The powerful teachers union on Wednesday ramped up its criticism of New York City’s expansion of standardized curriculum — suggesting the person responsible for the unforgiving mandates should be fired.
The United Federation of Teachers has long been a supporter of the Adams administration’s efforts to fundamentally change how students learn to read and rally behind a singular approach to literacy and math instruction across the public schools. But the union has increasingly railed against the implementation, especially in math, saying an overreliance on boxed curriculum fails to account for differences between students.
“They turned the word ‘fidelity’ into a curse word because they’re telling every teacher you must teach it exactly how it is written in the book,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the Daily News after an unrelated press conference outside the city’s Department of Education headquarters.
“Anyone who is instructing a teacher to teach specifically the way something is designed inside of New York City should lose their job,” the union boss fumed. “And I don’t care which deputy chancellor did it, they should lose their job. Because New York City is the most diverse, and we love it. But you cannot teach anything the way it is exactly planned, because it is not planned for each of the children in our classrooms.”
Tensions between the administration and UFT spilled over earlier this week when the union was conspicuously absent from Mayor Adams’ announcement in Downtown Brooklyn that the curriculum overhauls, known as NYC Reads and NYC Solves, would be expanded to 186 more middle schools — with plans to reach all schools in the grade band by fall 2027.
Instead, the union released a statement calling the buildout, particularly in math, nonsensical when there’s still more work to do with schools that are part of the initial cohort. The next day, Schools Chancellor Melissa Aviles-Ramos defended the decision against union criticism during an interview with local education news source Chalkbeat. (Representatives for the chancellor declined to comment further on Wednesday.)
Referencing multiple meetings with unionized math teachers, the schools chief said she was responding to the issues raised: “I heard all their concerns and complaints about NYC Solves, and I sat with them, and I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’ We needed a better runway and we need to take a look at this.”
Aviles-Ramos has made a number of tweaks to both the literacy and math initiatives since taking over the school system late last fall — loosening some pacing and paperwork requirements, and giving teachers more flexibility in the classroom.
“I said, ‘This isn’t meant to take away autonomy,’” she said. “‘This is meant for teachers who maybe don’t have your level of expertise yet and they need a blueprint. You’re helping them as they navigate the line between fidelity to a curriculum and flexibility and autonomy of your lesson plans.’”
On Wednesday, Mulgrew said “thank God” the school system got a new chancellor during the transition, praising Aviles-Ramos for recognizing what he believes was broken. But not all the changes are sticking, he said, noting, “At the same time, we’re still getting mixed messages from superintendents throughout the city.”
He added that conversations were still in progress between a union vice president and central education staffers when the expansion was announced. “We’re just getting frustrated,” he said, “because the union’s on board, we’re trying to make these things work, but you got to do it the right way.”
New York City has been engaged in a painstaking overhaul of reading and math curriculums, citing years of unacceptable test scores. Less than half of the city’s public school students are proficient readers.
Some teachers have pushed back against the changes to reading instruction, which place a greater emphasis on phonics and discourage the use of context clues to guess at words. But their union has reserved most of its criticism for a math push that seeks to encourage critical thinking over rote memorization.
Mulgrew, for example, pointed to a required curriculum item for Algebra I, called “Illustrative Math,” where the first set of lessons were in statistics — despite there being no prerequisites for statistics taught in earlier grades. The result, he said, is a breakdown in trust between teachers and their students in the first few weeks of the school year.
“Why would you start with a curriculum that takes two or three weeks of lessons on something that you know is just going to annoy and aggravate your students?” he said. “As a teacher, you’re going to ruin my relationship with my students.”
“I have to take those three weeks to get them involved, get them engaged, show them I trust them, and they can trust me. You can’t do that by saying you have to learn this — and you have none of the prerequisites to learn it.”
