Highlights from the March 4 issue of New York Teacher:
Tensions were high as parents, students, teachers and community members from PS 30 and Eva Moskowitz’s Harlem Success Academy 2 faced off at a public hearing on Feb. 22 over Department of Education plans to site the charter school in PS 30’s building.
Former city councilwoman and now charter founder and operator Eva Moskowitz has a relationship with Chancellor Joel Klein that any school leader would envy. It goes way beyond Klein appearing at her school functions when requested; it goes beyond her successfully enlisting his support for $1 million in funding from the Eli Broad Foundation.
At the Feb. 24 Panel for Educational Policy public hearing, Harlem Success Academy 2 got the green light to move into PS 30 in Harlem. Fifteen additional schools, including 12 other charter schools, also got the go-ahead to move into or expand within existing district school buildings.
The UFT filed 1,324 class-size grievances in 41 schools citywide on Feb. 24, as an estimated 46,968 high school students began the school year’s second semester in oversized classes for all or part of each day. Several of the same high schools that were guilty of stuffing their classrooms with more students than allowed last fall are again up to their old tricks.
For nearly 80 years, the corporate-backed nonprofit Citizens Budget Commission has asked the wrong questions about city and state financing: What government spending and taxes can we cut? What public sector workers can we lay off? What can we privatize? The self-appointed “commission” markets itself as a good government organization, but it is far from a neutral body representing the interests of all New York City citizens.
Twenty-eight Career and Technical Education teachers — chosen by their peers — were honored Feb. 11 at the UFT’s 2010 Awards Recognition Ceremony at UFT headquarters in Manhattan. The teachers, most introduced by their appreciative students, might never think of themselves as — in the words of one student — “super special,” but it was clear that the term fit nicely to describe the important work going on in the city’s CTE classrooms.
At the Bowling Green subway entrance on Feb. 18, UFT President Michael Mulgrew joined other union and community leaders, students and elected officials in hammering the MTA for threatening to charge students for weekday MetroCards. “Students have a right to a free public education,” he said. “This shouldn’t even be in negotiation. Take it off the table!”
The Department of Education is once again overhauling its special education program. But will its new guidelines do what no preceding plan has done: ensure not just that the law is followed and special needs students get the services their Individualized Education Programs demand — but that students actually achieve and graduate with diplomas?
UFT Federation of Nurses members at Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn overwhelmingly ratified a new contract that raises salaries by 8 percent over three years, keeps health and pension benefits intact and requires no givebacks.
In a sobering budget report, UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the union’s delegate body on Feb. 24 that, should the state Legislature fail to produce a budget by April 1, the city and the Department of Education might propose layoffs in schools as a money-saving solution.
