Sealed With a Kiss?

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

New Yorkers will gain the first hint this afternoon of the impact of the hug and kiss that Joel Klein gave to Randi Weingarten last week after the two agreed on a new contract for the city’s public school teachers. Union delegates gather in Brooklyn today to vote on the contract and are expected to approve it. The size of the opposition, however, will give an indication of how the rank and file membership, who vote by secret ballot later this month, view the contract. The embrace between the schools chancellor and the president of the United Federation of Teachers wasn’t quite a Hillary Clinton-Suha Arafat moment, but Ms. Weingarten is worried it has turned teachers against the deal.


This was reported by the Daily News yesterday from Denver, where Ms. Weingarten on Saturday told an audience that the kiss made her look weak before her members. The News quoted her as saying that Mr. Klein’s later celebration of the deal made it look even more so to teachers that they’d got the raw end of the deal. Our Deborah Kolben has found that at least some teachers have been grumbling about the contract. They’re unhappy that it would require them to work an extra two days a year and an extra 50 minutes each week. Other parts that displease teachers include losing the right to challenge negative evaluations and having to do some “hall monitor” duties.


Teachers have much to celebrate, however, including a raise over four years that, at 15%, is sharply more than the 11.4% over three years an independent panel recommended. They also won a retroactive bonus. Such spending of taxpayers’ money by the Bloomberg administration is going to have to be funded by New Yorkers who already live in an over-taxed city. It increases pressure for tax increases. Poor and middle-class parents can only be left wondering about the logic of a government monopoly in education and a union monopoly in teaching.


From our perspective, the situation looks kind of like the Harriet Miers nomination – its flaw is that the courts, the Senate, and the country would have been well served by a real fight. It is a similar situation with education in this city. Diane Ravitch calls the contract a win-win situation, and the chancellor, Joel Klein, makes compelling points about the gains for management’s ability to manage. But there are deeper issues that the contract fails to solve, like parental choice. In a sense it is possible to see the proposed contract as reducing pressure for at least some consideration of a system of vouchers, the one approach that would afford poor and middle-income families the kinds of choice enjoyed by wealthy parents.


Our own view is that a system of vouchers needn’t be beneficial only to parents and their children – it could actually be beneficial to the teachers union as well. While a voucher system would drain some jobs and money from the public school system, it wouldn’t remove the funds and jobs from education altogether. It would provide the teachers with a greater number of employers and plenty of opportunities to organize. Private schools would be competing with public schools for the teachers and students. It’s hard for us to see how this equates automatically as a bad thing for teachers, which may be – though we doubt he’d say so – why Mr. Klein gave Ms. Weingarten that hug in the first place.


The New York Sun

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