Teachout for Governor, Robert Jackson for State Senate
September 9, 2014 am30 7:43 am
In the first UFT Executive Board of the year, New Action moved the endorsement of Zephyr Teachout for Governor. The motion was debated (2 speakers for, 3 against) and overwhelmingly defeated. Yet it was important that the issue came forward, and that opposition to Cuomo was acknowledged.
I spoke about Robert Jackson during the question period. Given the NYSUT endorsement of the other guy, a motion seemed besides the point. But what does Jackson have to do – Hero of Public Education, Dewey Award Winner (UFT), Lion for the Children of NY – to earn the UFT’s support?
JD2718 
As it’s time to go to work, I will read the details later. I know naught about Jackson. But your summary brought to mind the words of a colleague at the science department in my school, who left the field last year, after about 6-7 years of teaching. He told me, “Arjun, education is the lowest priority in the Department of Education.” He also told me, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my (working) life training kids how to pass the Regents.”
I only wish that I had seen what he saw, twenty years back, when I too had only 6-7 years in the system. While some of us may find niches in which they may function in a manner that they find meaningful, unless this becomes the expected norm, I see no light ahead for teachers and their students.
The UFT, just like the DOE, does not have education high on its list of priorities. And education, by the way, whether informal (by far the more important one, on which all else rests, including the acquisition of the first language and the absorption of ethics, from observations of examples set by elders) or formal (as in a classroom setting and from textbooks) has very little to do with what passes for it in to many of the Schools of Education in the universities. But that is another story.