Andy Pallotta, president of New York State United Teachers, is retiring. (Paul Buckowski/Times Union)
PAUL BUCKOWSKIALBANY – The president of the New York State United Teachers union is retiring — and told the Times Union Tuesday that as such, he's declaring victory against former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
“It was basically the anti-public education years at the Capitol,” said Andy Pallotta in reference to Cuomo's tenure from 2011 to 2021, which saw heightened tensions between the governor and the powerful state teachers union. “In the end, we won that war.”
The victor’s spoils Pallotta said: state funding.
“We have a governor (Kathy Hochul) who has fully funded foundation aid,” he said. “We have turned the corner on the anti-public school, anti-public educator narrative.”
For some background: Because of a lawsuit, the state was ordered in 2007 to help the school districts with the least resources to be fully funded by 2011 through a foundation aid formula. After various delays, the parents in the lawsuit and the state agreed to a three-year phase-in, beginning in 2021. Hochul's proposed 2023 budget includes the final year of the phase-in.
Hochul, former lieutenant governor, became governor in 2021 after Cuomo resigned amid several allegations of sexual misconduct detailed in a state attorney general's office report. Hochul was elected to serve a full four-year term last fall.
Pallotta was an elementary school teacher in the Bronx for 24 years before becoming NYSUT vice president in 2009 and then president in 2017. It was a memorable time period.
“First we had the great recession in 2009,” he said. “Then we went through a whole slew of major issues, starting with the governor who hated public education.”
NYSUT argued with Cuomo over teacher pensions and performance evaluations. When Cuomo was successful in linking evaluations to test scores, the union in 2015 backed a private group that used robocalls to urge parents to opt their children out of the tests. In the first year, more than 20 percent of students opted out. The next year, districts started saying they were “de-linking” test scores from teacher evaluations.
The former governor's spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, said Wednesday in response to Pallotta's comments that Cuomo was trying to improve students’ lives.
“I assume what he’s talking about is efforts to inject more accountability and transparency into a system that New Yorkers invested billions of dollars in taxpayer money every year,” Azzopardi said.
NYSUT is an influential player in state government, with nearly 700,000 members whose votes could make the difference in many elections. As Pallotta puts it, “we are politically a force to be reckoned with.”
He sees plenty of battles in the future, including teacher evaluations.
“We have to figure out the final answer to the teacher evaluation issue,” he said. (His solution: local control, at the school district level.)
He also expects a vigorous fight on charter schools, which are currently funded by the school districts in which their students reside.
“We have a lot of work ahead of us (on charters),” he said. “They’re not transparent. They take money right out of the public schools. We take every student. We don’t turn away anyone.”
He said he did not want to retire until he was sure that NYSUT had a potential successor who could handle those fights. Now there is, he said, endorsing Melinda Person, currently NYSUT executive director, for the position.
On Twitter, he posted that he had “mixed emotions” about retiring. But in an interview, he said he is ready to move on.
“Now’s the right time because I believe it’s the right person to pass the torch to,” he said.