Know your rights

If at first you don't succeed...

May 8, 2008 5:55 PM

They say you can’t blame a guy for trying. But when it comes to contract negotiations, a deal is a deal. Heaven knows, management always tells us that, but now that the full import of the mutual-consent transfers and job-security clauses in the 2005 contract have become clear through the lens of the budget, we see feigned DOE shock.

The chancellor knew full well that the 2005 contract contained a job-security guarantee. As everyone on the 300-member UFT negotiating committee saw, he tried to hold up the 2006 contract at the last minute to eliminate the job-security clause. He failed. He has done the same thing all this school year when we’ve been trying to get the DOE to simply do its job and help place ATRs who want to teach into full-time teaching positions.

So it wasn’t a surprise to me that this self-styled “independent” group that gets tens of millions of dollars a year from the DOE carried the chancellor’s water for him recently by issuing a report on the ATRs. It charged that hundreds of excessed teachers, displaced through no fault of their own, were wasting taxpayer money because the UFT’s contractual rock-solid job-security guarantee prevented them from being fired.

It’s not as if Chancellor Klein wasn’t explicitly warned in 2005 when we negotiated a “free-choice” transfer system. One of our conditions was that any excessed teachers must be guaranteed a job. The DOE team said not to worry, they would manage the process. Their only caveat was that just like we didn’t want forced transfers, they didn’t want to “force” excessed teachers onto a school.

The problem is their belief system. They believe:

a) the root of all the problems in our schools is “bad” teachers;

b) schools fail because they are full of “bad” teachers who are forced on principals;

c) the way to improve schools is to close them and get rid of all the “bad” teachers by making them compete for jobs.

As I said, the union believes in choice, too. We believe that teachers should be able to choose which schools they want to work in and not be “chained” to a school for years because they aren’t allowed to transfer out. So starting in the early 1990s, the UFT agreed with then-Chancellors Fernandez, Cortines and Crew to create an open market transfer system (also know as the SBO transfer system) free of most of the existing managerially imposed transfer restrictions. So began a gradual move to a more open system.

But regardless of how good a placement system is, where no one feels locked in, where teachers and principals feel they have choices, by 2005 it was clear that one could never trust this chancellor. That’s why I insisted that all excessed teachers, regardless of tenure status, be protected in three ways:

• First, the DOE would continue to have the responsibility to place people, with both the member and principal having the right to reject the placement.

• Second, if the right fit wasn’t found, the teacher would be placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool in her prior school (or district if the school had closed). These pools had been established years before to address job losses from temporary drops in enrollment.

• Third, if necessary, we would negotiate a voluntary buy-out agreement for teachers excessed for more than a year who would prefer to retire or leave the system.

That wasn’t what the DOE first had in mind. It wanted to follow the Chicago model and impose an 18-month deadline for finding a new job, after which the teacher would be laid off. But I rejected that, and when the contract went to fact-finding, the panel agreed with us.

So the Open Market Transfer Plan, including job security, was negotiated. We warned the DOE’s bargaining team that, if the school closings continued and the DOE did not ensure placements for the excessed teachers, there would be a growing number of people on the payroll without full-time positions. “We’ll take care of it,” the city negotiator said, and the deal was sealed.

That didn’t stop the DOE from trying again in the 2006 contract negotiations and then again a few months ago to get the right to fire unplaced excessed teachers.

What is unfortunate is that the DOE’s obsession with trying to fire teachers who are displaced through no fault of their own has obscured the fact that in many respects the new transfer plan has been a success. Thousands of teachers each year have taken advantage of the open transfer system, several times the number that used to be able to transfer each year.

The real culprit here is the DOE’s maneuver last year to change the school funding system. Under the new system, schools that hire senior teachers or keep a stable staff could be financially penalized over the long term, while schools with high teacher turnover and lower teacher salaries would have more discretionary spending ability.

Along with a coalition of parent and civic groups, we fought the so-called “weighted student funding” formula, because it was immediately obvious that it would destabilize successful schools. One characteristic of successful schools is that they keep their staffs, and — particularly with the salary increases we have negotiated — that means that the staff costs more. In April 2007, the DOE finally agreed to “hold harmless” the funding of all schools and to ensure for two years that any school that lost a senior teacher was entitled — with no budgetary penalty — to replace that teacher with an equally senior teacher.

