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Eva Moskowitz, Harlem Success And The Political Exploitation Of Children
As educators, one of our defining beliefs is the principle that we do not use the students entrusted in our care as a vehicle for promoting and accomplishing our political agendas. We hold to this core...
View ArticleWalmart, the Walton Foundation, and New York City Schools
The conservative Walton Foundation’s education spending has been in the news quite a bit this summer — including recent announcements of a $49.5 million dollar contribution to the expansion of Teach...
View ArticleClass Warfare
Class Warfare: that’s the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill’s book would investigate how the deep class...
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The One Percent And Us
Over the last few weeks, a small team of New York City building inspectors descended upon UFT headquarters, responding to a mysterious 311 call. Our building has been placed under police surveillance,...
View ArticleThe Politicization Of Educational Research
Last Friday, an analysis of the “value-added” contributions of public school teachers authored by a trio of economists, Harvard’s Raj Chetty and John Friedman and Columbia’s Jonah Rockoff, was unveiled...
View ArticleSetting The Record Straight On Teacher Evaluations: Scoring and the Role of...
(This is the first of two posts on the new teacher evaluations, focusing on the overall scoring of the evaluations and the role of standardized exams. The second post will take up the question of...
View ArticleFree ALL Of The Schools Held Hostage!
Today, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYC Department of Education released seven of the thirty-three schools they had been holding hostage. The NYC DoE announced that it would not close the schools which had...
View ArticleShutting Down Public Voice on Charters
As originally envisioned, charter schools were supposed to be a way of empowering communities to have a stronger voice in decision-making at their local schools — with community leaders, parents, and...
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Hurricane Sandy Relief — Donate to the UFT Disaster Relief Fund
Thousands of UFT members rose to the occasion in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, serving admirably in evacuation centers across the city and providing comfort and solace to our fellow New Yorkers....
View ArticleEvaluate This!
Everyone’s talking about the breakdown in the teacher evaluation talks between the mayor and the union as if it were the only chance to fix public education in New York City. Do we need an evaluation...
View ArticleBudget Office Finds Fair Student Funding Not So Fair
The Independent Budget Office, in a report released on April 10, finds that the Bloomberg-era school allocation formula, known as Fair Student Funding, actually underfunds 94 percent of schools and...
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Market-Oriented Reforms Really Don’t Work. What Should We Do Instead?
[Editor's note: Guest blogger Elaine Weiss is the national coordinator of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education.] As many of us have long suspected, the impacts of popular market-oriented reforms...
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The Great Divide in High School College Readiness Rates
10 percent of the schools produce nearly half the college-ready graduates Last week the city announced that 22.2% of students from the high school Class of 2012 met the state’s college-ready standard,...
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Teacher Evaluation: Lesson One
Let’s begin at the end, with final scoring. We all know that New York State created an evaluation system for New York City on June 1. And we also know that that there are three subcomponents in the new...
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According to Plan?
by Brook Lyn, special education teacher A teacher’s life can be measured by a long chain of plans. We plan our days, our lessons, even our free time. Teachers spend their lives helping young people...
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The Great Divide, Part Three
From the UFT Research Department: Just 60 of New York City’s 404 High Schools Produce More Than Two-Thirds of the Students Who ‘Pass’ the SAT College Entrance Exam The city announced with great fanfare...
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How I came out to my students
hudsynyc is the pseudonym of a second-year high school ELA teacher in Brooklyn. If you’d like to submit an entry for the New Teacher Diaries, please email edwize@uft.org. Sixteen 14-year-old girls...
View ArticleSmarter charters
The rapid growth of charter schools, in New York and around the country, has often put union supporters’ teeth on edge. This idea for an experimental public school model led by unionized teachers and...
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