With a new contract for the city’s teachers not far off, some New Yorkers who are following the negotiations say they fear that the dramatic reforms promised by Mayor Bloomberg won’t be incorporated into the deal between the city and its 80,000 public-school teachers.

Mr. Bloomberg promised during the 2001 campaign that he would overhaul the contract with the United Federation of Teachers. Last February, he seemed well on his way to succeeding when he proposed a revolutionary eight-page contract, instead of making revisions to the existing 250-page agreement, which expired more than two years ago.

By May, however, the president of the union, Randi Weingarten, told The New York Sun that the eight-page contract was off the table, and recent press reports have indicated that the new contract will give teachers a raise of 14% – their current average annual salary is $56,500 – while leaving unchanged most of the work rules the mayor pledged to reform.

With the next negotiation session about two weeks away, most people who talked to the Sun yesterday about the contract said it seems as though Mr. Bloomberg’s team is throwing in the towel when it comes to the major changes he pledged, including making significant reforms in “work rules” and adding provisions to tie pay to merit.

The schools chancellor, Joel Klein, has said work rules limit his power to manage the system. When it comes to reforming them in the next contract, however, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute who specializes in education, Sol Stern, said the mayor has “has completely blown it.”

“The only way to get the work-rule reforms was to convince the rank-and-file teachers that we – we being the Department of Education – we have a new vision for labor-management relations and we’re appealing to your professionalism,” Mr. Stern said. Instead, he said, a “top-down management style” has “angered the rank-and-file teachers and driven them into the hands of the union leadership.”

Other people said they have a little hope for the work rules but fear that the major promises of reform would be forgotten in the final contract.

“I think there will be movement in the work rules,” the president of the Center for Civic Innovation-Public Education Association, Sy Fliegel, said. “I don’t think we’re going to get a new contract, starting from scratch.”

A member of the state Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, said: “You are going to get a little bit longer school year. You’re going to get some adjustments around the margins, but on the big stuff, the ability to move teachers around and differentiate their pay, I don’t think you’re going to get much movement.”

Ms. Tisch said she hears that differential pay doesn’t have much chance of being implemented in the contract, though she said, “I’d like to be wrong.”

“The one thing the union could and should give is the ability to pay math, science, and special-education teachers more money so we could attract qualified teachers,” she said. “Without differential pay, we will continue to have huge shortages in the hard-to-staff schools.”

She said merit-based pay, a reform she would love to see – and one that the chancellor has repeatedly praised in public appearances – should be behind differential pay on the city’s list of priorities, and has even less chance of getting into the new contract.

The chairman of the New York City Center for Charter Excellence, Joseph Reich, said that he’d like to see the most successful teachers earn the most money under the new contract – but he’s skeptical. He doesn’t expect to see a “pay for performance” system until the time when his grandchildren are in college, Mr. Reich said.

A Harvard University researcher, Caroline Hoxby, said Ms. Tisch and Mr. Reich are on target when they say they want to see performance- or merit based pay in the contract.

“That is the No. 1 thing that has to be done,” she said. “That means no across-the-board pay increases.”

She said although the union might not like the idea, it would help the city attract and retain the best teachers and boost student performance. Neither the education department nor the union would comment yesterday on the content of the draft contract.