The Rochester Teachers Association is calling for in-person instruction to be paused until teachers’ resources and COVID-19 vaccines increase.
Adam Urbanski
Posted inNews & Opinion
Rochester teachers rally against ‘Christmas massacre’ layoff plan
Teacher’s union leaders called for the board to delay its vote and to try to get extra funding from the state.
Posted inNews & Opinion
Trevyan Rowe and the city school district
Trevyan’s death has laid bare – once again – the Rochester school district’s failure in key management responsibilities: oversight and accountability.
Posted inNews & Opinion
Union works for certification overhaul
New York State United Teachers is working with the Board of Regents, the State Education Department, and lawmakers to overhaul the teacher certification process. NYSUT says that there are numerous content and computer format problems with the state’s new certification exams. The union also wants lawmakers to stop for-profit testing companies from charging student-teachers to […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Forcing Urbanski out won’t help city students
An attack on Rochester teachers union president Adam Urbanski is an attack on teachers, and that distracts us from the enormous challenge ahead of us.
Posted inNews & Opinion
Feedback 9/30
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Posted inNews & Opinion
White charts new agenda for Rochester school board and district
Surrounded by nearly two dozen community leaders, newly-elected Rochester school board president Van White laid out an ambitious plan yesterday to improve city schools and to stop the steady loss of students to charter schools.
Posted inNews & Opinion
Vargas’s plea to higher ed
Bolgen Vargas may be remembered as the superhero who figured out a way to reverse 30 years of declining student performance in the Rochester City School District. Or he could be remembered as another name on a long list of well-meaning superintendents ultimately bested by an ossified bureaucracy. After two years leading the school district, […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Is APPR fair?
The Annual Professional Performance Review for teachers and principals is a key component of education reform. And the state Education Department’s recent release of statewide teacher and principal evaluations is supposed to help answer the question asked by many parents: How effective are the teachers in my child’s school? But the evaluations are controversial. In […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
The test score rage: rhetoric versus reform
Well, that gave everybody something to talk about, didn’t it? State education officials released school-district scores on standardized tests last week, and the news was awful. Only 31 percent of the state’s students met or exceeded the “proficiency” standard for math. And only 31.1 percent of them met the English standard. And among the large […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Running out of time
Significant cuts to All City High’s teaching and non-teaching staff have set off alarms about that school’s survival, but there’s much more to it. The cuts have also ignited a much larger concern about the future of the Rochester school district and the role that charter schools will play in that future. All City High’s […]
Posted inNews & Opinion
Reductions at All City High may signal trend
Cuts to All City High’s teaching and non-teaching staff amount to a self-inflicted wound for the Rochester school district, says Adam Urbanski, president of the Rochester Teachers Association. All City High’s instructional staff of about 120 teachers will be cut next school year to about 64, according to current plans, Urbanski says. That doesn’t include […]
