Weingarten, de Blasio to announce five-city ‘compact’
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten will announce a compact with five cities to increase career and technical education offerings in New York City this Thursday, and will be joined by Mayor Bill de Blasio and United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew.
The initiative will be funded by the national teacher union's "Innovation Fund," and will use the New York C.T.E. programs as a model for expansion in New York, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Miami-Dade County, and Peoria, Illinois. Peoria mayor Jim Ardis will also attend Thursday's press conference, which will be held at the U.F.T.'s headquarters in lower Manhattan.
The "compact" will require leaders of the five cities to create more C.T.E. offerings in their public schools, and more details will be released on Thursday.
Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg made C.T.E. a priority in his administration's education agenda, securing a variety of public-private partnerships to provide computer science and engineering courses to city schoolchildren. Bloomberg oversaw the opening of P-TECH, a C.T.E. high school in Brooklyn, which President Barack Obama has praised as a national model for a modern career and technical education school.
The de Blasio administration has also relied on partnerships to boost C.T.E. offerings.
City schools chancellor Carmen Fariña has been Weingarten, de Blasio to announce five-city 'compact' | Capital New York: