reality-based educator

Here are the details of the tentative agreement between the United Federation of Teachers and Mayor Bloomberg on the new teachers contract. They are not pretty:

WAGES: The agreement calls for a 15% increase over 52 months; 2% effective Dec. 1, 2003; 3.5% effective Dec. 1, 2004; 5.5% effective Nov. 1, 2005, and 3.25% effective Oct. 1, 2006. Yearly increases are compounded. A teacher with five years experience and 30 credits above a Master’s degree would go to $58,452 from $50,828 by the end of the contract. The maximum salary would go to $93,416 from $81,232. Salaries for new teachers would increase 9%, going to $42,512 from $39,000, except for those who started this year, who get the full 15% increase. The contract would run through October 12, 2007.

RETROACTIVE: A teacher at the top of the pay scale would receive a total of about $5,771. A teacher with five years experience and a Masters would receive $4,094, and a teacher who entered the system in September 2002 would get $2,819 in retroactive pay. Those figures are more than 60% higher than recommended in the fact-finders’ report. The difference was achieved by moving up the effective dates of the first two raises by six months.

PARAPROFESSIONALS: Creation of a pay line for paras who earn a bachelor’s degree, bringing their top salary to at least $32,000. Retroactive pay for paraprofessionals at the top of the pay scale will be $1,974.

THE SCHOOL DAY: The agreement maintains the uniform school day. It adds 10 minutes to the day, which will be combined with the previous 20 minutes per day added in the last contract. That time would be used for tutorials, test preparation and/or small group instruction, limited to no more than 10 students per teacher. The instruction will be given in a 37½ minute period immediately after dismissal four days a week, Monday through Thursday, starting in February. There would be an expedited grievance process for violations of the 10-student rule. District 75 and the multiple session schools will use the time to expand each class, and the rest of the school system will have four days a week of tutoring, test prep and/or small group instruction after dismissal.

SENIORITY TRANSFERS: The agreement calls for ending seniority transfers and bumping, while banning “forced” transfers. Principals cannot reject transfers or excesses based on age, race, gender, sexual orientation and union activities. The fact-finding panel rejected the city’s demand that any teacher “excessed” out of a job be fired if he/she could not find a new job within 18 months.

LEAD TEACHERS: Expands the creation of the UFT- and parent-initiated pilot program of a lead or master teacher program in District 9. Lead teachers, who receive an extra $10,000, use their expertise to provide educational support for all teachers in their schools, in addition to their classroom duties.

COVERAGES: Remain the same: Principals may assign teachers in middle and high schools to cover for an absent colleague once a term without extra pay. The panel recommended raising it to 12 times a year, but the final agreement kept it at two.

LIMITS MICROMANAGEMENT: Teachers can no longer be disciplined for “the format of bulletin boards, the arrangement of classroom furniture and the exact duration of lesson units.”

SEXUAL MISCONDUCT: Both parties agreed to mandatory dismissal for any teacher found to have had a sexual relationship with a student or minor. Any teacher indicted or charged with sexual misconduct would be suspended without pay for up to three months after an arbitrator finds there is probable cause. The union insisted on language to require that any teacher found to have been falsely accused of sexual misconduct or corporal punishment would receive full back pay, and all references to the charges would be removed from the employee’s file.

CIRCULAR 6: Professional activities are maintained, but administrators will have more leeway in assigning teachers to such things as homeroom, hall patrol and cafeteria duty during those periods. The principal, after consulting with the union’s chapter leader in each school, would list the number of available positions for each activity. Teachers would select from a menu of options.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT DAYS: Three professional development days would be added to the school calendar. Two would occur the Thursday and Friday before Labor Day and teachers will have time to prepare their classrooms. The third would be on Brooklyn-Queens Day, a day on which schools were closed in those boroughs. Under the agreement, there would be no classes system-wide on that day.

RETIREMENT: Both sides agreed to jointly seek state legislation to allow for retirement at age 55 with 25 years experience; commonly known as the “55-25” rule.

LETTERS IN THE FILE: The agreement would eliminate the right of teachers to file a grievance over any letter the principal puts in his or her file. Teachers would have the right to meet with the principal and respond to the letter, which must be removed after three years if it is not used in a disciplinary process.

FAIR PROCESS: The agreement incorporates the union’s recommendation to streamline the grievance process. The fact-finding panel rejected the city’s demands to end the just cause standard – a common sense standard of fairness.

Ultimately, this was an out and out sell-out of the teachers union membership by Randi Weingarten. She should be ashamed to come to the membership with this contract, let alone be happy and smiling and selling this abomination as a great deal. And yet, Randi said today that:

“This is a good day for our educators and our students. We’ve worked long and hard to find ways to pay teachers significantly more and to craft the fact-finders’ recommendations in a way that will work for kids and their teachers. We said the fact-finders’ report had its pluses and minuses. This agreement has turned those minuses into pluses.

