Protecting Play and Experiential Learning in School (and our Professional Autonomy)
In this post, MORE-UFT member and Chapter Leader Lauren Monaco motivates a resolution defending play during the school day. This resolution will be on the agenda of the November 2025 UFT Delegate Assembly.
“Democracy as an ethical ideal calls upon men and women to build communities in which every individual has the necessary opportunities and resources to realize his or her potential”. - John Dewey (1859-1952)
The purpose of public education is to appropriately meet each learner’s needs and prepare them to be active members of a diverse and inclusive democratic society, in addition to teaching the skills and knowledge base that prepare students for college and career. A responsible education considers the whole individual and is responsive to their academic, social, and emotional needs. Teachers don’t just teach subjects or curricula, they teach students. Ideally, in addition to content knowledge, teachers teach students how to think critically, solve problems, collaborate, and foster their students’ curiosity.
Michael Mulgrew (Inadvertently) Makes the Case for the New York Health Act
By: Kyle DeAngelis and Kate Connors
Amidst all the typical excitement and anxiety that come with starting a new school year, UFT chapter leaders and delegates had an item of unusual importance on their back-to-school checklists. At the end of August, it was announced that the UFT, in partnership with the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC), had reached an agreement with the City of New York, EmblemHealth and UnitedHealthcare to launch a new healthcare plan for in-service city workers and pre-Medicare retirees. The new plan, called the NYC Employees PPO Plan (or the NYCE PPO plan which, in what can only be described as a stroke of marketing genius, is pronounced the “nice plan”) will replace our current GHI-CBP plan starting on January 1, 2026.
An Open Letter to AFT President Randi Weingarten on the Potential and Pitfalls of the New National Academy for AI Instruction
On September 17th, Kyle DeAngelis, one of the authors of this piece, delivered this open letter to Randi Weingarten at an event at UFT headquarters, along with a copy of Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI.
The Myth of Higher State Test Scores and the Cost of Curriculum Mandates
A year ago, after the first phase of curriculum mandates, test scores across the city were down. Now, with all elementary schools using one of three mandated reading curricula, city leaders are claiming test scores have shot up. What changed? Our breakdown of the DOE's desperate push to make curriculum mandates work, and what we should do about it.
Why are UFT Chapter Leaders and Delegates in the Delegate Assembly Voting No on the Proposed Changes to Our Healthcare?
What is currently being proposed?
The City and the Municipal Labor Committee (MLC) negotiated NYC Employees Preferred Provider Organization (NYCEPPO) to replace the largest provider of health insurance to NYC employees, GHI-CBP, as a response to rising healthcare costs in the private insurance industry. This plan as proposed by the UFT’s healthcare committee needs to be approved by the UFT Delegate Assembly (DA) on September 29th, which will implore UFT representatives in the MLC to also vote in the same manner as the DA on the current proposal.
Who’s going to provide coverage under this new plan?
Under the new plan, EmblemHealth will still provide coverage in 13 NY Downstate counties including NYC, but nationwide coverage will now be provided by United Healthcare.
Will our benefits change under the new plan?
Our benefits largely won’t change on paper, but this is the crux of the issue. United Healthcare is currently under fire for having the worst claims denial rate (32%) in the country. It also does not expand coverage into new areas for employees like in-person mental health services (which would still largely be telehealth as in our current plan). Expanding coverage to more nationwide providers is ultimately meaningless if almost a third of those claims are denied. This would impact your ability to receive care if you are outside of the Downstate 13 as well as impact any dependents outside of the Downstate 13.
Wait, what claims are usually denied?
While it isn’t always consistent and can be case-by-case, their denials often range from cancer treatments and gender-affirming healthcare. According to the NYTimes, United Healthcare has come under fire for the denial of claims being algorithmically generated and has faced class-action lawsuits for their denial algorithm.
But aren’t they legally required to provide coverage like gender-affirming care in NY State?
Legally, yes. However, one of the loopholes United Healthcare has is that under the new plan, it will be self-funded, which means you cannot appeal externally to New York State if you are denied coverage, which is an important tool for many members of our communities who are denied care. This doesn’t just apply for gender-affirming care, but cancer treatments and other life-saving treatments as well. If you wish to receive care outside of the Downstate 13, you are essentially at the mercy of United’s system.
But I saw we had $0 co-pays at NYC Health and Hospitals (H+H). Isn’t that a good thing?
