Unions Give Teachers a Voice and a Platform From Which to Help Students

This post is a contribution to EDUSolidarity, the net roots campaign of hundreds of American teachers explaining “why teachers like me support teacher unions.”

by Marc Korashan
UFT District 79 Special Representative

When I began teaching in New York City in 1975 I didn’t initially see the need for a union or get involved in union activities. I knew, from history and the stories my parents and grandparents told, about the struggle for unions, but like so many today, I took the existence of a union and a contract for granted. My chapter leader gave me some advice and made sure I had all the necessary forms when I got appointed, but that was the sum of my union involvement until I moved to a position as an Education Evaluator on School Based Support Teams.

In that position, as a Special Education Teacher/Education Evaluator, I was much more exposed to the whims of management than I had been as a classroom teacher. Administrators didn’t often walk into my SIE VIII classroom as most of them were afraid of the volatile students I taught. I worked with my co-teacher and we succeeded in making a difference for most of our students.

Now I was in a position at the heart of the problems in special education, students taking too long to be evaluated and placed into programs, students not getting the services they needed, too many students being found eligible for special education, and an ongoing Federal lawsuit over these issues that left the Board of Education under the scrutiny of monitors for the plaintiff groups.

What I began to experience were constantly shifting demands and a pressure to work harder, faster, and cut corners. As the evaluators began to get organized within the structure of the UFT, first as a committee and then as a functional chapter, we gained more and more voice for the issues that confronted us.

I was privileged to be elected as the Chapter Leader for this new chapter and began to use our consultation with the Division of Special Education to raise concerns, not only about our treatment but, more importantly, about the procedures used for evaluations and how they affected the students we were there to serve.

We used consultation and the willingness of the Division of Special Education to collaborate with us to ensure that our voice was heard on all the issues that came up. With our colleagues on school based support teams from the Social Workers and Psychologists chapter, we successfully pushed for and got a significant reduction in the amount of paperwork that needed to be completed for each student, making the process flow more efficiently and faster, and language in the contract to try to prevent the bureaucracy from creating more unnecessary paper.

We created and installed both pre-service and first year training programs that helped new evaluators get off to a good start and become more effective. We led the way with our colleagues in creating a model for professional development that provided more choice and allowed individuals to seek to meet their professional needs. At the same time we worked collaboratively with the Division of Special Education to implement and educate staff on each change in law and policy. This ensured that policies included the ideas of the staff that would implement them before they were written and that they were then uniformly followed.

As a result the Board of Education began to catch up and eliminate the back log of referrals, standards for evaluations and taking root and an increasing percentage of students referred for special education were found not to be disabled, just in need of additional attention or curricula changes in the general education setting.

Working through the union structure and working consultation and collaboration with the Division of Special Education served both staff and students.

When Chancellor Klein dissolved the position, ignoring the suggestions we made to try to meet his stated goals, he ended the collaboration and special education in this City has been moving backwards since. Now on their third or fourth reorganization, the Department of Education is further away from finding solutions to the problems of serving disabled students than they were when they were listening to the teacher voice.

The Union gave us a platform from which to speak and we were fortunate enough to have administrators, then, who knew how to listen. Staff and students benefited from this together.

Tagged: EDUSolidarity