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OCTOBER 2004

Working Together for Kids
by Randi Weingarten, President, UFT

Imagine NASA excluding its rocket scientists when planning a mission to Mars, or a hospital not consulting doctors when drawing up plans to build a new intensive care facility.  It’s a good bet that problems will arise down the road. The same holds true for education. The most successful administrators are those wise enough to listen and respond to the concerns and suggestions of educators who work with kids daily and know their needs.

Judging by recent events, this is a lesson that the Department of Education sometimes takes to heart, but on other occasions manages to ignore.

A positive example: last year when the mayor announced plans to target third-graders in his attempt to end social promotion—the policy of advancing students to the next grade even if they have not mastered key academic knowledge and skills—he did so without first consulting front-line educators. That resulted in a firestorm of criticism as concerned parents and education experts questioned the fairness and effectiveness of the policy. Over time, the plan was changed, including adding resources for struggling students, the creation of an appeals process, and the establishment of protocols to guide educators making these critical decisions about kids’ lives.

One might have expected a similar negative reaction when, at the beginning of this school year, the mayor announced that he would expand the no social promotion policy to fifth-graders. But this time the public reaction was muted—and generally supportive—because the administration had learned a lesson. It listened to educators and made sure that the plan, which was announced at the start of the school year, included immediate additional supports and resources to improve students’ prospects for success, and was not based solely on one standardized test.

Now for the negative example:  Starting this summer, parent groups and teachers began hearing from principals that—despite additional money from the state this year—many of our schools were receiving large cuts in their budgets. The Department of Education at first professed that there were no cuts, then said it was a question of a fairer allocation among schools, then said it was waiting for more state funds. Now after adding more than $100 million at various intervals, the Department has said that schools will be getting at least as much money as they got last year. But with the new budgeting process, few of us can figure out where the money is going.

Some of our largest high schools are even more overcrowded than last year, with thousands of classes that exceed our contract’s class-size limits including high school science classes with 45 students and physical education classes with 60 students or more. Tutoring, SAT prep and remediation classes have been cut, high school electives have been put on hold, and advanced placement and after-school programs have been canceled. Tweed may be spending the money on good programs, but at what cost to these important needs? 

Tweed’s lack of candor has fostered an atmosphere of mistrust and a sense in both teachers and parents that their issues and their kids are a lower priority than meeting some budget goal, or policy objective such as small schools or new coaches/parent coordinators, even when the city rolled over a budget surplus of nearly $2 billion. Enlightened employers everywhere have learned—the hard way, in some cases—that even in industries using unskilled workers, involving employees in decision-making boosts morale and productivity. If the Department of Education wants to succeed, this is a lesson Tweed needs to keep relearning.#

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