The White Paper

Unity wastes a great deal of my time, and accomplishes nothing for me or my students.

I’ve been teaching newcomers how to speak and use English for most of my life now, Though I’m retired, I’m still doing it F-status two days a week (and they seem to be bouncing me up to three).

I got into this very much by accident. In my brief tenure at Lehman High School as an English teacher, a supervisor asked me, “Do you want to teach ESL?”

“What’s ESL?” I replied.

“Try it. Maybe you’ll like it,” said the supervisor. I was a teacher with no training or experience, and I now had five preps instead of four. I didn’t know anything about rules back them, and my only experience with unionism was when the chapter leader found me in a bathroom, handed me a card, and whispered, “Pssst…you want to join the union?”

Shortly thereafter I was teaching ESL full time in Newtown High School. They gave me the beginners, and I’ve always loved teaching them. This made things easy for me, as most of my colleagues have preferred higher levels.

I got to meet very interesting people. Two sisters from Afghanistan told me stories of crossing mountains to get to Pakistan. A girl told me she loved the United States, because in Korea her parents forced her to play piano five hours a day. She hated the piano, and they didn’t have one here. Some stories were very sad, and I’ll spare you. But they fascinated me, and still do.

That’s why I’ve always been glad to advocate for them.

A few years back, I was quite upset about Part 154, an idiotic NY State regulation that cut the number of hours English language learners (ELLs) spent learning English. Instead, we’d place them in core content classes with an ESL teacher hanging around a few days a week. Then we hope for the best. Or something.

I’d just been booted from a caucus I’d run and won an Executive Board seat with. A UFT official was bringing me to language-learning symposiums and trying to get me involved. She encouraged me by focusing on the students I served. In fact, her UFT committee had just met with Betty Rosa, then NY State Regents Chancellor. A person for whom I had great respect screamed at me for a considerable period of time for not being on that committee.

I got myself on the committee. We met, and everyone was horrified by Part 154. It was a terrible move. Our students needed more, not less, English instruction. It was common sense. The Unity member in charge of the group told me we would work on this, and that UFT had a White Paper they would soon put out. (I didn’t know what a White Paper was, but I had seen a lot of paper, and most of it had indeed been white.)

We met every month at 52 Broadway. At first, there was much discussion about Part 154 and how we would fix it. We would contact the Regents chancellor and she would help us. I went to a meeting at George Washington Campus and Betty Rosa told me she would come visit our school. I followed up, but she never showed.

I did meet Rosa a few times, though. I volunteered to help at a UFT event for ELLs. Rosa spoke and everyone applauded. I remained kind of frustrated. I got to meet with her once more when she and a bunch of VIPs visited our monthly group. She said she would fix Part 154. I was happy to hear it. (I kept wondering about that White Paper, which got mentioned from time to time, but never materialized.)

Through contacts outside of UFT, I bullied my way into a meeting in Albany. There were representatives from UFT and NYSUT, and Rosa was supposed to attend. However, after I spent hours driving to Albany, she wasn’t even there. Her assistant showed. We spoke of Part 154, but received no commitments. We learned a lot about how underfunded the Regents felt they were (even though they worked out of a building that looked like Hogwarts).

Meanwhile, I kept going to monthly meetings. There was progressively less talk about Part 154. It became increasingly clear, with no explanation whatsoever, that it was no longer a pressing issue. We spoke about Donors Choose, an organization that hyped the anti-public school film Waiting for Superman. I was left thinking if they hadn’t propped up charter schools, we might have sufficient funding that teachers wouldn’t have to simply hope someone might fund their classroom needs.

At a subsequent meeting, a guy got up and spoke for a full hour about how he was going to get a full time job at AFT. Exactly why that was important to anyone but the speaker himself, I had no idea whatsoever. As far as I know, that AFT gig never materialized. On Executive Board, though, I often heard the guy praise Michael Mulgrew, and beg him to never move to AFT. In this member’s eyes, Mulgrew was indispensable.

Perhaps the guy’s now got a UFT gig. He certainly meets the qualification. Sycophantic devotion to the Dear Leader is a big calling card for those who wish to sit in offices at 52 Broadway.

At the last ELL committee meeting I attended, I brought up Part 154. The UFT Unity patronage employee seemed irritated, and reluctantly paid it a moment’s lip service. She looked at me resentfully. At that point I knew that the union had officially given up on helping my students.

In Unity’s favor, they didn’t actually hurt my students. They simply failed to help them, and wasted an awful lot of my time.

That’s better than what they did to members. By selling out our health care in exchange for compensation increases that A. didn’t keep up with inflation, and B. retirees didn’t get at all, they’ve managed to make things worse for us.

It’s now on us to fight them and win. We need to continue to donate to NYC retirees. They’re doing the work we pay Michael Mulgrew and his Unity Patronage mill to do.

Also, we need to alert our colleagues, be they in service or retired, that next May it’s time to vote out these pretenders. We need representatives who will fight for the interests of working people, not Eric Frigging Adams. Adams may be on his way out, and it’s on us to do everything within our power to send Mulgrew right along with him.

They can ride out into the sunset together.

PS—I never saw the White Paper, and to this day I have no idea whether or not it ever existed.