Candidates backed by the union that represents city teachers took control of the state union Sunday after a bitter battle over teacher evaluations.
The United Federation of Teachers, headed by Michael Mulgrew, has long fought tying teachers’ salaries and continued employment to their students’ performance on the new Common Core standardized tests.
The ousted New York State United Teachers leadership, including President Richard Iannuzzi, reached an agreement with Albany allowing its members to be evaluated on the basis of student results on standardized tests.
The new head of the state union is Karen Magee, who was president of the local in the Westchester town of Harrison.
The vote came at a convention in Manhattan. The final results were not immediately available, but an official said she won by a “comfortable” margin.
Magee, the first woman to lead the 600,000-member union, promised to take on “tough fights.”
Mulgrew, who had clashed with Iannuzzi over evaluations and Common Core standards, will now exert a strong influence over teacher unions around the state.
The new leadership is expected to be friendlier to Gov. Cuomo and more likely to endorse him for re-election.
Cuomo had supported teacher evaluations, and the UFT feared the higher standards would make more kids flunk and adversely affect their teachers’ evaluations. But the governor has since backed off, saying evaluations may have to be delayed while the new tests are evaluated.
The union’s relationship with state political leaders may change, but its animosity for state Education Commissioner John King remains as strong.
Its members voted “no confidence” in King’s leadership and asked that the Board of Regents fire him. “We’ve had it with a broken ideology that values obsessive testing and data collection over teaching and learning and meeting the needs of the whole child,” Iannuzzi said on Saturday.
The union’s major disagreement with King is his strong support for teacher evaluations based on their students’ performance on the Common Core tests.