Mulgrew Takes UFT Reins, To Be Assertive With DOE

JOEL I. KLEIN: Gets new sparring partner.

Michael Mulgrew was formally elected president of the United Federation of Teachers July 29 by the union's executive board to serve the rest of Randi Weingarten's term, which ends next year. He began Aug. 1, when Ms. Weingarten departed to run the American Federation of Teachers full-time.

In an interview, Mr. Mulgrew said that he would focus on grass-roots activism to push for many of the union's causes, advocating for collaborative reform in city schools on issues like tenure, use of data and charter schools. "Community is the key," he said. "Educators get into this field because they want to make a difference in children's lives, and at the same time in the lives of the community."

Comes Out of Vocational Ed.

Mr. Mulgrew, formerly the union's chief operating officer and vice president for career and technical high schools, worked at William E. Grady High School in Brighton Beach from 1993 to 2005, serving as a chapter leader from 1999 until he left to work for the UFT full-time.

The Chief-Leader/Michel Friang THE MERIT IN COLLABORATION: While he expects to have some tough dealings with the Department of Education, new United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew says the merit-pay program negotiated with city officials two years ago has been a notable success story. 'Anything that fosters complete collaboration inside of a building,' he said, 'is a good thing, versus pitting individuals against each other.'

Since Ms. Weingarten was elected AFT President in July 2008, he has been groomed as her successor, heading a number of high-profile campaigns for the union, including its March rally outside City Hall with other unions and community groups, and its lobbying of Congress for edu- cation stimulus money. He said that his work had shaped his views on where to focus his attention as a leader.

"We are a very politically active union, and there's a good reason for it, because that's what the people in this union are, very tied into their communities," he said. "A lot of my work over the past couple of years has been . . . strengthening the community relationship between the school level and the local constituents, the parents, the politicians, and that's a path I'll continue to follow."

One issue on which a combined effort will be needed, he said, is next year's potential budget cuts, which are predicted to be even worse than the Department of Education's $400- million reduction this year. "You're going to have a group of advocates, union leaders, and the unions themselves, coming up with a plan and moving this issue," he said. "We know there will be pain, but we need to minimize the pain. We will advocate staunchly our position to minimize that pain, especially for those who will feel it more than others."

Seeks Home Day-Care Pact

He also worried that the UFT's newest members, the home day-care providers incorporated in 2007, would suffer further cutbacks as the union tries to negotiate their first contract. "We need them to be respected by both the state and the city government for the work that they do," he said. "They have brutal cutbacks; at the very time that families need this child-care service more than ever, they have been cut...we need to stop that. It just puts more families at risk."

Some UFT dissidents have protested that Mr. Mulgrew will offer little new and stick to Ms. Weingarten's leadership approach, perhaps even under her direct influence from Washington. But he insisted he would be his own man. "We'd love to spend time where we sit and talk about issues, but our jobs don't lend to that, because we're basically 24/7 in both jobs," he said. "Our styles will probably be different. People point out that we look a little different."

As AFT President, Ms. Weingarten has counseled her members in speeches that they must confront difficult reforms like merit pay, charter schools, the use of data and revision of tenure laws, that are being pushed by President Obama and his Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan.

'Won't Dictate to Us'

But Mr. Mulgrew was adamant that such reform wouldn't happen in New York without major collaboration with Teachers. He stated that the use of test data to measure Teacher performance was particularly important and an issue he felt would be a sticking point in upcoming contract discussions. The union's current contract ends in October.

"Teachers have always used data," he said. "It's a tool, but this is our tool. We're not going to listen to people from the outside telling us how to use a tool in the classroom when they've never been in a classroom. And we will work this, as this technology advances, we will figure this out, because it's a tool for our profession and that's something we will control."

He worried about DOE officials using data as a "blunt instrument," saying a blanket approach without considering school-by-school nuances would be unhelpful. "Teachers understand that they use data to drive instruction, to help customize an individual child's education, and people don't understand from the outside; they just look at it as rough measurements," he said. "If you do it that way, you're going to make mistakes...we're not going to allow something that we know could be harmful if applied incorrectly."

Likes Merit-Pay Program

On the other hand, Mr. Mulgrew praised the city's "model system" on merit pay, where schools are awarded lump sums for achieving well that they can then decide to distribute evenly or unevenly, citing it as an example of successful grassroots collaboration. "We have people coming here, we've been sending people from the UFT to different parts of the country to tell local leaders about our system," he said. "Anything that fosters complete collaboration inside of a building... is a good thing, versus pitting individuals against each other."