This would be incredible if this was met with increased funding and a plan to expand our public hospital system. Right now H+H is in a staffing and facility crisis that’s only going to get worse. H+H’s funding largely comes from Medicaid, which has now been slashed thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. As the city is not making up the difference in funding, it is now at the mercy of receiving funding from private insurance, which will create lags and inequities in an already stretched and unequal system. It is not uncommon for one ER physician to have 50 patients to care for. And we saw during COVID patients largely from poorer and black and brown communities who have no choice but to rely on H+H suffer and die at higher levels when that system was at a breaking point. Now, the current proposal is essentially incentivizing over 3 million city workers to use that system with no plan to reach that capacity. This sets up a recipe for a complete disaster in H+H and will only fuel the argument that public health does not work.
But isn’t this the best we can negotiate?
Anyone who tells you that you have no choice but to vote yes or else bad things will happen is, frankly, browbeating you and engaging in a classic bullying tactic. No tentative agreement, union contract, or otherwise is above criticism. No one is obligated to vote yes or no on any agreement until they have heard all of the best possible arguments and made their decision for themselves. The strength of any agreement is made on the basis of how hard the demands achieved were fought for in the first place. Under the current proposal, we have made little improvement on our current coverage while potentially opening up risks in other areas of coverage. That alone is a reason to go back to the drawing board.
The speed of negotiations is not justified. This deal is our current mayor Eric Adams and UnitedHealthcare’s/EmblemHealth’s deal in order to use denials and delays through the self-funded plan to achieve $1 billion in savings. Because this plan would be locked in for 5 years, any changes made to our healthcare would be pushed off for future negotiators to decide, further kicking the problem down the road instead of aiming to solve the problem of rising healthcare costs once and for all. Negotiations should resume and decisions should be made by next year, and delegates should have ample time to see the full contract and to make the best-informed decision possible.
What will happen to our benefits if the Delegate Assembly votes no?
Those who have GHI-CBP will still have their same coverage as before with no change. You will not lose your health insurance, nor do we lose our leverage at the negotiating table. It simply means they have to try again, and we will go through the same process as before. To be clear, the UFT is not the only union represented in the MLC, but it holds the biggest share of representation next to DC37. While there is a likelihood this proposal could still pass without UFT, DC37 does not often vote against UFT, and it would be even less likely to pass if a movement to vote no on this proposal spreads to our city union siblings. A no vote would send a big message to negotiators in the city and the healthcare companies that we will not do business unless these concerns are unequivocally addressed, especially if this is backed with grassroots support. Retirees in the UFT proved this kind of activism is possible by building protests against the proposed privatization of their healthcare benefits through a Medicare Advantage plan, which has nearly been defeated.
But what changes can we win, really? I haven’t seen our union do much and the city and private companies are so powerful.
It’s absolutely true there are powerful forces against the working class of this city, and unfortunately our unions have not had a good track record of pushing back against the real losses we have sustained. This is why this isn’t simply a campaign to vote no, but to connect this with the fight to elect new leadership that is accountable to the rank-and-file in the UFT and all of our city unions. But we can also take the lead of the retirees and build a protest movement now to demand positive changes that guarantee in-person mental health services, gender-affirming healthcare, reduce deductibles and co-pays, expand providers and coverage, and keep our premium-free healthcare.
But in our opinion, under our current system of private insurance, we are always going to be in this cycle of threats, negotiating and defense our healthcare, which is why we believe in our union using their support of the New York Health Act (NYHA), which would make NY State the single insurer of healthcare, as leverage in current negotiations while campaigning for it on the streets. This is something our union has voted on in the DA in 2015 and 2017, but has not acted upon it since. Right now, Henry Garrido, executive director of DC37, and Michael Mulgrew, president of UFT, are playing into the hands of Eric Adams and his rotten partnerships with by ramming this deal through the membership, and are cited by legislators as the reason why they won’t pass NYHA as they have chosen to negotiate opaque deals over what many their rank-and-file on other unions have been on the record for supporting. “If the city’s biggest unions don’t want it, why should we?” If we’re going to finally push back Adams’s and Trump’s attacks on our healthcare system, we must build a grassroots movement for NYHA and push our leadership to act!
If you agree with this statement, and are a chapter leader or delegate in the UFT, sign this!
If you agree with this and are not a chapter leader or delegate, or are in another union affected by this tentative agreement from the MLC, sign anyway! Send this to your union leadership and all of your coworkers and tell them to vote no!
A Call to Educators: Reclaiming Teaching and Learning from Corporate Interests
Educators across New York City are enjoying their remaining days of summer and beginning to feel what those of us in the profession call, the “Sunday Scaries". "The Scaries” are rooted in the responsibility we hold for educating our students and anxiety over the few things we have control over in our day to day. We’re thinking about the activities we’ll do with our students to get to know them and each other, setting classroom routines and structures and how we’ll work to ensure they are seen throughout the curriculum to ensure they learn and grow as human beings.
