City Council Questions Mayor's Additional Planned Cuts to Internal City Government Watchdog
City Council Member Gale Brewer (photo: Emil Cohen/NYC Council Media Unit)
The New York City Department of Investigation has lost 86 budgeted positions, 21% of its staff, in the last two fiscal years, and is being hit with further vacancy reductions in Mayor Eric Adams’ proposed $102.7 billion preliminary budget for 2024. Those cuts threaten to undermine the agency’s work to root out waste, fraud, and abuse in city government, as it continues to handle an unchanged workload with fewer resources.
The Department of Investigation (DOI) is a mayoral agency with law enforcement powers meant to be the inspector general for city government, operating without fear or favor toward the mayor. Given its powers, its commissioner is one of a very small number of mayoral appointments at that level of government that requires the consent of the City Council.
At a City Council budget hearing on Tuesday, DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber testified to the agency’s dwindling staff and the efforts the office has taken to streamline operations in response. DOI has its own personnel budget and also receives funding from other agencies for dedicated Inspector General staff. For fiscal year 2024, which begins July 1 of this year, DOI’s overall budget proposed by the mayor is $45.27 million – a more than 15% cut from the budget adopted last year – while another $1.6 million will flow from other agencies and public authorities like NYCHA and NYC Health+Hospitals.
“This committee is concerned that after multiple years of reductions the department is not adequately funded,” said City Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat and chair of the Council’s Committee on Oversight and Investigations, in her opening remarks at Tuesday’s hearing.
The mayor’s preliminary budget proposes a cut of 55 budgeted positions at DOI, from a budgeted headcount of 348 when the current budget was adopted last June to 293 for next fiscal year. That cut includes 18 positions that were added at the urging of the Council last year but not baselined in the budget as well as another 37 vacant positions that were cut as part of the mayor’s Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), wherein the mayor sought 3% in savings across most agencies.
As Strauber noted in her testimony, the PEG “hit DOI particularly hard because we already had a high vacancy rate due to difficulties in hiring and retaining staff over the past several years.” The agency currently has 63 positions that are vacant. “DOI is staff-driven, not program-driven, so our PEG cuts principally impact our headcount,” she said. Strauber, a former federal prosecutor, was appointed to the role by Mayor Adams during 2022, his first year in office.
At the same time as it continues to lose staff, DOI’s workload has increased on some fronts. In the 2022 calendar year, the agency received 12,580 complaints, an increase of about 3.5% from the previous year. It opened 940 investigations, 46 more than in 2021. There were also 1,526 active investigations and another 837 closed investigations, roughly consistent with 2021. The agency also reduced its backlog of personnel background investigations to about 910, down from a high of 6,500 in 2019.
“You've done more with less so I know you could do a lot more with more,” Brewer told Strauber.
Strauber emphasized that the agency has strived to fulfill its responsibilities. “I certainly don't think there's work that we're not doing or important investigations that we're not pursuing,” she said. But, nonetheless, the staffing reductions have had an adverse impact. “Overall there may be a slower pace of work and we are…trying to make good and efficient choices about how we pursue investigations. So we're doing everything we can with what we have.”
Strauber said the agency needs at least 30 more baselined positions at a total cost of just $1.7 million. That will free up staff to focus their attention on investigations rather than spending 20% of their time on administrative complaint intake, she said. Twenty of those staffers would include confidential investigators, auditors, lawyers, and other specialists, and six of them would be dedicated to a squad overseeing four agencies that handle more than $6.7 billion in capital projects. “That Squad has not been fully staffed to date which has hampered its ability to strategically establish its docket,” Strauber noted.
Strauber also said that without baselined funding, the agency will struggle to fill empty positions and hire more investigators. “We can't really recruit people where we don't have assurance that the money will be there,” she said.
“It is hard for me to envision how we could hire someone without a commitment that we have the funding to pay them for more than one year,” she later added.
When asked by Brewer about the potential for DOI workers to be allowed hybrid work schedules, including some ability to work from home, Strauber said it would make it easier to hire personnel. “Our hiring, we think, would be considerably easier if we could offer even a moderate remote hybrid option,” she said. Mayor Adams has insisted that all city employees report to their official workplaces, continuing a policy put in place by Mayor Bill de Blasio after the worst of the covid pandemic.