“I am particularly pleased that we have significantly closed the pay gap between our hard-working educators and their colleagues in the suburbs. Between this agreement and our previous contract, teachers will have received more than a 30% increase in pay."

Weingarten is full of shit. She is putting the best face on a horrific deal that if given a fair vote should go down to a pretty hefty defeat.

Let's list the atrocities:

Can't grieve a letter. Seniority is changed in the administration's favor. Pottyroom duty returns. Secondary schools get a 37.5 minute class four times a week. 3 extra days, two before Labor Day, for PD. Merit pay for "lead teachers." Retro is still pretty paltry.

And this is a "good day for educators"? This turns the PERB report "minuses" into "pluses"? Who is Randi kidding?

NYC public school teachers will now be teaching a sixth class, staking out toilets to catch kids smoking cigarettes, giving up some of their summer vacation (and don't kid yourself, in the next contract there will be three more days added to make it a full week in August), and losing their right to grieve a letter in the file or transfer to a new school!!! All for 15 fucking percent, which amounts to about a $184 dollars a paycheck for me after taxes.

And why do new teachers only get a 9% increase when everybody else gets a 15%? I thought Randi was demanding the same raise across the board for all teachers so that the city could attract new teachers and compete for "good teachers" with the more lucrative suburbs? How does raising the starting salary for new teachers from $39,000 to $42,500 help the city compete for good teachers when many of the districts around the city have starting salaries of $50,000 to $60,000 dollars? Seems to undermine one of Weingarten's main arguments for the contract.

Also, how does the union ensure that the DOE will no longer "micromanage" UFT members and discipline teachers for “the format of bulletin boards, the arrangement of classroom furniture and the exact duration of lesson units"? What provisions are in the contract that will keep Joel and his curriculum bootlicks from coming around with their bulletin board rulers and placing letters in the files of teachers caught for violations (letters you will no longer be able to grieve in the new contract, by the way.)

And why add the provision that raises the salary of paraprofessionals who earn a bachelor's degree to $32,000? Wouldn't most paraprofessionals who earn a bachelor's degree become teachers? I have yet to meet a paraprofessional with a bachelor's degree who didn't move over to teaching. This seems like a bullshit provision that will affect very few paraprofessionals. I guess she was scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with some "positives" in the contract deal she could use to sell it to UFT members.

All in all, a very bad day for NYC public school teachers.

The more I think about the awful job Randi Weingarten has done as UFT preznit, the more I want Randi Weingearten to fall on her own sword and resign.

She has shown herself to be grossly incompetent in her running of the union. She has been taken to the cleaners in two straight contract negotiations. She agreed to give Bloomberg and Klein complete authority over the system and the effects have been chaotic and completely demoralizing for most of us in the system. She doesn't even challenge the mayor's claims that the test scores have gone sky high the past year when even Diane Ravitch, the noted education reformer, believes Bloomberg is fucking with the stats. She allows Bloomberg to run on a pretty mixed "education" record completely unchallenged and even helps out his reelection bid by refraining from endorsing the Democratic candidate who would be a much better friend to NYC teachers than this union-busting billionaire.

Randi Weingarten must resign.

She doesn't act in the best interests of the members. She acts in the best interests of herself and her UNITY caucus hacks. Randi always does what is good for Randi and the story is always about Randi. Take a look at the UFT.org website. Almost every picture on the site has Randi's scowling mug glaring out at you. Even today, when Randi hands down a contract that gives back 20 years of contract provisions in one shot, the story on the UFT website about the new contract is a fawning piece of propaganda that makes it sound like Weingarten is all that stands between teachers and a job at Walmart when the reality is, Randi has allowed the Walmartization of New York City teachers to occur.

Randi Weingarten must resign.

Weingarten of course does not have the grace or the dignity to resign, so she will have to be dragged out of her UFT office kicking and screaming. All right, I'm willing to help do it, and come next UFT election, I will work my damnedest to send her ass packing.

But first, we must defeat this abomination of a contract. The contract provisions are horrific enough that Weingarten is going to have a hard sell on this. But of course she will hit us over the head with the usual UNITY propaganda about how we must take this deal because the only alternative is a strike. She is wrong. We can tear this piece of shit up and go back to the drawing board. The abomination Weingarten has tentatively agreed to does not amount to a raise anyway, since after you crunch the numbers along with all the extra work you see that teachers are actually taking a 15% to 20% pay cut.

So vote no on this contract. Talk to your colleagues at school and convince them to vote no on this contract. And then, after this piece of shit is voted down, we work on voting Randi Weingarten out of office and electing a union leader who will work for the union membership rather than tolerating a union preznit who has the union membership work for her.