"Despite unions, a principled stand
by JAMAL E. WATSON
Amsterdam News Staff
Originally posted 5/4/2005
It’s early in the morning at Brooklyn’s Paul Robeson High School for Business and Technology, and Ira C. Weston is already making his second trip around the aging school building.
“Get that hat off your head,” Weston, the school’s principal, tells one student. “Why are you in the hallway?” he asks another. “Go to class. And take those headphones off.”
For Weston, who started his career at Robeson High School in 1985, the challenges have been daunting, but the no-nonsense administrator, who works 12-hour days, is trying to do something that others have predicted almost impossible: transform a failing school into a high-end achieving one.
Weston has lofty ideas for the Crown Heights school that others have long written off. He believes in these students, stopping them in the hallways to buttonhole them about college.
For most of these students—who are Black and poor—Weston’s inquiries are greeted with respect. His tough-love approach has given students the needed confidence to encourage them to apply and get accepted into some of the nation’s top-tier universities.
In recent years, students from Robeson have gone on to New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia.
On the surface, that seems good.
But Robeson still has a long way to go. Only 60 percent of the students here graduate and go off to college. A large portion of the students are performing below average, forcing Weston to initiate 15 partnerships with outside institutions like Citicorp, or recruiting a group of aging alumni from Princeton University to come into the school to tutor students several days a week.
“I am not afraid to ask for help,” said Weston, who taught in China and Kenya before winning a fellowship in the early 1980s to attend Teacher’s College at Columbia University. “We have to bring resources into the school from outside of the building.”
Weston, like other school principals across the city, faces some of the same dilemmas: not enough resources to service a public school system that is bigger than some U.S. cities.
But in New York—unlike some other school districts—Weston doesn’t ultimately have complete autonomy over his school. He, like other New York City administrators, is restricted by a stringent union contract that enables tenured teachers who have been in the system for years to fill a vacancy in a school even if the principal has another candidate in mind.
“It pisses me off that I can’t pick my team,” said Weston, who has hired a crop of young teachers over the past few years who are idealistic but have little teaching experience working in challenging urban settings.
“I can’t say, ‘Let me go out. Let me hire. Let me recruit,’” he said.
School reform advocates have long argued that at schools like Robeson, which has had a long history of underperformance, students could benefit from having more seasoned educators in the classroom.
“If you have a good principal, you want them to have autonomy,” said Gary Orfield, a Harvard University professor who is an expert on urban education.
But under the current union contract negotiated by the United Federation of Teachers, once a teacher reaches tenure, he or she has the option of transferring to a high-performing school, leaving many underperforming schools in largely poor, Black and Latino communities—staffed with a batch of first- and second-year teachers.
It’s no coincidence, some argue, why young, inexperienced teachers in some of the city’s most challenging schools get burnt out after their second year on the job. At Robeson, there has been turnover. Teachers have left the profession, some have moved away, and some left because they were concerned about the tough neighborhood where the school is located. It is just a block away from one of the city’s most dangerous housing projects.
Another provision of the union contract—a massive document that most city parents don’t know exists nor can fully comprehend—does not require that teachers monitor students in the hallway as they pass to and from classes or that they supervise students on the recess playground.
“You think the union is protecting the interest of the students, but in reality, they are protecting the interests of teachers,” said Courtney Harris, a Harlem resident who recently took her daughter out of public schools and enrolled her in a charter school.
Harris isn’t alone. Each year, dozens of parents crowd into city schools urging principals to provide services for their students that the union contract explicitly prohibits teachers from performing. One teacher at a Manhattan school said that she did not volunteer for certain jobs (such as staying after school to sponsor an art and drama club) because it was frowned upon by other teachers active in the union.
“I feel torn,” said the teacher, who asked that her name not be identified. “When we signed up to be teachers, we pledged to give it our all. But some of my colleagues are in this thing for a paycheck. It’s hard to criticize them because then you are viewed as being against the union.”
Joel Klein, chancellor of the public schools, is convinced that the teachers union has made it more difficult for students—particularly those from lower-income groups—to receive a quality education in New York.
“This is really a civil rights issue,” said Klein, who has called for reforms in the contracts.
At a gathering before a largely African American crowd in Harlem last week, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg chastised the teachers union for advocating for a contract that rewards teachers based on seniority, allowing tenured teachers to escape troubled schools where they are needed most.
“This is counter-intuitive,” said Bloomberg, who is running for reelection.
Repeated calls to Randi Weingarten, president of the UFT, were not returned.
At Robeson, Weston acknowledges that he has his “talented tenth” –the group of over-achievers who will succeed no matter what—but it’s the other students that he stays up at night worrying about.
And he’s also lucky. He hasn’t had to deal with the union in years. “We haven’t had a grievance in three or four years,” said Weston, who has been the principal for the past nine years. “We resolve any issues beforehand, so we’ve been lucky.”
But Weston doesn’t buy the notion that tenured teachers who aren’t performing ought to be coddled and protected, either.
“You’re as good as your last earnings,” he said, adding that the results of good teaching should prove evident in student performance.
Jamal E. Watson can be reached at jamalwats@aol.com. This is the first in a series of occasional stories about New York City public schools.
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