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.#
