POLITICS: NYC schools are failing teachers and pupils — UFT’s Michael Mulgrew must be stopped

Voting is underway to elect the President of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City. Michael Mulgrew, who has held the position since 2009, is expecting he can sleepwalk into another term.

However, under his watch schools are requiring less and less of pupils, to the point where attendance is essentially optional and almost everyone is handed a passing grade.

Brooklyn-based Social Studies teacher Mike Dowd writes why its time for a change and for basic discipline to be brought back.

Officials love to brag about the 84% graduation rate for New York City public-school students.

But if you thought that was an honest measure of how many kids are passing, I have bad news. High-school grading policies have become so corrupt, class credits have become almost meaningless.

In recent years, the Department of Education and many individual schools, have adopted “equity grading” practices intended to benefit disadvantaged students.

But by making it almost impossible for such students to fail, even when they don’t show up to class, our school system harms the less privileged by discouraging hard work and reliability.

Despite the demoralizing effect these policies have on teachers, the United Federation of Teachers, under the out-of-touch leadership of Michael Mulgrew, has failed to make this a public issue.

New Yorkers would be shocked to see how far school standards have dropped.

Although many of us who taught under Mayor Bloomberg remember the pressure to increase passing rates or face retaliation, there was an important check on this practice — the longstanding notion that attendance was a basic requirement for passing.

But this constraint disappeared under Mayor De Blasio, whose pursuit of equity involved eliminating “seat time” as a requirement to pass.

Thereafter, schools could award passing grades to chronically absent students who didn’t deserve them alongside students who worked hard.

Then, Mayor Adams made attendance completely optional by continuing remote-learning policies that forbade any lowering of a student’s grade due to absences.

Nowadays, if teachers want to penalize students for cutting, they must give a makeup assignment for each missed day and inevitably accept work — even if it appears to be AI-generated.

Meanwhile, many individual schools have incentivized absenteeism through another equity policy — minimum grades.

In these schools, a missing assignment or test with no correct answers receives a grade as high as 55 — just 10 points below passing — instead of a zero. Students, therefore, can (and do) miss months of class in a semester and still pass, even without doing makeup work.

Not surprisingly, high-school attendance has fallen. But it’s even worse than publicized. Because students need only show face at their “attendance” class to be marked present each day, they can skip other classes and still have excellent official attendance.

How often this happens is unknown because the DOE hides this data.

The DOE has other ways of de-emphasizing attendance.

When students fail classes, teachers must select prewritten, explanatory comments for their report cards.

But the DOE has removed Excessively Absent (More than 2 days/month) from the list, leaving no appropriate options for chronically absent students. They’ve even removed Excessively Late, as if to emphasize that old standards no longer apply.

So we’ve gone from defining three absences per month as excessive to denying that absences can even be excessive.

Meanwhile, the DOE’s attendance app hides attendance records from parents and teachers. As a coach, I no longer know if my wrestlers are attending class and must keep paper records to know my own students’ attendance history.

A culture shift is underway as attending class goes from being a widely understood responsibility to a mere lifestyle choice. Regularly absent students often ask me with complete sincerity how they might improve their grades. Some even request college recommendation letters.

As students offer ever weaker excuses for low attendance, it’s clear that these new policies are teaching them to surrender in the face of everyday challenges. At a formative time in their lives, our future workforce is losing its self-discipline, reliability, and resilience.

But the damage goes beyond work habits. Allowing students, especially those with weak academic skills, to miss vital classroom instruction denies them the full education they deserve.

In fact, in a recent examination of equity grading, the Fordham Institute, an education think tank, cites research showing “lenient grading leads to less learning.”

My fellow teachers and I wonder how the DOE can completely upend longstanding norms of student accountability without public debate and why our union leaders remain silent as our integrity is undermined from above.

It’s time for Mayor Adams to end these destructive policies or tell us why he supports them.

In the meantime, the DOE needs to provide period-by-period attendance data, to show us just how serious our absenteeism problem is and tell us just how many chronically absent students are receiving class credit. And we need to identify the schools at which these problems are most significant and develop plans to fix them.

We waited far too many years to address teachers’ concerns about student cellphone use. Let’s not do the same with lax attendance and grading policies.