Highlights from the Jan. 11 issue of New York Teacher:
After two years of sharply rising class sizes in the city’s public schools — despite hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding to reduce them — the UFT filed a lawsuit against the Department of Education and Chancellor Joel Klein on Jan. 5 to finally force them to comply with class-size reduction mandates.
Surrounded by city and state elected officials, and citing a new UFT report showing that New York City’s charter schools fail to serve the city’s neediest students, UFT President Michael Mulgrew used a Jan. 3 press conference to call for changes in the state charter school law.
Thousands of teachers, students, parents and community and political leaders are crowding public hearings for each of the 20 schools earmarked for closure by the DOE to demand that the threatened schools be fixed, not shut down. Hundreds of stakeholders are pulling no punches in their comments, charging the DOE with inequity, mismanagement and inconsistent standards in making closing decisions.
Dignity and respect. Professionalism and due process. Competitive wages and benefits. Fifty years ago, those things didn’t exist for teachers in New York City’s public schools. The system’s structure and support were haphazard at best, and concepts such as class-size limits and career ladders were only pipe dreams.
When his middle school students tossed away barely used pencils, Wonah A. Odaji gathered them up after class, sharpened them and mailed them from New York to the children in his village in Nigeria. Now, around 20 years later, by borrowing money from his 401(k) and credit card, he has built a school for them.
It was plenty cold when UFT members staged a boisterous late-afternoon demonstration outside the Merrick Academy Charter School in Queens Village on Dec. 22 to protest their employers’ failure to bargain fairly in their two-year contract battle. But things heated up considerably a few hours later.
Gov. David Paterson isn’t backing down on cutting state spending, including holding back on millions of dollars of already allocated funds to schools. On Dec. 12, the governor announced that he would unilaterally withhold $750 million in scheduled payments to schools and local governments.
The 2008-2009 Teacher Data Reports will be issued later this month or in early February, the Department of Education has announced.
