Perdido 03

Perdido 03

Friday, May 2, 2014

Here's How You Know The UFT Contract Deal Is A Bad One - The NY Post Likes It

One of the measures of any UFT contract deal is what the neo-liberals at the Daily News and Times and the neo-cons at the Post think about it.

If these editorial boards, who never saw a merit pay proposal they didn't like, a teacher they didn't want to fire or a traditional public school they didn't want to turn into a non-unionized charter school, like the new UFT contract deal, then you know there's are serious problems with it.

The NY Post came down squarely on liking the merit pay and de-contractulaizing 10% of city schools in the tentative UFT contract agreement:

Now that Mayor de Blasio has reached a deal with the United Federation of Teachers, most of the attention is on the $3.2 billion in retroactive pay. That’s understandable, given it’s the largest number in the deal and the mayor’s predecessor has said the city can’t afford it.

But we’re intrigued by some of the items we didn’t expect. One provision, for example, will allow exemptions from some Department of Education regulations and union rules in 200 schools — permitting them to change curricula, reconfigure the length of their school year, provide for more parental involvement and modify seniority rules for work assignments.

Used correctly, that would give traditional schools some of the flexibility that helps make charters successful.

Ditto for merit pay. Again, it will depend on how it’s implemented. Paying a good teacher $5,000 extra to keep her in a challenged school is an excellent investment, but if it means paying $5,000 to keep every teacher there, you haven’t fixed anything.

Perhaps most important is the $1 billion in savings the mayor says he and the UFT will seek in health care. We have few specifics, though the mayor mentioned sensible possibilities such as auditing benefits to remove those not entitled. If the mayor makes good on the promised savings, it would be a huge step forward.

Yeah, they love the merit pay and the charterizing of 10% of the city's schools without actually making them into charters (i.e., they won't be under the UFT contract rules, but teachers there WILL pay UFT dues.)

That's how you know this is a bad deal for teachers - the Posties like it and see it as a blueprint for eventually de-contractualizing all of the city schools down the road.

6 comments:

  1. You know, when I read this editorial this morning I thought the exact same thing. In fact, I have said to several colleagues already this morning that The Post likes the deal and therefore it must be awful.

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    1. The Post likes it, time to look very close at what's wrong with it...

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  2. After the police, fire, sanitation, etc refuse to accept the 0's and 1's, what happens to us? Will we get what they get or are we stuck with this steaming pile of crap?

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    1. Depends on what they get, I suppose. Not so sure they don't 0's and 1's since the UFT seems to be setting the pattern.

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  3. It's official - the union has ALL become real life cartoon characters. They and we ( if you vote YES) are the burger pusher who has accepted the plea to "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a burger today."

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    1. An apt comparison. Scarier to me, if this is the best they could do with a fairly friendly negotiator, what do we get with another Bloomberg type?

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