The new contract between the city and the United Federation of Teachers fulfills the backroom bargain between State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and Mayor Bloomberg. The deal’s quid is mayoral control of the schools, its quo a teachers contract that will prove costly. With the city facing a budget hole of more than $5 billion next year, the mayor has agreed to raise teachers’ salaries between 16% and 22%, at a cost of $1.14 billion. Some $275 million of the total will be financed by a one-time payment from the state. The city’s tax-payers will then be left holding the bag for this “gift.” As the mayor conceded at the press conference announcing the deal, the city will have to be “very innovative” to come up with these funds in the next fiscal year. The danger is that Mr. Bloomberg will certainly be urged and maybe tempted to raise not only fees, as he does in his proposal for this year’s city budget, but also taxes.

The city has made some progress in this new contract toward the goal of removing teachers from the managerial role they have increasingly played since the Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis in 1968. That debacle managed to radicalize teachers and parents alike, while taking away the mayor’s control of the education system. This last change came with the school decentralization law of 1970, which created the Board of Education. The contract struck this week reduces teachers’ administrative authority enough to mark a shift in momentum from previous contracts, in which teachers accrued ever greater administrative powers. The deal for mayoral control will be meaningless if teachers’ contracts place them functionally outside the mayor’s purview. Presumably, controlling the teachers will occupy the new chancellor and the mayor in the coming seasons.

The new contract runs only through May 2003. So it will soon be time for the next set of negotiations, when there will be no quid pro quo for school reform. The priority will be for the mayor to finish the deal by fighting for merit pay, an end to tenure and paid summer vacations, and an insistence on results. The contract just signed will go a way toward correcting school management, but it is a victory of process, which should not be confused with a victory of results. Mr. Bloomberg has taken a financial gamble in the hope of reaping a big payoff. The bill has yet to come due.