One example of a less-collaborative effort between the city and the unions is charter schools. The UFT has publicly protested the rapid but concentrated expansion of the schools in three areas of the city: the south Bronx, Harlem and central Brooklyn, saying at a charged City Council hearing a few months ago that public schools in those areas could be neglected. Mr. Mulgrew shared those fears.

"The idea of trying to pit one kind of school against another doesn't work," he said. "We're all trying to get the best schools, so anyone who's pushing an agenda of pitting one type of school against another, I'm going to have an issue with."

Innovation Being Limited

Citing President Obama's description of charters as "laboratories of innovation," Mr. Mulgrew said he was disappointed such innovation was only being applied in the fraction of city schools that are allowed to work outside of regulations. "What really is disappointing to me is that they've been given the freedom for this innovation, but the idea was that this innovation was supposed to be automatically transferred back into the regular school system," he said. "There are a lot of people who are involved who are not really designing it that way."

Visiting the Harlem Children's Zone, a program that includes charter schools but also serves other children in the neighborhood with advocacy and after-school programs, Mr. Mulgrew said that he felt such services could be offered in a more widespread way.

"What they're doing is, they're supplying services that they feel will allow those children in those areas to be successful," he said. "We as a city have these services, but no one's coordinating them to help these schools. Why don't we come up with a plan where you have a coordination of services from the city level...that's something I think the community would get behind. That's something the Teachers would be behind. That's something we're going to push."

'Retention's the Real Issue'

The almost-fireproof Teacher tenure system is another in the sights of the President, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein, who have all said that educators need to be held more accountable. But Mr. Mulgrew largely dismissed that notion, saying that challenging Teachers on tenure was a distraction from the real problem: retaining Teachers.

"Right now you see people trying to shift the responsibility solely to the individual Teacher sitting inside that classroom," he said. "This is where a lot of the angst and anger is coming from, from each side. We look at it and say, where are the supports from the school administration and the system administration?

"We have a hard-enough time retaining Teachers to begin with," he continued. "We're still right around that 50-percent mark after five years. What other profession do you have more than 50 percent leave after five years? You take tenure and everything else that everyone talks about, 50 percent are gone after five years. So there's something wrong with our support system if you're losing that many people...you can talk and argue, we'll all be arguing about this little piece over here, but this is your problem."

No Piece of Cake

He recalled the lack of support he received on his first day at Grady High School in 1993. "It was, 'here's the bathroom key, good luck.' That is the way it is," he said. "I came out of the construction industry, and I thought, oh, this is going to be a piece of cake, no big deal...that first week, I went home on Friday at 3:00 and passed out on my couch until the next morning, and I had never done that in construction."

Mr. Mulgrew said that a residency or internship program would be a better approach than the current Teacher recruitment systems, like the New York City Teaching Fellows, that send young instructors into schools after just a few weeks of training. "There should be a really formalized mentoring," he said. "A lot of this comes down to putting them in a classroom with a safety net, with another Teacher."

While eager to talk about most hotbutton issues, he passed on some, particularly whether the union would endorse a mayoral candidate or stay out of the race as it did in 2005, and what it was looking for in the upcoming contract talks. Mr. Mulgrew said only that the UFT's screening process for Mayor would begin soon, and that the 300-member contract committee had begun surveying the members on what should be pushed for in negotiations.

A Fondness for At-Risk Kids

And although Mr. Mulgrew had a clear grasp on the details of the union's major issues, he often seemed more eager to stress his compassionate approach to leadership with a focus on individuals in the community. It's a perhaps-unsurprising point of view, considering that he spent all of his 12 years as a Teacher with at-risk kids at Grady, teaching English and filmmaking.

"At-risk kids, they all just need to be reached. They have to know that someone cares, and they need to be reached, and then you can help them move forward," he said. "At the high school level, if you're at-risk in high school, you're getting very close to having a difficult life. And, just to me, that was the most rewarding work as a Teacher. My own upbringing, and things of that nature, I thought, you can't give up on people, you just gotta give them a shot. They're kids."

He added that he felt all of the union's members had a similar viewpoint. "Teachers, educators, the people in this union, between the nurses, the paras, the day-care providers, they get into this work because they're trying to make a difference in people's lives," he said. "That's our identifying coil, so to say, that keeps us all together. I look at that as what all of us are about."