Acknowledge, we must, that we are living in uncertain times and this directly and indirectly impacts all of us. We value that our pedagogical training involves understanding cognitive science and child development. This knowledge reveals that teaching and learning are social and emotional behaviors and guide our teaching to ensure that it is appropriately challenging, developmentally relevant and meaningful. Most likely, we’re already thinking about the personalities and contexts our students will be bringing to school at the beginning of September and how we can make our classrooms and schools safe and engaging spaces.
We care about what and how we teach. We are deeply invested in ensuring that our curriculum is grounded in relevance and meaning. We know more about what our students need than people outside that reality. Curriculum writers and many education reformers impose their ideas of what teaching and learning should look like but lack pedagogical foundations, knowledge of human development, city and state standards, and the context of a school day. In fact most curriculum writers have never been educators, and those who have taught average 2-3 years in the field. Let us be clear and honest- scripted curricula causes more harm than good. Being told to run any curricula to “fidelity” hurts students. Students are harmed by curricula that are developmentally inappropriate, perpetuate stereotypes, and time impositions that result in the reduction and removal of other important intellectual and curricular pursuits. Teachers working with packaged curricula are committing a load of extra labor to make it work for the range of students in their classes. Teachers teach students, not curriculum. A small number of schools have resisted the fad knowing that good teaching does not come canned. One size does not fit all.
Some argue that these curriculum products work and point to the recently released New York State test scores, which appear to show an improvement in student performance. There are multiple reasons for why this conclusion is faulty. There are a range of potential factors that could lead to fluctuations in standardized test scores; recent class size reductions, opt out percentages and New York State uses normed reference testing. Scores like on a statistical bell curve, skewing how “growth” is determined. In addition, test items are normed differently from year to year, deeming each year’s scores incomparable to the next and so on. We have seen the politicization of drops and improvements in test scores used for political advantages for different administrations. Prior to 2010, a drop in scores was attributed to an increase in immigrant student populations. In August of 2011, the Common Core was attributed with a rise in test scores. Retired NYC DOE data analyst, Fred Smith, provided a deeper insight into the numbers that revealed a correlation with political rationale for policy decisions. Psychometrics and statistical data analysis are not an area of expertise of most elementary educators (or school administrators). In fact, we’re made to not just believe in how the data is reported but to feel the pressures of performance in our day to day interactions with our students. The American Statistical Association put out this statement in 2014 decrying the use of value-added models for educational assessment.
Quick and easy fixes, in the form of packaged curricula and consultants, have been marketed and sold to us as the answer to what ails us. However, this distracts us from mountains of research that have connected student outcomes to financial stability at home, access to health care and other resources- all things that have been gradually stripped from our local fiscal and education budgets. We acknowledge that our city has a long history of under-serving and engaging in educational negligence for our most marginalized students. The burden of all of this has been placed on schools and we are at high levels of demoralization.
Unlike most cities, we have not had an elected school board since the start of the 2000s. New York City is the largest school district in the United States with approximately 1.1 million students, and 1,800 separate schools, with nearly every educational policy decision coming out of centralized decision makers. It’s important to ask who runs and makes monetary decisions for the largest education budget in the U.S. We want to direct the focus on following the many multi-million dollar contracts secured to continue a program of systematically dismantling public education in New York City.
Since Mayor Eric Adams took office and made his placements to run the department of education, few people know that the recent outgoing Deputy Chancellor, Dan Weisberg, worked behind the scenes and was the primary and dominant figure behind curriculum contracts with, and most known for those connected with the NYC Reads initiative. It is vitally important, as educators, to ask what is behind the initiatives of someone who has no educational experience but has a background for being an anti-union attorney and a known corporate education reformer in his role as director of the New Teacher Project under Michelle Rhee. Not to make this about him but without understanding the source, we are being led into an assumption that fixing the literacy issue is connected to purchasing “the best” curriculum, undermining the complex and critical work of educators.
The rhetoric and marketing around the mandated literacy curricula for elementary schools (HMH, Expeditionary Learning and Wit and Wisdom) implies that these curricula are the “silver bullet” that will “fix” literacy instruction and “failing schools”. We are not focused on debating which curriculum works the best, since any experienced educator knows that boxed curricula serve as resources. Many of us who were grilled under the Teachers College Readers and Writers workshop model, were told that if students were not learning to read using the program, then we weren’t implementing it correctly. We were forbidden, in many schools, to use instructional strategies that veered away from “the program” even if we were trained in instructional practices that could work. We are being forced to yet, again, use another form of scripted curriculum.
