The city’s contract with the United Federation of Teach ers expires at month’s end — so talks on a new agreement are under way in the shadow of the mayoral race.
Mayor Bloomberg will be tempted to reward the UFT for Randi Weingarten’s backing of the renewal of mayoral control earlier this year, and to dangle overly favorable contract terms to secure a timely re-election endorsement from Weingarten’s successor, Michael Mulgrew.
But Bloomberg doesn’t only have to balance those needs against the city’s looming budget deficits — he also needs to see that the new contract allows continued reform in New York’s public schools.
Nothing else Bloomberg does before Election Day will tell us more about whether his third term will be bold — or as listless as most third terms.
Five key issues will signal Bloomberg’s seriousness about future reform:
Length and flexibility of contract: Will the mayor let the new contract be absurdly long and detailed?
The last contract ran a stupefying 165 pages. It stipulates pay levels based on seniority, college credits and other credentials. It dictates when teachers may and may not be transferred, sets strict tenure protections and stipulates a highly formal process for disciplining or removing them.
And it narrowly defines work that each teacher can perform. The work rules, for example, stipulate that various classifications of teachers need not do such labors as “preparing transcripts for college applicants,” “scoring citywide standardized achievement tests,” “preparing absentee post cards and truant slips,” “study hall service,” and “the handling, distribution, storing and inventory of books, supplies and equipment” or “duplicating of teaching materials.”
City Journal’s Sol Stern rightly called it the “we don’t do windows” contract.
The UFT itself couldn’t run a school under all these restrictions: The union-founded charter school opted out of the master contract’s absurdly detailed work rules.
Indeed, the UFT has negotiated more flexible and briefer contracts with a number of schools. In June, for example, it agreed on a 29-page contract with the Green Dot charter. That contract still includes a number of provisions that most high-performing charter schools would reject — but it’s light years better than the UFT’s master contract: It has no tenure, no set limits on the length of the school day and a clearer process for removal of bad teachers.
Teacher tenure and data: In April 2008, Weingarten and her allies were able to slip into the state budget a provision that prevents school districts from considering gains (or losses) in student test scores when deciding whether to grant tenure. Thus, test results could show that a particular teacher’s students simply aren’t learning — but that fact couldn’t be considered when deciding whether to grant the teacher a lifetime job guarantee.
As part of contract negotiations with the UFT, Bloomberg should get the UFT to endorse publicly the expiration of this law next year, as scheduled.
Merit pay: Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has argued for awarding merit pay to individual teachers based on demonstrated results in the classroom. But Bloomberg blinked in negotiating the last UFT contract — the only “merit pay” allowed is school-wide bonuses that reward incompetent and gifted teachers alike.
Bloomberg also needs to challenge the entire structure of teacher compensation. Teacher salaries can now top $100,000 a year without any link to results — the accumulation of seniority and credits leads inexorably to ever-higher pay. Salary increases should be based on factors more relevant to classroom results.
Principal autonomy: The current contract denies principals the complete autonomy they need to run high-performing schools. It prohibits them from dictating the organization and format of lesson plans, the format of bulletin boards, the arrangement of classroom furniture or even the exact duration of lesson units.
Will Bloomberg let this micromanagement continue, or get principals the power they need to get the job done?
Rubber rooms: Steven Brill’s recent New Yorker piece brought added attention to an outrage The Post has long chronicled — the scandal of the city’s “rubber rooms.” These are the rooms where Klein has been assigning teachers deemed unfit to teach children, but protected by tenure and the state’s dreadfully restrictive (but union-friendly) dismissal policies.
The city is spending millions each year to warehouse some 600 teachers in a half-dozen rubber rooms, where they report daily but do nothing for the school system or the city’s children (although occasionally fitting in a good poker game).
Bloomberg should insist that the unions allow the more-rapid dismissal of these unfit teachers — that is, make “rubber room” reform an explicit precondition for his approval of any new pay package.
Fair is fair: The mayor now issues “report cards” on each city public school. The voters should be ready to grade him on school reform. To pass, he’ll need to make gains on these issues in the next teachers’ contract.
Thomas W. Carroll is president of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability.