Urbanski may stop mayor’s plan for Rochester schools
As a teenage immigrant at Franklin High School in the 1960s, Adam Urbanski was so ashamed of his dense Polish accent that he spoke with a hand covering his mouth.
A dose of confidence from a girl’s whispered compliment changed that, and today, as he approaches his 30th year as president of the Rochester Teachers Association and vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, people listen when Urbanski speaks.
While Mayor Robert Duffy seeks to assume control of the Rochester School District, Urbanski’s voice — and the influence he wields as one of the nation’s most powerful teachers union leaders — might represent the best chance opponents have of thwarting the plan.
“I don’t like systems that are built for one person,” Urbanski, 63, said in an interview shortly after Duffy made his intentions clear. “What are these new ideas that Duffy would bring? Why haven’t we heard any of them until now?”
Because Duffy’s request for control of schools requires the approval of the state Legislature and the governor, Urbanski’s sway and that of the state teachers union — which Urbanski said will support his opposition — will help decide the plan’s fate.
“Adam Urbanski is there to serve the teachers and the members of his union,” said Duffy, who met with Urbanski recently to discuss his proposal. “He is a very tough, experienced, successful union leader. In the current system, he has as much influence in Albany as anyone here.”
Urbanski has said he’s opposing Duffy’s proposal not only because he believes the mayor intends to cut spending on education, but also for reasons that touch on his personal history.
“Even though I fight with school boards, I prefer school boards to mayoral control for a philosophical reason,” Urbanski said. “I was born and raised in a communist society, where there is indeed concentration of power.
“Flags go up for me when you concentrate all the power in one person.”
Respect for teachers
Nowa Huta, the city where Urbanski grew up, was an industrial town — its name means “the new steel mill” — built on the eastern edge of Krakow by the communist government. “I grew up in that supposedly model socialist city,” Urbanski said. It was named first for Stalin and then, when he fell out of favor, for Lenin. Now it bears neither name, and a square in Krakow that was once home to a statue of Lenin has been renamed for Ronald Reagan.
As a child, Urbanski defaced money that bore Stalin’s likeness and traded it for twice as much in new currency.
“Me and my buddies would take these coins and put them on the railroad tracks,” he recalled, and then watch the trains race over them.
The blue-collar city grew quickly — it’s now home to 200,000 people — and Urbanski attended Catholic Mass there in a cemetery cathedral presided over by a young monsignor named Karol Wojtyla. He later became better known by another name: Pope John Paul II.
School was very traditional, Urbanski said. Instead of teachers threatening to call a misbehaving student’s parents, the opposite happened: Parents threatened to call a child’s teacher.
A kiss to the back of a teacher’s hand was a standard greeting. “It would be unthinkable to even speak to a teacher from a seated position,” Urbanski said.
In 1960s Rochester, after his family escaped from Poland and came to America through waypoints in several European countries, Urbanski was struck by how little respect teachers were shown. When he stood to answer a teacher’s question, the teacher flinched defensively, as if being challenged to fight.
“That spoke strongly to me,” Urbanski said.
He wasn’t always sure he wanted to be a teacher, but after graduating from the University of Rochester and earning a Ph.D. in history, he took a job teaching.
He taught history for 12 years before entering union leadership.
“Bringing back the honored role of the teacher was a stronger motivation for me to become involved in teacher advocacy and unionism than the specific bread-and-butter issues,” he said.
Today, in his union office on North Union Street, pictures of his grandchildren hang on the walls. Urbanski is divorced, and his daughter, Lisa, is a teacher in the Rochester School District. His son, Mark, is an immigration attorney.
Though he no longer teaches, Urbanski draws separate salaries from the district and the union — $105,631 from the district for the last school year and more than $42,000 from the union.
He loves jazz, frequents the Flat Iron Cafe and wears a distinctive pair of brushed metal glasses that he said he let the optician in the shop downstairs from his office choose for him.
“I’m in the restaurant business, and you wind up having many friends in different professions,” said Urbanski’s longtime friend Guy LaPergola, who shares his love of jazz.
“We became friends through music, and maintained that relationship for many, many years,” LaPergola said. “We’re not from the same ethnic background, but we share a love of talking about Europe … we talk about wine, and we talk about politics.”
Clout in Albany
Though Urbanski has consistently won raises for Rochester teachers, he also has taken positions that are unpopular with unions nationally.
“Adam Urbanski is always ahead of everybody when it comes to education,” said RTA First Vice President John Pavone, who has worked under Urbanski since he won the union presidency nearly 30 years ago.