Brewer had broached the subject of DOI’s vacancy reductions and the administration’s stance on work-from-home policies on Monday, at the first Council hearing on the mayor’s proposed budget. At the hearing, Jacques Jiha, director of the Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, defended the cuts in vacancies as part of the broad effort to reduce spending across city government. On the issue of hybrid work schedules, he declined any real discussion, instead pointing to a pilot hybrid work program that the administration has agreed to explore with DC37, the city’s largest public sector union. Brewer stressed that many non-union employees, like those at DOI, should be offered a hybrid schedule, and pointed to the lack of hybrid schedules as a major barrier to hiring and retention.
On Tuesday, Strauber said that remote work had not negatively affected her agency’s work. “We had the vast majority of our staff work remotely during the pandemic,” she said. “Obviously that was a challenging time, but their ability to do their investigations really continued unabated. And certainly remote work we don't view as posing an issue to our ability to be productive and to work collaboratively as a team and as an agency.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
At First Hearing on Mayor's Preliminary Budget, City Council Takes Aim at Agency Staffing Crisis
Budget Director Jacques Jiha (photo: John McCarten, NYC Council Media Unit)
City Council members repeatedly clashed with budget officials from Mayor Eric Adams’ administration at a hearing on Monday, pressing for answers about an ongoing staffing crisis at city agencies that has affected the delivery of municipal services. The hearing kicked off the weeks-long process of the Council’s public examination of Mayor Adams’ $102.7 billion preliminary budget proposal for the 2024 fiscal year, which starts July 1.
The first part of the hearing featured testimony from Mayor Adams' budget director, Jacques Jiha, who repeatedly stressed the fiscal challenges facing the city and touted the administration's careful budgeting. He and a series of City Council members engaged in rounds of back-and-forth where the members questioned the city's approach to its tens of thousands of vacant positions and rigid personnel policies. While Jiha offered a few notes of progress, he largely side-stepped what appear to be the most pressing challenges: a lack of hybrid work models and low pay scales that often can't compete with the private sector.
[READ: Is Mayor Adams' Spending Plan an 'Austerity' Budget?]
The mayor’s budget proposal is about $1.7 billion higher than the budget adopted by the Council last June, and slightly lower than the $102.9 billion that the city projected in its November budget modification that it would spend by the end of the current fiscal year.
When Adams, a first-term Democrat, released his budget proposal in January, it included few new avenues of major spending, and made significant cuts across several city agencies to account for pandemic-era federal aid that is running out.
The administration also faces a slew of budget risks – unresolved costs of renegotiating expired labor contracts, funding services for tens of thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, lower stock market returns that will increase pension costs, cuts and cost shifts imposed by Governor Kathy Hochul’s state budget proposal, a possible recession, and tax revenues that are expected to slow after coming in higher than expected.
As part of the preliminary budget, the mayor ordered city agencies to find 3% in savings under a Program to Eliminate the Gap (PEG), which saved $3 billion across the current and next fiscal years – including a reduction in almost 4,300 budgeted vacancies across city government in the current fiscal year.
City Council members, among others, have been particularly critical of the vacancy cuts and larger picture of tens of thousands of budgeted vacancies, arguing against what they see as an overall approach that has hampered the ability of city agencies to provide basic services and core functions. At the Council’s urging, the administration restored almost 400 vacant positions, including 340 for the Department of Social Services, but the central issue — discussed repeatedly at Monday’s hearing — remains the city’s ability to recruit, hire, and retain personnel.
“These reductions call into question the city's ability to provide essential services that support New Yorkers to say nothing of the goals laid out by the administration on housing, economic opportunity, and public safety,” said Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, a Queens Democrat, in her opening remarks. “The fact that these cuts are not distributed evenly, only magnifies this concern.”
Adams and others have pointed to specific areas of concern including funding cuts to libraries, mental health services, CUNY, and prekindergarten for three-year-olds (3-K).
The mayor’s Office of Management and Budget has predicted that the city will end the current fiscal year with a $2.2 billion surplus, which will be used to pre-pay costs for the next fiscal year. But the City Council has questioned those predictions, releasing its own forecast on Friday that projects a surplus that is $5.2 billion more than OMB’s projections for the current and next fiscal years. Council Member Justin Brannan, a Brooklyn Democrat and chair of the Council’s finance committee, said there is an “abundance of pessimism” in OMB’s tax and revenue projections, unlike the Council’s own numbers. “[A]fter reviewing the administration's preliminary budget, concerns that the Council raised last year about veering into unnecessary austerity have returned,” he said.
