School News

Retired Seaford teacher stands up for education

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Seven award-winning teachers have written a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, decrying his recent attacks on public education in New York. One of the letter’s signers includes a retired educator from Seaford.

Past winners of the New York State Teacher of the Year Award, dating back to 2005, were asked to sign on to the letter, and seven agreed including Steve Bongiovi, who retired in 2008 after a 36-year career teaching English at Seaford High School.

“We have given our hearts and souls to this noble profession,” the letter states. “We have pursued intellectual rigor. We have fed students who were hungry. We have celebrated at student weddings and wept at student funerals. Education is our life. For this, you have made us the enemy. This is personal.”

The letter points out the difficult implementation of the new Common Core standards, questions the validity of the state tests, and notes a state aid formula that takes money away from schools, forcing a reduction of services.

“I might be retired, but I will always consider myself a teacher,” Bongiovi told the Herald. The recipient of the 2006 New York State Teacher of the Year Award said he sees himself forever as a representative of educators.

The letter also calls into question the potential success of the governor’s proposals, saying that ideas like merit pay and more charter schools are not answers. The letter includes an invitation to Cuomo to visit classrooms and see education for himself.

Bongiovi said that the governor makes sweeping generalizations that education is failing in New York, which Bongiovi said is simply not true. “There’s lot of great things going on in classrooms every day, all over the state,” he said.

In Cuomo’s State of the State Address, he expressed concern that only about one-third of students were proficient on the ELA and math exams, yet only 1 percent of teachers were rated ineffective. Cuomo has sought to have a greater amount of a teacher’s evaluation tied to state assessments results. Currently it is 20 percent.

“There is little correlation between one day’s’ test score and the value of a teacher,” Bongiovi said. He added that at the core of the achievement gap in the state is social issues like poverty, not teachers.

The primary author of the letter was Rich Ognibene, the 2008 New York State Teacher of the Year. Bongiovi said he did a good job of capturing the feelings of the six others who signed on. The signers of the letter also come from all areas of the state, including two from Long Island, and others from upstate and western New York.

Bongiovi said the difference in how educators are perceived now compared to when he first started teaching is stark. “In 1972,” he said, “what the teacher said what was what everyone believed, because everyone believed that the teacher was professional.”