In that union election, Pavone said, “I worked for the other guy.”
Urbanski kept Pavone anyway. They’ve been together ever since.
“He did away with seniority as the only rule in education. There was no other union that did that,” Pavone said.
“I consider him pretty progressive,” said Assemblyman Joseph Morelle, D-Irondequoit, who has come out in favor of Duffy’s proposal.
“Adam has been a longtime friend. I think he’s very passionate about children and defending the members of his union,” Morelle said in an interview held while Urbanski and a group of teachers were picketing his Irondequoit office.
In Albany, Morelle said, Urbanski works largely through New York State United Teachers, the state union.
“It goes without saying that NYSUT is one of the most effective organizations in Albany,” Morelle said.
State legislation would be required to change the governance structure of the public schools, so Duffy would need the support of both the Legislature and Gov. David Paterson.
And at Urbanski’s urging, the state union will oppose it, Urbanski said.
The Assembly, Urbanski conceded, is likely to pass whatever mayoral control bill eventually emerges. Both Morelle and Assemblyman David Gantt have announced their support.
But Urbanski said he’s also confident that he — and NYSUT — will be able to convince enough state senators of his position, and Sen. Joseph Robach, R-Greece, said recently that he’s concerned that the impetus for mayoral control isn’t starting with parents and voters in Rochester.
“That has to come at the local level,” Robach said. And Urbanski said he will not push the issue unless he senses that parents agree with him.
Putting kids first
It makes perfect sense for the union to oppose mayoral control — “the dominant forces in the current education system are not going to benefit,” said Paul T. Hill, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. “If I were Adam, I’d do what he’s doing.” But Urbanski, Hill said, is known and respected nationally as a progressive, reform-minded union leader. If Duffy succeeds, Hill said, Urbanski will adjust — something he’s done skillfully over the course of his long career.
Not everyone agrees.
“Some people still remember the old reformer,” said Joseph Klein, CEO of Klein Steel Service and a charter school trustee. “(But) I don’t think his reputation is what it used to be. I think there has been a drop-off.”
Klein supports Duffy’s plan and refers to the contract between the Rochester School District and the union as “the anarchist’s cookbook.”
Klein, who serves on the board of True North Rochester Preparatory Charter School, is highly critical of teachers unions — Rochester’s in particular. Teachers at charter schools typically aren’t unionized, and many unions oppose expanding charter schools.
“Adam is the smartest and most strategic union leader in the country,” said Klein, and though he considers this board the best in decades, he said it doesn’t think or plan strategically.
He said the union — and Urbanski — have been putting their own interests ahead of children’s.
“I think at some point, Adam really wanted the kids to learn,” Klein said. “But the politics of being a union leader caused that to be lost.”
Becoming partners
In Urbanski’s recollection, one superintendent after another has arrived in Rochester not as crusaders — “I’m the crusader,” Urbanski said — but as would-be dictators. Eventually, he said, nearly all have come to view him as a partner.
“Virtually every superintendent we’ve had came in pretty much trying to ride roughshod over the teachers and the union, and ended up being a partner,” Urbanski said. “I’ve been able to collaborate with superintendents who were willing to accept me as equal partners.”
He said current Superintendent Jean-Claude Brizard will become a partner, too.
“I’m mindful that this is his first superintendency,” Urbanski said. “He’s a very good and decent man.”
“A union’s job is to protect their employees,” Brizard told a group of parents recently. “Ours does a pretty good job of doing that. It’s our job to fight back and be a union for the kids.”
Urbanski said what’s good for students dovetails with the desires of teachers.
“Figuring out how to make all schools work for all kids will be no easier than finding a cure for cancer,” Urbanski said. “In order to even have a shot at it, everyone needs to pull in one direction.”
That’s not happening yet, Urbanski said. And if teachers feel the mayor’s proposal is happening to them rather than with them, it will fail.
“There’s an old Polish saying: Governments always do the right thing,” Urbanski said, “after they’ve tried everything else.”
NRAMOS@DemocratandChronicle.com
Adam Urbanski
Age: 63.
Personal: Divorced; two grown children. Daughter teaches in the Rochester School District; son is an immigration attorney.
Hometown: Nowa Huta, Poland.
Education: Franklin High School; University of Rochester, Ph.D. in history.
Career: History teacher for 12 years before becoming union leader; president of Rochester Teachers Association for 30 years; vice president of the American Federation of Teachers.
In his words: “There’s an old Polish saying: Governments always do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”
