The UFT Agreement

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 New York Sun
The New York Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

The agreement reached between the United Federation of Teachers and the Bloomberg administration truly is a win-win situation for both sides, and more importantly, for the city’s 1.1 million students. It involves higher pay for the teachers, some givebacks to permit principals to have greater management discretion, and additional instruction time, which will mainly benefit students who need extra time.


We should all be grateful that an agreement was reached, and that the union did not find it necessary to resort to a strike. Anyone who remembers previous teachers’ strikes will recall that the days in which the schools were closed were terrible for everyone involved, particularly the students, who were never able to make up for the time they missed in school.


The question now is whether the contract will be approved by the members of the UFT, who have grown angry and restless as a result of working for over two years without a contract. Their anger was further fed by the Department of Education’s haughty style of micromanagement and its constant efforts to mandate the minutiae of teachers’ daily work lives.


Although Mayor Bloomberg says that the contract must be approved by the Panel on Education Policies, everyone understands that the panel does whatever the mayor wants.


One of the best features of the new contract is its longevity. It will be in force for a period of four years and four months. It begins retroactive to June 1, 2003, when the last contract ended, and it continues in effect until October 12, 2007. This guarantees a relatively long period of labor peace in the schools, and that is a powerful benefit to students and the educational process.


The agreement is a victory for the UFT president, Randi Weingarten, and her negotiating team, because they were able to persuade the mayor to grant much larger salary raises than other New York City public employee unions have received, and larger even than a fact-finding report recommended. The starting salary for a new teacher will rise to $42,512 from $39,000; the top salary for an experienced teacher will grow to $93,416 from $81,232.


The “pattern” for collective bargaining with municipal unions was supposedly set by the city’s earlier contract with District Council 37, which accepted a raise of only 5%.The UFT would never have accepted such a small increase.


The meager increase awarded to DC 37 was a non-starter for the UFT; any leader who accepted it would have been ousted by the membership.


The other parameter for the contract was the fact-finding report of the Public Employees Relations Board, issued in August, which recommended an increase of 11.4% over three years. The fact-finding report also proposed givebacks by the union. It is clear in retrospect that the fact-finding report provided a starting point for the ultimate settlement. The mayor raised the salary settlement to 15% as a sweetener to make the givebacks tolerable.


Ms. Weingarten won a clear victory on another point important to teachers. She won concessions that she summarized as “let teachers teach.” The Department of Education will no longer be able to reprimand teachers based on the state of the classroom bulletin board, the arrangement of classroom furniture, or the duration of lessons. (On this last point, some supervisors had been reprimanding teachers if their lessons did not follow the department’s guidelines to the minute.)


The mayor is a winner in this negotiation because he was able to win substantial concessions on work rules. The new agreement restores important managerial authority to school principals. It abolishes seniority transfers, which allowed teachers with seniority to transfer into a school by “bumping” junior teachers, whether the principal wanted the senior teacher or not. Seniority transfers promoted the clustering of the most experienced teachers in highly desirable schools, which was not equitable to low-performing schools in poor neighborhoods. Principals will also have more authority over hiring their staff, which will allow the leaders to shape their team around common goals.


The agreement guts the controversial “circular six.” This was the rule (agreed to in negotiations between the late UFT leader Sandra Feldman and Mayor Giuliani) that exempted teachers from patrolling the halls, the lunchroom, and the playground, and performing other such functions that were allegedly “non-professional.” School aides were hired to perform these jobs. Now, under the new agreement, principals will be able to assign teachers to these jobs, and this will make schools safer because teachers know the students and will be expected to exercise their authority before and after classes, as well as throughout the school premises.


The agreement adds a modest amount of instructional time: an additional 50 minutes a week. This time, according to the mayor, will be used to provide additional tutorials to small groups of students who need extra instruction.


A very promising accomplishment in the agreement is the creation of a new position called “lead teacher.” These will be teachers designated by their principal because of their excellence, who will be allowed to transfer to a low-performing school, where they will earn an additional $10,000 annually. This could be a very valuable way of encouraging outstanding teachers to serve in schools where they are needed, while gaining additional compensation for doing so.


This is an agreement where both sides made very significant compromises. The mayor gave up on his demand for a 5% wage package. The UFT gave up some workplace rules that made its members lives easier. But both sides made very significant gains. The mayor won historic work rule changes. The UFT won a bigger salary increase than anyone expected and managed to win back a measure of professional freedom for its members.


The rest of us can breathe a sigh of relief that the threat of a strike has been averted, that the city has a pay scale for teachers that is respectable, and that our leaders reached an accommodation that is good for the city and good for the children.


Ms. Ravitch is research professor of education at New York University and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

The New York Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

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.


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