Former AFT president makes a passionate plea for equity as she steps down

A hallmark of Sandra Feldman’s presidency of the AFT—indeed of her life—has been her relentless championing of equal rights and the needs of our nation’s schoolchildren. To no one’s surprise, Feldman’s final speech as AFT president reflected those ideals.

In her farewell address to AFT convention delegates in July, Feldman recalled her roots in a poor working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, N.Y., and her role in the civil rights movement, which shaped her lifelong commitment to educational opportunity.  Her most passionate words, however, centered on a plea for “a level playing field for all children, in and out of school.”

“It remains a source of real anger to me that the needs of children, especially poor children in this wonderful, wealthy society of ours, are still neglected—not just in school, but in general,” Feldman told delegates.

Feldman announced last spring that she would not seek another term, citing a recurrence of breast cancer that requires weekly treatments. “As you can imagine, this is not a decision I came by lightly,” she told AFT executive council members at their May meeting. “You all know how much the AFT, our members and all those we serve—especially the children—mean to me.”

The convention gave delegates and others a chance to honor Feldman’s seven years of service as AFT president, as well as her 30-year career as an activist and leader of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, where she served 11 years as president.

Continuing a tradition of innovation, reform

As AFT president, Feldman built on the union’s vision of education reform, first outlined by her predecessor, Albert Shanker, who died in 1997 after 23 years as AFT president. In her first major speech as president, in 1997 Feldman asked public school teachers to take the lead in shutting down and then redesigning schools that fail to educate their students. “Put very simply, and most starkly: I propose that we do not defend or seek to perpetuate failing schools to which we would not send our own children,” she said.

It was a strong statement that created the impetus for a new AFT initiative, Redesigning Schools To Raise Achievement, a program offered to school districts across the country outlining what teachers and students need to succeed, including professional development, smaller classes, extended days and summer school.

Feldman later called for an end to social promotion, a greater emphasis on closing the achievement gap and master contracts that give schools greater flexibility.

Throughout her presidency, Feldman took on critics of public education in television appearances, op-ed articles and radio and print ads, keeping the union’s fight against private school vouchers on the front burner while pressing for better teacher preparation and recruitment. During her 2002 AFT convention speech, Feldman expanded on her earlier call for universal preschool to propose Kindergarten-Plus, an initiative to extend the kindergarten year for disadvantaged children (see related story).

Feldman has been a leading voice in the national and international labor movement as a member of the AFL-CIO executive council and a vice president of Education International. She has been a strong proponent of civic education and democracy in the international arena, condemning terrorism and repression of human and worker rights abroad.

It is her compassion for children, however, that remains at the center of Feldman’s legacy. Fifty years after the U. S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling that outlawed segregation in America’s public schools, “we still have two school systems—wealthy and poor—and still often separated as much by color as by class,” Feldman told delegates in July.

“We cannot let another 50 years go by; we cannot wait for the 100th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. Our children need us to remain diligent and militant in our fight on their behalf.”