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There’s usually a lot of distance between the Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers.
But Thursday morning in Lerner Hall, DOE Chancellor Joel Klein, CC ’67 and UFT’s new President Michael Mulgrew came together at Columbia for the annual opening meeting of Learning Leaders, a nonprofit that brings volunteers into city schools.
This is the first year Learning Leaders has held its opening meeting on campus. Organization President Mindy Duitz described the event as “a celebration of our whole program.” The gathering featured a complimentary breakfast and a musical opening act with children playing songs like “Heart and Soul” on the keyboard and drums.
Speaker after speaker took the stage to commend Learning Leaders for its work. According to Duitz, Learning Leaders brings over 10,000 volunteers to more than 850 schools across New York City.
Rosemarie Fuller, a Learning Leaders volunteer at Central Park East High School in Spanish Harlem, said she was thoroughly impressed with the program. “I think that it’s a wonderful program, because it helps the staff, the teachers in the classrooms. It also, more so, helps the students.”
Speaking from a podium beneath brightly colored banners bearing the names of New York’s five boroughs, Klein and Mulgrew were effusive in their praise for the organization. Klein described how public schooling allowed him to rise from humble origins in Astoria, Queens to attend Columbia, and then later to work in the Bill Clinton White House.
“The real heroes in education are those who give voice to the voiceless,” Klein said to the audience. “Each one of you find the voiceless and go fight for them.”
As head of the DOE, Klein oversees the city’s school system under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s system of mayoral control, which manages New York’s 1.1 million schoolchildren under one central bureaucracy. Implemented in 2002, mayoral control was a shift from the previous, more fragmented, district-based administrations. As Bloomberg campaigns for his third term, the policy—officially renewed in August following a disruptive coup in the New York State Senate—has come under intense scrutiny.
Mulgrew, who succeeded long-time UFT president Randi Weingarten in August, was met with raucous applause when he asked those in attendance, “Who here wants to help children learn? Who here wants to help children have a better life?”
The event also featured City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Caroline Kennedy, vice-chair of the Fund for Public Schools, which promotes private investment in school reform. Kennedy, who said she “was so inspired by the energy and the passion and the dedication” of Learning Leaders, told the crowd that they were “a model for volunteer organizations across this country.”
As Klein said of the school system, “That changed my life, that changed my view of my own expectations, changed my sense of the power of public schools to change lives.”
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