Bush
Pataki
Bloomberg

Good luck if we strike.

We are teaching those in our community whom these “leaders” could care less about.

• Katrina response, energy policy, Iraq…
• The overdevelopment of NYS for the benefit of the Governers friends and inner circle.
• Billion dollar stadium, recent landlord free-for-all…

We and our public have NO power in this country at this time.

The Democrats can’t get out of there own way, AFL-CIO is falling apart, and our union is under the knee of the Taylor law (easily as unconstitutional as the Rockafeller drug laws).

Wake up people, this is the end of the FDR American dream. We are headed for hard times and don’t think your pensions are safe either!!!

The Zietgeist

“Arbitration Panel Recommends Double Digit Raise For City Teachers
September 14, 2005

An arbitration panel mediating the contract dispute between the city and the teachers union has recommended raises of 11 percent over three years.

The panel’s recommendations are nonbinding, but both sides have said the findings were crucial in signing a deal.

In return for the raise, the panel recommends that 10 minutes be added to the school day and that some seniority rights in staffing decisions be cut.

Both the city and the union are giving the decision mixed reviews. The union had been pushing for a 14 percent raise.

If a three year contract is approved, much of it would be retroactive to May 2003, when the last contract expired.”

Isn’t it strange that there is no mention of this on EdWise or the UFT website? What’s up?

You write “Please work a couple of years in the system and see what your attitude is then!” This is a typical argument that I hear from teachers that don’t want to address my points or answer my questions.

In any case, I do think merit pay and advancement is part of the answer (not the entire answer, of course). In all organizations, judging performance is a difficult and important task. The vast majority of organizations in our country rely heavily on the judgment of managers to help make these decisions. All of these organizations have the potential to suffer from corruption or incompetence in these situations. Overall, however, the system works well. What makes public schools different? Doesn’t Google risk problems with favoritism? Should they move to a tenure/seniority/no-merit system? Doesn’t Apple have a risk of corruption? Doesn’t Whole Foods have a risk that a manager doesn’t realize that an employee has a particularly tough job? Meanwhile, how do private schools survive and thrive without these protections?

Get_me_a_contract, what makes public schools special with respect to these issues, other than the off-the-charts customer dissatisfaction? Others on this blog point to very tough conditions and difficult students, but how does that justify seniority/tenure/no-merit? We can’t even get our best teachers into the most challenging schools.

What about the two Unions joining forces against the DOE. Better yet, get DC37 and the Custodians to join us. Too often we are at odds with each other, while the main problem, (the mayor and chancellor) sit back and watch us bicker.

Since Randi is Chairperson of the Municipal Labor
Committee can’t she get something like this in motion?

Imagine if we had pattern bargaining with all municipal contracts ending on the same day. All municipal employees together have a lot of power.

Just some thoughts from the proletariat.

Do you think that merit pay is the answer? What will happen is that teachers who teach the “harder to reach” students will not get a pay raise.

How do you judge who gets a raise with merit pay? There is a great deal of favoritism in the schools already.

Who will give the raise? The principal? Won’t that just create corruption? What if a teacher works really hard and isn’t awarded a merit raise? How do you decide merit pay for music teachers, physical education teachers, librarians?

Would the teacher who is lucky enough to get the best and brightest in the school get the highest salary even though the teacher who teaches the almost truant crowd makes the most progress? How do you measure this progress?

Also–think of this. A teacher works really hard and even comes in Saturday. His/her students don’t make as much progress on a standardized test (or whatever the criterion for htis raise is) as another class with more “gifted” students. The teacher gets disgusted and stops giving it his/her all? Or quits altogether in disgust? Finally, would you have teachers undermining each other in pursuit of that ever elusive merit raise?

Merit pay doesn’t belong in the school. It will create strife and bad feelings among the staff. Morale will suffer and you will have more teachers leave the system.

Children are not cogs and education is not just a science–it is also an art. You can’t measure progress just by a standardized test…