Jiha said the Adams administration followed a “cautious path” as it prepared for the many risks it faced in creating next year’s budget. And he repeatedly deflected when questioned about the staffing crisis, which he attributed more to a tight overall labor market than city policies. Even with some reductions, there are more than 23,000 budgeted vacancies citywide – including, for instance, over 2,100 at the Department of Social Services, more than 670 at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and more than 400 at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.
“Their challenge is that hiring has not caught up with attrition,” he said, noting that agencies hired 22,400 employees in the 2022 fiscal year and lost 24,500 to attrition. He did say that the city is “turning the corner” and that the municipal headcount increased by a net of 1,000 in the first seven months of the current fiscal year.
Jiha said the administration has taken several steps to address staffing issues including scrapping previous restrictions on hiring, shortening his Office of Management and Budget’s timeline for reviewing personnel actions, and new initiatives for recruiting and retaining workers. While he repeatedly pointed to job fairs the city has begun holding, he mostly tried to avoid discussing pay scales and hybrid work models for union and non-union employees. He did, however, acknowledge at one point under questioning that the lack of a remote work option is one of the reasons that the city has lost workers to the private sector.
Most recently, the administration reached a tentative contract deal with DC 37, the city’s largest municipal workers union, that included a $70 million equity fund for salaries for hard-to-recruit titles, and a plan to explore flexible work schedules that will allow for remote work for some employees. “The city has always been a passive employer…We don't aggressively go out there, try to recruit people,” Jiha noted. “We're changing that pattern.”
When asked by Council Member Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, if the Adams administration was offering non-union employees or recruits hybrid work schedules whereby they can work some days from home, Jiha acknowledged that the administration has made no such strides, only pointing to the exploratory effort in the tentative DC37 contract. “That's going to be part of the pilot,” he said.
“People won’t work for the city if it is not hybrid,” Brewer responded. “You're not going to be able to hire good people.”
The DC37 deal and other likely labor agreements to follow, along with the growing costs of the migrant crisis, state cuts and cost shifts, and more have all yet to be fully accounted for, and will be included in the mayor’s executive budget proposal which is due in April. With the state budget due by April 1, the mayor will be able to take into account final decisions by Governor Hochul and legislators on a number of fiscal issues where the city is trying to push back on Hochul’s plans.
Jiha noted that the $4.4 billion DC37 agreement for 2021 through 2026 is mostly offset by the city’s labor reserves, and would lead to a net $2.9 billion increase in city spending through the 2027 fiscal year. But the pattern set by the contract will cost the city about $16 billion in total for all labor contracts to be settled through 2027. The state cost shifts, he estimated, would equal more than $1 billion annually – that includes about $530 million each year in additional contributions to the MTA, and $125 million in the current fiscal year in lost Medicaid funding, which will grow to more than $340 million annually.
Jiha also painted a dire portrait of the migrant situation, which has swelled the city’s shelter population and strained the budget. Last January, Jiha said, the city’s shelter population stood at 45,213, and it has grown to almost 80,000 between DSS shelters and humanitarian relief centers specifically for asylum-seekers. In total, shelter and services are estimated to cost the city about $4.2 billion between the current and next fiscal years. The governor has proposed $1 billion in state aid for that purpose while the amount of funding from the federal government remains uncertain – $800 million for migrant assistance nationally was appropriated in December, with the city expected to see much of it, but it has yet to be disbursed.
“We are in a very difficult situation,” Jiha stressed. “In an era of limited and diminishing resources, we will have to make difficult decisions to balance the budget as required by law and simultaneously prevent fiscal strain that will jeopardize our ability to deliver quality services to New Yorkers.”
Throughout the hearing, Council members were largely focused on the personnel vacancies. They pointed to the Preliminary Mayor’s Management Report, which shows city agencies failing to perform their duties. For instance, the Human Resources Administration has shown significant delays in processing food stamp applications. After a marked slowdown last fiscal year, the housing department is predicting that far fewer new affordable housing projects will launch compared to before the pandemic. There has also been a drop in the number of new housing units to begin construction in the first four months of the current fiscal year compared with the same period in the previous fiscal year.
Jiha sought to reassure the Council that vacancies generally were not to blame, and that the administration is prioritizing resources where required. “We are more than happy to work with agencies,” Jiha said. “Agencies have enough heads but if there are certain areas of the operation that need resources, and if the resources are available, we will work with them and work with you.”
