You people have created 4 kinds of tenure, which paves the way for throwing some of us under the bus in the next contract. That’s cause for concern condemnatioin, but not for surprise: it’s the way you always negotiate our givebacks — incrementally, hoping we don’t notice.

This agreement only creates incentives to re-hire SOME of the ATRs back, the centrally funded ones, and Weingarten was very clever in her press release to avoid mentioning there’s more than one kind. She says there more than once that the DoE can hire “from the ATR pool,” avoiding any mention of the fact that there is no incentive whatsoever to hire back ATRs whose positions have been cut and who remain on the school’s budget.

So, here are the 4 kinds of tenure, though I’m sure you’re not losing any sleep over what you’ve done:

1. Tenured educators in real positions, paid out of the school’s budget.

2. Tenured educators in real positions, paid in part by central for eight years; principals get extra money the first year to sweeten the deal.

3. Tenured educators in provisional positions one year at a time, paid in part by central. Principals will get that extra cash only if they keep them on permanently. It’s like an auditioning for your job. Disgraceful that you allowed this.

4. Tenured educators who will remain ATRs, paid for by central or by the school. Obviously, the least privileged category: the teacher’s qualifications and years of service make absolutely no difference to anyone. In fact, the vets are worse off, because two-for-the-price-one hiring still flourishes citywide.

We should all be proud of this agreement!!!!!

David

I hope you realize that Rhee’s merit scheme is not going to help teachers or students unless teaching to the test becomes the only lesson children learn.

So I just hope our union, and that includes AFT, has learned that sometimes going to the “dark side” is not always the best fit.

They bent their budgeting software in pretzels to charge each school the real cost of each teacher, but to reimburse the school at exactly that rate. “No change, no change” they lied, “nothing to worry about”

When SBO transfers were eliminated and the “Open Market” with its vile name was introduced, lots of people, including some who should have known better, declared that this would lead to a much more ‘open’ much more level playing field. They touted the higher transfer numbers, without examining who was actually transferring.

And then when Fair Student Funding (another lie buried in a bizarre name) was introduced, all was clear. Senior teachers wouldn’t be able to transfer; those in closing schools wouldn’t have jobs. Enough schools, along with the UFT, howled, that the DoE agreed to delay implementation. But they never backed off. Senior teachers got a short-term reprieve, but the offending condition, the threat to their jobs, was not removed.

So senior teachers, ATRs, sat in closing schools, without work. Jobs were opening, but the DoE penalized principals for not hiring from outside the system.

And then the financial crisis hit, and the DoE blinked. They looked bad. Not because they were misunderstood, but because the public understood them perfectly well: they intended to swallow the cost of senior teachers just to make them look bad rather than to put them to work.

So they backed off.

Not because the are reasonable. Not because they are nice. Because we beat them. Because they were nasty, evil, venal, and we exposed them.

We don’t get many wins these days. But on this issue, we forced them to retreat. I;ll take wins where we get them.

And I’ll celebrate downtown on Monday…

Jonathan