When Mayor Bloomberg announced last Thursday an agreement that would give him control over the city’s school system and eliminate the quasi-independent Board of Education, it appeared to be an unalloyed victory. The speaker of the Assembly, Sheldon Silver, who had been the obstacle to mayoral control, walked away with nothing. Or so it seemed.

Last night, with the announcement of a new contract between the city and the United Federation of Teachers, the price of mayoral control became clear: It is hundreds of millions of dollars. That is the cost of a 16% raise for the city’s public school teachers at a time when the city’s cultural institutions, senior citizens, and emergency services are facing drastic cutbacks and the city itself is facing a budget deficit in the billions.

The price is also that of educations forgone by hundreds of thousands of city schoolchildren who will remain stuck, under this contract, in schools where there are no rewards for high performing teachers, and where the chance of mingling with a teacher in a lunchroom is rare.

The two deals — governance and the contract — were ostensibly unrelated, but the timing of the contract, combined with the comments of the main players at the press conference last night, suggest Mr. Silver was unwilling to give the mayor control of the schools until he was assured the teachers union would be taken care of.

Only time will tell if this tradeoff was one worth making. On the face of it, there are some encouraging signs in the agreement outlined last night. Six percent of the raise is in exchange for the teachers’ agreement to work an additional hour and 40 minutes a week. The teachers also agreed to accept a “streamlined” disciplinary process. The UFT also agreed to weaken, though not abandon, their ability (through a set of work rules known as Circular 6) to refuse to perform lunchroom and hall monitoring and other such non-classroom responsibilities. The devil in all this is the details, of course, and we’re looking forward to seeing a copy of the actual draft contract in order to determine just how “streamlined” the disciplinary process is.

On the disappointing side, there is no provision in the contract for merit pay. What other professionals are compensated in a way that provides no rewards for excellence? The contract offers no special incentives to math and science teachers, of whom there is a scarcity.

Politics is the art of compromise, and the chances that Mr. Bloomberg would be able to walk into city government and write a model teachers’ contract were nil. Mayor Giuliani couldn’t get it done, and he tried for years. This contract will expire on May 31 of 2003, with Michael Bloomberg still mayor. When that time rolls around, Mr. Silver will no longer have the threat of withholding mayoral control. And Mr. Bloomberg may well be in a stronger bargaining position to seek some of the gains he conceded this time around as part of the price of control.