The hearing touched on several other issues in some depth as Council members asked questions, including the migrant crisis, cuts to a planned expansion of 3-K, nonprofit contracting, and more.
One of the criticisms the mayor has faced is for his decision to pare back an expansion of 3-K for All, which was planned under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. Adams’ preliminary budget includes a $283 million reduction for the 3-K program, scrapping 6,000 new slots that would have grown the program from 55,000 to 61,000 seats. The administration has said the expansion was unnecessary since roughly 33% of 3-K seats are currently empty and the prior model was not right-sized for enrollment trends.
Asked by Speaker Adams about 3-K waitlists, Jiha said the administration has hired the consulting firm Accenture to study the distribution and need for 3-K seats. “It doesn't make any sense for the city to be spending money for 19,000 seats that are empty,” he insisted.
Pressed by Brannan about the vacancies at the Department of Homeless Services, Jiha said the administration has prioritized hiring at the agency. “We're working with them, and they're making progress but…it's a very challenging environment and we’re trying to be as aggressive as we can be,” he said.
Council Member Charles Barron, a Brooklyn Democrat, had some of the harshest criticism for the administration, in particular for the mayor’s budget PEG. “These are not PEGs. These are cuts to services and when you cut vacancies, you cut services no matter how you try to fix it up in your report,” he said.
Barron insisted that the budget fails to invest sufficiently in Black and brown neighborhoods where poverty and unemployment is higher than other parts of the city. “You don't have a money problem. You have a prioritization of spending problem,” he said, as he encouraged his fellow Council members to reject the budget. “This time around let's use our power so no matter what they present, let's use the power of the City Council to be for the people and say this budget is not a priority of the moral position or the values of this Council when it comes to human beings living in the richest city in the world with abject poverty that is disgusting and shameful,” he said.
Council Members Diana Ayala, Farah Louis, and Althea Stevens questioned the administration about delayed payments to nonprofit service providers. Jiha said the administration is working to improve its procurement process, and collaborating with the comptroller’s office to streamline contract registrations and payments. “This is the first time we're tackling this issue where we’re putting resources behind it to make sure we change our entire process,” he said.
Council Member Pierina Sanchez highlighted staffing challenges at the housing department (HPD) and the decreased rate of new affordable housing being financed and built. “The housing crisis. It is number one on New Yorkers’ minds and I wager that it should be and it should remain number one in the administration's mind,” she said.
Jiha said the slowdown of affordable housing creation is a much more complicated problem because of the global supply chain problems and a nationwide labor shortage. And he noted that HPD currently has 427 vacant positions. “Giving you a hundred more vacant positions is not going to solve your hiring problem,” he said, again not discussing some of the ways in which critics and supporters of the administration have suggested changing city policy to enhance hiring and retention.
Ahead of his own testimony to the City Council on Monday, Comptroller Brad Lander, a Democrat, released a detailed analysis of the mayor’s preliminary budget, along with a brief report on how vacancies have affected agency performance.
He highlighted the changing fiscal forecast for the city, predicting a “soft landing” but not a recession for the city’s economy. But he did note the various added costs and risks including the costs of the labor union deals, the effect of the governor’s proposal, and additional costs of migrant shelter and services. He also pointed out other areas that are under-budgeted including uniformed agency overtime costs, spending on charter schools and Carter special education cases, pupil transportation, and growing city contributions to the MTA.
Lander had several recommendations for the administration including shifting more migrants out of shelter (by supporting work authorizations or transitions to permanent housing), reversing cuts to CUNY and public libraries, adopting a formula for Rainy Day Fund deposits, new hiring and retention policies, and support for higher taxes on the wealthy at the state level in order to increase revenue for the city to invest into services.
“Let’s be clear. While savings and efficiencies are necessary, they won’t be near enough to allow us to invest in the ambitious programs we need to secure New York City’s economic success, while also closing the budget gaps we face,” Lander said in his testimony. “New funding will be necessary. This budget cycle is the time to ask Albany for the resources and authority to raise revenues necessary to invest in the City’s future.”
Like the City Council, the Independent Budget Office also predicted in testimony on Monday that the city will have higher revenues at its disposal. But IBO also pointed to additional costs such as spending at the Department of Education (which will be affected by diminishing federal aid) and overtime costs, largely at the NYPD, that have regularly been higher than budgeted. The settlement of labor contracts will also push spending up, IBO’s testimony stated. “While this does not come as a surprise, it does mean policymakers may be faced with tough choices, particularly in the outyears,” the testimony reads.
