Missed Opportunity

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When negotiations over a new labor contract between New York City and the United Federation of Teachers got under way last year, the schools chancellor, Joel Klein, went straight for the jugular. He proposed scrapping the existing 200-page contract, with all of its Byzantine and excellence-killing work rules, and proposed in its place a streamlined, eight-page agreement that would have given principals and administrators the power to assign experienced teachers to those schools and classrooms where they were most needed. He also campaigned to eliminate tenure and to make it easier to fire incompetent teachers. A few weeks ago, Mr. Klein stirred an education reform conference in Washington, D.C., by vowing to make a merit pay system for teachers his signature initiative.


But even as Mr. Klein was promising radical reforms, his boss had decided that enough was enough. There was an election to be won. The last thing Mayor Bloomberg needed was 120,000 angry union members demonstrating in the streets and fouling up his campaign’s depiction of New York as one big happy city. So last week, Mr. Klein bit his lip and affixed his signature to yet another 200-page teachers contract – one containing the same lock-step pay schedule, based on seniority and useless education credits, he earlier promised to end. That wasn’t all he gave up. The new contract has no provisions for merit pay, and no differential pay for teachers in critical-needs areas or for those working in hard-to-staff schools. Thus, the Ph.D. in mathematics who teaches college-level courses in high school is paid on the same salary line as the 7th-grade gym teacher who spends most of the school day rolling basketballs out on the court.


It gets worse. The additional money slotted for the city’s teachers is more regressive than in previous agreements. This contract grants a 15% across-the-board pay raise, but the bulk of the new money (estimated to add almost $1 billion to the city’s education budget) will go to teachers counting the days to retirement. Teachers with 22 years or more in the system, those least likely to be lured to other districts, will receive a $12,000 raise, upping their maximum salary to $93,000.Teachers with five years in the system, those most likely to be lured to higher paying suburban districts, will receive only $7,000 more. First-year teachers receive an 8% raise for a total of $3,000. Stiffing teachers who will not join the system for another year or two makes sense politically for the mayor and helps pay for the hefty raises going to senior teachers. But this makes it more difficult to recruit bright graduates from selective colleges to Gotham.


The union had to make some concessions to achieve its money demands. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein are trumpeting as a major breakthrough the elimination of the contract’s “seniority transfer” provisions, which forced less senior teachers to stand in line behind more senior teachers when vacancies at other schools came open. While a good thing for the system, it’s hardly a breakthrough. New York is late jumping on to this bandwagon. Boston’s reform minded superintendent, Thomas Payzant, accomplished this 10 years ago. Since then, many other school districts have followed suit. Indeed, as a result of contract changes accomplished by previous education administrations, more than half of New York’s schools have already opted for an alternative hiring system, called School Based Options, which allows principals to get around the seniority rule. And while seniority transfer is finally out, seniority placement in the schools still stands. Principals continue to be required to follow seniority rules when assigning teachers to class schedules and to various other in-school positions.


As for Mr. Klein’s promise to make it easier for the system to get rid of incompetent teachers, he can claim one slight improvement. In the new contract, teachers charged with unsatisfactory classroom performance can no longer file a separate grievance over every negative letter entered in their file by a principal. However, Mr. Klein’s big targets – the tenure system and a faulty and slow arbitration process after teachers are formally charged with incompetence – are still firmly in place. Thus it will still be very difficult, if not impossible, for the system to rid itself of truly incompetent teachers.


The “give backs” that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein portray as giant steps toward reform look, upon closer inspection, to be no more than baby steps – with the occasional setback. For every work rule eliminated from the old contract, 934 1567 1041 1578there seems to be another one or two in its place. One of the most bizarre of the new rules, inserted into the contract at the insistence of the UFT, states: “The following issues shall not be the basis for discipline of pedagogues: a) the format of bulletin boards; b) the arrangement of classroom furniture; and c) the exact duration of lesson units.” The new work rule is a direct slap at Mr. Klein and legitimizes the union’s complaints about the chancellor’s “pedagogical tyranny.”


But the most significant aspect of this new contract is that it probably marks the last opportunity for Mr. Bloomberg to reform the city’s schools. That’s because the mayor inexplicably agreed to a 52-month deal that doesn’t expire until near the end of 2007. By that time, Mr. Bloomberg will have just two years until the next municipal election. The term-limited Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, if he’s still around, will be lame ducks with no leverage to secure further concessions from the union.


Without a contract that provides incentives – financial and otherwise – for teacher excellence and productivity, what’s left of the Bloomberg/Klein legacy of reform? As I have argued previously, all that remains is Mr. Klein’s determination to enforce constructivist pedagogy – “fuzzy” math and whole language reading instruction – on almost every classroom and school in the city. This approach has been proven, time and time again, to be wrong for most children, and particularly for children from disadvantaged family backgrounds.


Not only has Mr. Klein missed the jugular, he has opened himself to attack. His supporters in the education reform community have not paid much attention to what’s happening in New York City’s classrooms. They felt they could be quiet about this because they believed Mr. Klein was reforming teachers’ incentive structure. Get that, they reasoned, and student academic improvement would follow, regardless of the instructional methods the chancellor was forcing on teachers. It seems like the right time for education reformers to re-examine that position.


Mr. Stern is a contributing editor to City Journal and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. This article appears on the Web site of the Fordham Foundation,www.edexcellence.net.


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