As the economy weakened, the DOE decided to try once again to fire unplaced teachers, even as we were trying to get them placed. This time they called it a budget issue. But that’s clearly an excuse. We have proposed myriad solutions that would have resolved it if it were just a budget issue. We proposed negotiating the voluntary buy-out provided for in the contract. We suggested placing the excessed teachers in vacancies before hiring new people. We proposed that central cover the cost of hiring senior ATRs. All were rejected. The only “solution” the chancellor was interested in was to fire them.

In March, we finally gave up negotiating and blew the whistle at a City Council hearing on the terrible waste of talent and money the ATR pool had become. Soon thereafter, we filed an age discrimination suit because it was clear that a disproportionate number of the teachers who had not been able to find jobs were older.

Then last month, only weeks after we took those steps, the New Teacher Project came out with this report. What a coincidence! Having failed to get what they wanted in the 2005 and 2006 contracts, and having failed again in recent months, the DOE thought it would embarrass us. Please! The only one who should be embarrassed is the DOE for the lack of integrity and honesty about the deal, and the “researchers,” who, in their haste to come to the chancellor’s rescue, did a sloppy job.

First, their account of the numbers of ATRs without jobs and their cost was inflated because they included almost 200 ATRs who are actually working in long-term vacancies full time (proving they are not such undesirable teachers after all). The fact that they are still ATRs is the result of a clear financial disincentive to hiring them on the regular payroll. As ATRs, the central DOE covers the salaries of most of them, including all whose schools closed or were in the process of closing. If they were full-time staff members of the school, their salaries would come out of the individual school’s budget. Principals trying to stretch their budgets can have a free teacher in an ATR. Subtract those 200 people and the salaries of the substitute teachers that didn’t have to be hired because the ATRs were used in their place, and you reduce the researchers’ estimate of the cost of retaining ATRs by three-quarters, from $81 million to less than $19 million.

Second, the charge that teachers were not job-seeking was also specious. It was based only on online applications, completely ignoring such routine methods as letters, phone calls and in-person applications. Even worse, it ignored the fact that current employees were not invited to many DOE job fairs or were allowed in only after new applicants got first dibs. I say even worse because the same outfit writing the report also runs the job fairs. In fact, the New Teacher Project has a multi-million-dollar contract to do recruitment for the DOE.

The conflict of interest goes even deeper. The New Teacher Project also runs the Teaching Fellows program (another few million dollars!). Graduates of their program need placements. Placing a few hundred ATRs means that many fewer vacancies for their Fellows. Who do you think gets priority?

The third problem with the research is that it completely disregards the system’s obligation to place excessed teachers within their district or superintendency unless the principal denies the placement. Only if a placement cannot be made is the teacher supposed to go into the ATR pool. It’s quite the sleight of hand to shift the school system’s responsibility (and remember, this very task has been privatized to this outfit) onto the individual employee.

Finally, if the New Teacher Project wanted to be helpful, why would it release the report to the press and policy makers at the same time it asked us to review it? A hatchet job is a hatchet job and, as such, we have rejected it wholesale. I have written to every ATR to reassure them that I will under no circumstances “reopen the contract to negotiate any change in the terms and conditions” of their employment. This is “a manufactured crisis” that “the DOE created … and fuels … at every turn for its own political purposes,” I wrote. And this from the agency that tries to make “accountability” its middle name — everyone else’s accountability, that is.

Perhaps the saddest part of this story is the message it sends to teachers and kids who need great teachers. The chancellor often says that closing the achievement gap and bringing highly qualified teachers to low-performing schools is his main objective. But his actions belie his words. What career teacher, however committed to helping kids succeed, would go to a low-performing school that is facing possible closure, knowing that she or he could be labeled a “bad teacher,” be out of a job and at risk of being fired in a year or two? You might just as well hang a sign on the schoolhouse door: “Teachers, stay away!”