Teaching begins with knowing our students well, and this requires having educators who are trusted and given the professional wherewithal to provide them with what works. There is no more important time than now for educators to be included in the discussion and decisions around what our students need to feel seen and empowered in their education. A major part of this is realizing the private interests that impact how and what we teach.
Union Members Should Demand the New York Health Act
Richard Gottfried is a former Assembly Member and sponsor of the New York Health Act
A recent post on Educators of NYC by Peter Goodman opposes the New York Health Act, the bill to create universal, publicly-funded, publicly-accountable comprehensive health coverage (“single-payer”) for every New Yorker.
This focuses a lot on the point that many details of the system are not spelled out in the bill. Of course not. Does a union contract name all the thousands of medical procedures and drugs the health benefit might cover and the price for each? But the bill spells out – in law – the key fundamentals that make clear that New York Health is the right choice for all of us, and far better than any other health plan, union or otherwise.
The NYHA specifies that anything covered by Medicare, Medicaid, state insurance law mandates, and any state or local public employee health plan will be covered for every New Yorker. This includes long-term care (home care and nursing home care). It’s dramatically broader coverage than any union health plan.
It guarantees no premium, deductible, co-pays, restricted provider network or out-of-pocket charges. The bill has strong enforceable language guaranteeing fair and adequate payment methodologies and rates.
All guaranteed by law, not at risk every time a union contract is re-negotiated.
The plan will be publicly-accountable, not run by an insurance corporation accountable to stockholders. The governor and legislators, and their families and friends, will all be covered by the plan, so they’ll have a keen interest in making sure it treats patients and providers as well as can be. And 20 million New Yorkers will benefit by being in the same plan.
The bill spells out that it will be funded by a progressively-graduated tax, based on ability to pay. For payroll income (anything subject to the federal FICA tax), the employer must pay at least 80% of the tax; the employer share could be more, especially through collective bargaining. (For state and local public employees, whatever percentage of the health benefit premium the employer currently pays, the bill requires the employer to pay at least that percentage of the NYHA tax for the employee, going forward.) The first $25,000 of a person’s income will be exempt from the tax; for Medicare enrollees, the first $50,000 of income will be exempt (acknowledging the federal money they draw into the system).
The tax will also apply to non-payroll income – e.g., dividends and capital gains – that is subject to the state income tax. That’s where really serious income is earned in our economy.
The exact brackets and rates will be set by the governor and legislature when the plan is ready to be implemented. That makes sense: today we don’t know what income levels and distribution, and health care prices, will be at that point.
Today, no one can tell any union member what their health plan will cost them or what the details will be in the next contract. Union leaders constantly say that every time they’re at the bargaining table, they have to choose between protecting the health plan or other wages and benefits.
Many studies by major consulting firms (e.g., RAND) and academics have analyzed state and federal single payer plans, including the NYHA. Almost all agree: the plan will produce billions in net savings over the current system. By eliminating insurance corporation bureaucracy, marketing and profit, cutting what health care providers spend fighting with insurance corporations, and slashing drug prices using the bargaining power of 20 million “covered lives,” NY Health will save almost $60 billion a year. After paying for long-term care and picking up out-of-pocket costs, the net savings will still be almost $20 billion a year.
Those savings, and the funding mechanism based on ability to pay, means almost every New Yorker will spend less than they now do for health care and coverage.
The article cites a report by a Canadian think tank called the Fraser Institute attacking the Canadian single-payer system. Fraser is a Canadian equivalent of the extreme right-wing Heritage Foundation (the people now hosting Project 2025).
The article expresses concern about the growing power of for-profit equity taking over health plans and health care providers. That’s a very important concern. It is made possible by the concentration of economic power exerted by a handful of huge health plans and pharmacy chains. We need a countervailing power serving the public interest. The answer is a universal publicly-run and publicly-accountable single-payer health plan – the NYHA.
Some unions say they support a universal health plan but say it should be done nationally. With the current climate in Washington, a national plan is not likely any time soon. And a plan enacted in New York will be more favorable to employees and patients than one enacted in Washington.
MORE’S HEALTH JUSTICE WORKING GROUP RESPONDS TO UFT LEADERSHIP’S CONCERNS ABOUT THE NEW YORK HEALTH ACT
UFT leadership must be terrified of actually doing the work and conducting contract negotiations without using healthcare as a bargaining chip. They must be terrified that if they can’t dangle (ever-diminishing) healthcare benefits in front of members, they will lose membership. All evidence points to these reasons as to why they are dishonest with members about healthcare. Let us explain.