The City Council’s preliminary budget hearings will now shift to committee and agency specifics, and will last through March. Tuesday’s hearings include those on small business; environmental protection, resiliency and waterfronts; immigration; and oversight and investigations.
[READ: Is Mayor Adams' Spending Plan an 'Austerity' Budget?]
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
‘Stop Wasting Our Time’: Michael Mulgrew on UFT Contract Negotiations, Charter Schools & More
UFT President Mike Mulgrew hugs Mayor Adams (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the union representing the majority of educators in New York City’s public schools, has been bargaining with the city for a new contract since October of last year. Now, the union is expected to be next in line for an agreement after District Council 37 (DC37), the city’s largest municipal worker union, secured a tentative agreement of its own last month with the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, a first-term Democrat.
The UFT’s previous contract expired nearly six months ago, and the union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, is ramping up pressure on the Adams administration to deliver on the union’s demands. Mulgrew joined Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast to react to the tentative DC37 deal and discuss the UFT’s top priorities for ongoing negotiations as well as other major issues the union is focused on, such as its opposition to Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposal to raise the cap on largely non-unionized charter schools in New York City.
“I believe everybody who works should have access to a union,” Mulgrew said on the show. “It's shown that if you have access to a union, you'll be treated better overall.”
Mulgrew has been president of the UFT since 2009, leading a union of about 200,000 active and retired members, including teachers, paraprofessionals, secretaries, counselors, and therapists.
Contract Negotiations
DC37’s February agreement with the city was the first of its kind under Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. If ratified, the five-plus year contract, in part retroactive from DC37’s contract expiration on May 26, 2021, will impact nearly 100,000 current public workers directly, and hundreds of thousands more via the tenets of “pattern bargaining” that the city’s unions abide by. It includes annual raises of 3% for 2021-2024 and 3.25% in 2025; and an increase of the minimum wage for DC37 workers to $18 per hour, among other details.
Mulgrew said on the podcast that he was headed later that day (Tuesday February 28) to a meeting with his 500-member bargaining committee that afternoon, during which they would continue to discuss their priorities for contract negotiations and would likely also discuss the tentative deal reached by DC37 and what it might mean for their bargaining process. He was hesitant to go into many specifics of what the UFT’s top priorities would be during negotiations, citing internal, ongoing discussions, but he did point to some of the union’s overarching focus areas.
The UFT’s bargaining with the city will most adhere to “pattern bargaining,” Mulgrew confirmed, in which key agreements made for one contract are used to dictate others. Mulgrew said that the extent to which his union has held to the “pattern” has varied over recent years, and every union negotiates its own deal, from the major aspects like pay to sector- and profession-specific details. He expressed some initial frustration with the percentage of wage increases won by DC37, and their added value over time.
“The people in my profession, working with the children, should be the people with the highest compensation,” Mulgrew said. “That's not the way our world works, but that's how I feel. And I know that DC37 was trying to do what they could do to really help their folks.”
Mulgrew said that increased funding was near the top of the priority list for the UFT’s ongoing negotiations with the city. He added that, across the board, teachers want relevant training — not bureaucratic paperwork, which he said has taken time away from educators’ work with children. He said most of the added paperwork was due to chain of command issues and bureaucratic hangups: “You name it, we got it all.”
“It was funny because both the mayor and the chancellor, when they were coming into office, they kept talking about how the bureaucracy of the DOE was the enemy of the children,” Mulgrew said. “Yes, I agree…Stop wasting our time.”
Agreed to under the de Blasio administration in 2018, UFT’s previous contract promised new positions like bilingual social workers and speech teachers, health-care savings, and compounded wage increases of between 2-3% per year. It also included specifics like the Bronx Plan, intended to increase recruitment and retention of teachers in “hard-to-staff” positions and schools, and the Collaborative Schools Model, a program to provide coaching to teachers, $25,000 annual grants to each school for an “innovation fund,” allocated toward projects chosen by a school-specific committee, and increased teacher involvement in school planning.
Now, Mulgrew said that the UFT wants standardized literacy curriculum rather than what he called “fly by night” trainings. Many of the decisions made about education and working conditions are made by bureaucrats at the Department of Education who do not know the reality of working in a school, he said.
