Battle Erupts Over Terms of Teachers Pact
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 battle over teacher contract negotiations broke into the open yesterday when the chairwoman of the City Council’s Committee on Education, Eva Moskowitz, hand-delivered to Mayor Bloomberg a letter in which she urged him not to abandon efforts to roll back restrictive teacher work rules that have impeded school reform.
“Now is the time to hold firm against pilot programs and incremental changes,” Ms. Moskowitz told the mayor in the letter. “Those are merely window dressing and the illusion of progress. I fear that if you do not fix the teachers’ contract, no mayor in our lifetime will.”
The city’s teachers have been without a contract for 17 months, and the Bloomberg administration and the United Federation of Teachers have been in negotiations that, to now, have apparently been more acrimonious than fruitful. Reaching a contract involves more than money – raises for teachers may be the least of Mr. Bloomberg’s concerns. Seen as more vital is the overhaul of a roster of work rules that govern everything from teacher raises to seniority rights to the amount of time teachers must be given to prepare for class.
The consensus is that the work rules have made managing the schools a nightmare. It is hard, among other things, to fire incompetent teachers, or even to reward particularly good ones. The council member’s suggestion that Mr. Bloomberg had given up on those kinds of management reforms in the contract drew uncharacteristically harsh salvos from both the council speaker and the mayor.
“I believe that a letter from Council Member Moskowitz this late in negotiations is destructive to the important process of reaching that agreement,” the speaker, Gifford Miller, said in a written statement late yesterday. In the past, Mr. Miller and Ms. Moskowitz, who both are East Side Democrats, have been close political allies.
Mr. Bloomberg was caustic.
“I guess I am happy to see that the council member has gone back to grandstanding on education rather than doing political favors for Upper East Side residents about sidewalk cafes,” the mayor told reporters in the Blue Room of City Hall yesterday. That was a reference to Ms. Moskowitz’s decision last week to weigh in on a spat between a wealthy businessman, Ronald Perelman, and a local cafe that is seeking a permit to put tables outdoors on the sidewalk across from Mr. Perelman’s home.
“These are part of negotiations so I don’t know what makes her an expert,” Mr. Bloomberg continued. “We are not going to sacrifice reform for political expediency. I can’t imagine anybody who knows me who thinks I would ever do that. This city will negotiate as hard as it can. We are making progress. We are talking and we are working hard and going in the right direction.”
Talk about a breakthrough in the contract negotiations was ignited earlier this month when Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president, sat in the mayor’s box at Yankee Stadium to watch a playoff game. It immediately started speculation that the city and the teachers were closing in on a contract deal.
While no one is willing to discuss the details on the record, a broad outline of the discussions has emerged from people on both sides of talks. The deal could include pay raises of up to 14% over three years, in return for teachers’ working an extra week at the start of the school year and perhaps working a longer school day during the year.
While reform of the work rules didn’t emerge as part of the framework leaked to reporters from participants, that doesn’t mean the mayor has abandoned those changes, Cathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, said. The Partnership is a leading business group.
“To focus solely on the contract is not necessarily the best way to get this done,” she told The New York Sun in an interview. “Eva Moskowitz should not be so pessimistic about the mayor’s commitment. Some of these changes require a change in the state education law, and what she isn’t considering is that the education law frequently trumps what is negotiated in the contract.”
That means a final deal could include an agreement by the two sides to change the state’s education law, in addition to having concessions spelled out in the contract, Ms. Wylde said.
“That kind of solution is not necessarily a copout,” she said. “My sense is that the mayor is very committed to these work rule changes. The question is how they get there.”
Even changes that are spelled out in the contract can be deceiving. When Mayor Giuliani negotiated with the teachers in the mid-1990s, he thought he had obtained a concession that would have allowed him to abolish tenure for principals. Ms. Moskowitz said it wasn’t until she ran some hearings this year that it became clear that the concessions were empty ones. Principals’ tenure had not, to all intents and purposes, changed.
It is against that backdrop, Ms. Moskowitz said, that she wrote the letter to Mr. Bloomberg yesterday.
“I am not accusing,” she told the Sun. “I just want everyone to be watching, because there is nothing more important than getting this right. This is being negotiated behind closed doors, and it is so complicated I think people need to be looking at it.”
Ms. Moskowitz said there are four major changes that must be made to the teachers’ contract to reform it. Longevity can no longer be the sole criteria for teacher assignments, inefficient work rules needed to be abolished, teachers’ pay must be based in part on individual merit, and the obstacles to the firing of incompetent and mediocre teachers must be removed.
“In my mind, unless those four things are in the contract, it is incremental,” Ms. Moskowitz said.
Ms. Weingarten, who has been in the middle of the contract negotiations, blasted Ms. Moskowitz for discussing the negotiations in such a public way.
“Since September, it has been obvious to any interested observer that the city and the UFT have been working intensely to negotiate a new contract,” she said after reading the Moskowitz letter. “During that time, Council Member Moskowitz has had many opportunities to have private conversations with me or with the mayor about any of her concerns. She opted not to do so. Such private conversations would be far more productive than repeating misleading and inaccurate assertions.”
One mayoral aide close to the discussions, who declined to be further identified, told the Sun the reports that work rules were not part of the discussion were flat-out wrong. “I’m not even sure where that came from,” he said.