New York’s largest teachers’ union has elected a new president. Melinda Person was picked by delegates to lead the New York State United Teachers union during NYSUT’s 51st Representative Assembly. Person has served as NYSUT’s executive director and political director since 2019. The union credits her with developing programs to amplify the voices of teachers on policy issues and strengthening internal organizing efforts. The union has nearly 700,000 members across the state. Outgoing NYSUT president Andy Pallotta is retiring. Person spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus.
What would you say is your vision for the New York State United Teachers?
Well, our vision for our team is primarily three things. The first is we believe that we need to create learning environments where all educators and students can thrive. And one of the main things that we'll be focused on in that regard is a focus on ending an overemphasis on high stakes testing. The second piece that's primarily on our radar is focusing on making careers in education enticing and sustainable careers. And that means focusing on things like fixing Tier 6 so that our members have retirement security. It means focusing on things like discipline concerns and gun violence in our schools and school safety generally. And then the third piece that we're focusing on is growing NYSUT’s size and power. So, we are making a major investment into organizing, organizing new units and growing the size of our memberships, while also focusing on maintaining our political power and influence by electing NYSUT members, so that our voices are heard in the halls of power.
Where will you look for new members and why do you want to grow the size of the union?
Well, right now is a very, it's an opportune moment for organizing in our country. There's a lot of people who are looking to join a union, because they see that unions give workers a voice in their workplace and help them to fight for wages and working conditions that can sustain them and we want to be that union for many of the unorganized workplaces around New York State.
And that would include people who are not educators?
Yes, it would include folks in libraries, it would include some private schools, possibly hospitals, charter schools. There are a lot of private sector locals that have yet to be formed.
So, before we talked, some more specifics, tell people who are listening a bit about you. What's your background and what do you think you bring to the table as the leader of this union now?
Well, I started my career training to be an educator in the Boston Public Schools and then found that I wanted to get involved in government and policy making, so came to work in Governor Pataki’s Budget Office many, many years ago. I then went to work in the Assembly Ways and Means Committee, and worked on Education Policy for many years, eventually, working on the Foundation Aid Formula that everyone's been talking a lot about this year, as it's finally getting funded. I came to NYSUT 16 years ago, to do the same type of advocacy work that I had been doing in government, but from the outside and as part of the labor union, I learned about the power of collective action and advocacy. NYSUT is an organization that mirrored my own commitment and passion to public education so it's been a great fit for me.
What would you say to the criticism that the teachers’ union already has too much power? People might be listening to this hearing you say that you want to grow the ranks and also the influence. What's your response to that critique?
I mean, the teachers’ union is a powerful organization, because we have a lot of members that share values and concerns for their communities and for public education. And I think that's a good thing. We're out there trying to make our communities and our public schools better. That's what we're for.
I want to go back to something that you listed in your sort of three prongs earlier, and that was making the world of teaching an enticing career for people who might be considering it. Do you see this as an issue of pay? Is it not good enough benefits? What's the problem in your view?
Well, there are a number of things that I think are troubling, right in this moment. We're coming out of COVID, which was a really challenging time for our students and for educators. And so, we're dealing with a lot of things in our classrooms. We have safety concerns; we have gun violence in our schools more often than we've seen in the past. Pay is always a concern because our members are highly trained, master’s degree level professionals. And so, compensation always matters. But you know, our members want professional autonomy. There's a lot of things that go into it. We want these careers that we have. There's not a shortage of people who want to go into helping children and to educating. They want respect, though, in their jobs, respect in their profession and they want autonomy.
So, what changes would you like to see?
So, as I mentioned, the over reliance on high stakes testing has been influencing not only what our members teach, but how they teach. They know that using things like experiential learning, or project-based learning, there are other approaches to educating students that are not measured necessarily by a standardized, fill in the bubble test. And they want to use the experience and the knowledge that they have about what's best for kids to deliver and produce outcomes for kids.
What is another way of tracking student success, if not standardized testing?
Well, students are tested all the time using local assessments. What we're saying is that our educators know best how to assess their own students. They don't need a statewide standardized test that would measure that. They have other means to do it.
Let me ask you about the New York state budget. It includes, as you mentioned, the foundation aid that Governor Hochul has championed. What does NYSUT think of the state budget conceptual agreement?
Well, the school aid agreement is really groundbreaking. The CFE case and the funding associated with it is something that we have been fighting for 30 years, if you can believe that. And so, we give Governor Hochul a lot of credit, and our legislative leaders a lot of credits for finally fulfilling that promise, for keeping that promise to our students. We're less excited, and I would say disappointed about the charter school proposals that are in the budget, but we still have several weeks left of session to fight for some reforms to corporate charter schools that we've been looking to see.
And for people who are listening as part of the New York state budget, there has been a deal to I think add about 20 new charter schools to New York State. Why does NYSUT oppose that?
Well, we believe that charter schools should have to play by the same rules that our traditional public schools do. And right now, we see that corporate charters, undeserved students with disabilities and English language learners. they're exempt from public transparency and accountability requirements. And unlike public schools, charter schools are not locally approved. So, for instance, in the district where I live, if they wanted to go out and buy a school bus, they would have to put up a public vote to expend those funds. Charter schools, on the other hand, can come into a community and the local taxpayers have no say over how those schools draw funds out of their public schools.
What do you say to the argument that charter schools are sort of a symptom of the failure of other regular established public schools in given areas?
We believe that the vast majority of kids attend our traditional public schools, and that is where our elected leaders should focus. The corporate interests that are motivating a lot of the charter schools that exist right now are motivated by profits and not by community. And that is something that we believe our policymakers, our elected officials need to address
With the benefit of some hindsight as we speak in 2023, what kind of impacts do you think the years of COVID education and remote learning have had and continue to have?
I think one of the things we learned from this COVID pandemic period was the real value of human connection. And in person learning. It was, you know, for us remote learning was a spare tire as they say, right? It got us where we needed to go and through a through a period. But there's nothing like that personal connection between a student and an educator. And it can't be replicated online in the same way or with the same level of quality education provided.
So, you have a three-year term, what would success look like for you if we're speaking about three years from now?
Wow, that's a great question. Well, first, we will have enacted at the federal level, the Jamaal Bowman's Bill, the More Teaching Less Testing Act, which will give our state more flexibility with regard to the requirement to do annual testing. We will have grown our membership here at NYSUT and we will be thousands of members stronger as a union. We will have rolled back some of the onerous high stakes accountability measures that have been implemented over the last decade, including returning APPR to local control and rolling back receivership, which is a punitive mechanism for schools that are struggling, and instead replaced it with a process that supports our struggling schools and provides them with the help they need instead of just shaming them. We will have fixed Tier 6 and provided some real tier equity for our newest members who have entered the profession in the last decade, so that they can retire with dignity after a 30-year career. We will have succeeded in acquiring a multi billion-dollar commitment to public higher education here in New York State. We have a campaign, the New Deal for Public Higher Education in New York, which will bring back equity and access to public higher education. And we will have elected many more NYSUT members to office because we believe our members can speak from experience about the needs of our communities and our public education system.
Just one more thing about school safety, which you've touched on a couple of times; how do you propose to do it? A lot of districts have decided to hire school resource officers - SROs. There's discussion in some parts of the country, maybe less so in New York about arming teachers. What do you envision here?
Well, we don't support arming teachers. We believe that the solution lies in focusing on mental health needs of children in our schools and in our communities, on a broader sense. We believe that locally, school districts can decide the level of support they need with regard to SROs. It is a decision that every community can make on their own. School psychologists, social workers, staffing to support students’ needs, that is what we think is the most important thing that can be done.