“We want to be compensated fairly,” Mulgrew said. “We want everything to be focused on the work that we're trying to do with the children. That's it, because this profession has gotten way out of whack with all the other stuff,” referring often to the large amount of paperwork teachers and other school professionals must do.
Mulgrew said the UFT is not willing to negotiate on mandatory health care savings, which were included in the union’s previous contracts, and that it was something that the UFT, DC37, and other members of the Municipal Labor Committee had decided together to take off the bargaining table heading into this round of negotiations.
“We were clear that we would do no health savings in this round,” Mulgrew said. “We said enough with that. We've done what we needed to do.’”
However, improved healthcare as a whole is a priority, including better deals and lower costs. The union is doing “hard-nosed negotiations” over the issue with hospitals and others, Mulgrew said.
Asked about how remote and hybrid work models may be part of contract negotiations, Mulgrew said that offering more remote work options, especially for roles like social workers and psychologists — which are extremely short-staffed — may improve morale and staffing rates.
“Say we had a foot of snow. Right now, the city mandates that because those people are not part of a school, they have to go to work,” Mulgrew said. “They would call out or spend the day trying to get to their office where no children are coming just because the city says they will not allow those folks who aren't in schools not to show up for work.”
Although not necessarily a main issue at the bargaining table, Mulgrew said many teachers are concerned about the cost of living in the city with regard to housing. Unless a house has been in a family for several generations, it is difficult to buy property as a civil servant, Mulgrew said. He acknowledged general UFT support for the major housing development plans that Adams and Hochul have advanced, but noted that this is an issue that the union has been talking about for a very long time.
“I don't know how the city is ever going to really get back and moving in the right direction if the people who work and keep the city moving and keep the children being educated can't afford to live here,” Mulgrew said.
The union president also said the city has “a long way to go” on ensuring clean air and water in New York City schools, and advocated for increased safety measures like air purifiers in classrooms, though he did not indicate exactly how the issue may factor into contract negotiations.
And, he said the UFT is supportive of efforts to add Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, to the school calendar, currently the subject of a legislative push in Albany, where Mayor Adams and lawmakers are seeking to remove Brooklyn Queens Day as a city school holiday and instead insert Diwali.
Charter Schools
Governor Kathy Hochul has proposed to raise the cap on charter schools in New York, allowing for an estimated roughly 100 new charters, which are privately-run public schools. The proposal, which would allow mostly non-unionized, city-based charter operators to utilize unused allocations from elsewhere in the state without increasing the statewide cap of 460 charter schools, has faced considerable opposition.
Speaking to members of the State Legislature at a budget hearing last month, Mayor Adams said that while he is in favor of allowing more charters, Hochul’s plan would be untenable for the city’s finances.
“If the state raises the charter cap as proposed, we will need more resources,” Adams said. “We believe it will cost us over $1 billion to site these schools and cover the required per-student tuition — money we do not have.”
On the podcast, Mulgrew reiterated the UFT’s long-standing opposition to the expansion of charter schools, stressing the opposition is focused mostly on the “corporate charters,” by which he means the large networks like Success Academy, KIPP, and others.. He said that one of the UFT’s chief objections is that charter schools have lower standards of accountability, saying that many charter schools are only able to boast of high graduation rates because they don’t serve as many harder-to-teach students as district public schools and actively seek to move certain student populations out of their schools.
“It’s really about corporate charters,” Mulgrew said. “They tell everyone they have a 98% graduation rate, but 50% of the kids that started are gone…That's really the issue for us is fairness and equity, because as an educator, your job isn't to weed out kids with challenges. Your job is to educate all children. If you don’t have that in your DNA, in your soul and in your heart, then, for me, you shouldn’t be in education.”
Though the majority of employees within the charter school system are not unionized, Mulgrew said that it was not the main reason why the UFT was in opposition to Hochul’s push. Instead, he said that the UFT’s main concerns are the implications of disciplinary measures he has observed at charter schools — including handing out suspensions to children who present challenges in the classroom — on the education system as a whole.
“Most of the things that we are now talking about that are problematic are things that nobody envisioned that a group of schools would try to do,” Mulgrew said. “Not taking children with special needs, not taking homeless children…We'll talk about it, but first, all of this has to be undone.”
[LISTEN to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: UFT President Michael Mulgrew on Contract Negotiations, Charter Schools, & More]
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by Abby Wilson, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
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