 students. Special education services, nurses, school police, alternative education, transportation, facilities and administrative supports will all also be reduced.

Meanwhile, in Chicago, the school year opened in September with 2,000 fewer teachers and 47 schools, almost all of them in black and Latino neighborhoods, closed. Rahm Emanuel, the city’s “reform-minded” mayor, claims that Chicago is running a $1 billion deficit, but that’s just his excuse for shuttering district schools and replacing them with charters.

On May 28, New Orleans closed its last five remaining traditional public schools, creating the country’s first all-charter school district. Also struggling are the public school systems in Detroit and Newark.

The situations our fellow educators in these cities must confront are dire but not unlike the challenges we faced under the Bloomberg administration, which also had a penchant for slashing school budgets, shuttering schools, threatening layoffs and stifling both teacher and parent voices.

If we can now show that empowering teachers and parents helps build a stronger school system, then that will be a shot in the arm for these colleagues who today find themselves excluded from meaningful participation in their own school systems.

Our success can serve as proof for embattled school districts across the country that amplifying teacher and parent voice in schools only makes them stronger.

We also stand ready to work with the AFT to support our fellow educators in these districts however we can.

As I told many of the leaders I met during my trip to Washington, the key to our success was, above all, our resilience and resolve during many years of the most awful, denigrating attacks on our profession, and our commitment during those years to standing our ground when we knew the mayor’s “reforms” would hurt our children.

We fought Bloomberg tooth and nail, employing every tool at our disposal to challenge — and beat — him in the courts, the streets and the political arena. And it worked.

When the mayor’s puppets on the Panel for Educational Policy convened to rubber-stamp his mass school closings, thousands of us flooded their meetings to express our displeasure. When he moved to close schools despite that public outcry, we sued to stop him and won. And when it became apparent that Bloomberg was trying to extend his policies into the next administration, we did all that we could to win the public debate on education so that the next mayor would be sure to put an end to those failed policies. We’re very happy that Mayor de Blasio has been leading that charge.

None of this would have been possible without the powerful coalition we built with parents, clergy and other community leaders by listening carefully to their concerns and working together to address them.

Our work paid off: Public opinion polls consistently showed that public school parents put more trust in the UFT than they did in Mayor Bloomberg, and today the teacher-parent partnership that undergirds our new contract directly derives from the relationships formed during our shared struggle against the Bloomberg administration.

Now that Bloomberg is gone, we finally have the chance to work with a pro-teacher, pro-public education mayor to remake our school system. But it hasn’t been easy getting to this point. Many other local unions are still struggling to fight off their own Bloomberg equivalents, and we are glad to offer whatever help we can.

It will be difficult, but if we managed to turn the tide here in New York, I believe that working together we can also turn it in the nation.

As always, I thank you for all that you do.