Results tagged “teachersunion”

While in Washington D.C. yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg said the city will start to use students' test scores when evaluating teacher tenure. The NY Times called the proposal one "that has been bitterly opposed by the teachers’ union and criticized as putting too much weight on standardized exams."

After school principals howled over a new deal between the city and teachers union that allowed teachers to return to school on the same day as students, the city has announced that the 2009-2010 will start on September 9 (a Wednesday), instead of September 8, the Tuesday after Labor Day. The school year will also end a day later. Mayor Bloomberg said, "This agreement will allow us keep the school year intact with kids in the classroom for the same number of days, while providing teachers and principals an administrative day to prepare for the arrival of students." Principals, who had complained teachers were missing the chance to organize their classrooms and that the first day of school would be chaotic, are pleased, though there previously were two administrative days before school's start. Ernest Logan, president of the principals union, said, "Common sense prevails."

This fall, teachers will no longer have to arrive two days before students and prepare their classrooms, because the deal the United Federation of Teachers struck with the Bloomberg administration allows them to return on the same day as students, as part of a deal to save $2 billion in pensions. Of course, the principals are upset: PS 321 (Brooklyn) Principal Elizabeth Phillips asked, "Do parents want their children coming into rooms where furniture is stacked up and materials packed away?"while PS 221 (Queens) Principal Sheila Twomey said, "You don’t want to picture what it was like if a child comes to school and there’s nothing up around the room, you’re trying to find your pencil and everybody else around you is disorganized." And principals union president Earl Logan said the before-school's start meetings were helpful to integrate new teachers. UFT outgoing president Randi Weingarten pointed out that requiring teachers to arrive on the Thursday and Friday before Labor Day (school starts on the Tuesday after Labor Day) violated a 2005 labor agreement and said that the new deal could allow Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to simply move the students' start date to be two days later.

Every few years, the issue of public school teachers in rubber rooms gets explored. These are teachers who have been removed from duty—whether they've been rightly or unfairly accused— while their cases are investigated...and all while they are still paid. (Remember the Bronx school bomb scare allegedly caused by a teacher? Well, that teacher was upset that he might be transferred to a rubber room over allegations he punched a student.) Now the Associated Press delves into the bizarro world of the rubber room, the holding pens where teachers are kept.

While Mayor Bloomberg and his staff have warned that the city's pensions could cripple the city's finances, the NY Times reports, "Interviews and budget records show that the Bloomberg administration itself is responsible for much of the growth in city pension costs over the last eight years, and has repeatedly missed opportunities to rein in the spending. A major reason: the mayor has given the city’s 300,000 workers generous pay increases, guaranteeing that they retire with bigger pensions, which are typically 50 percent of salary. Such raises force the city to make heftier payments to the pension system now." The city's contribution to the pension system is $6.2 billion, up from $1.4 billion in 2002. The mayor's office defended the pay raises as incentives for workers to be more productive and pointed out that the stock market's downturn means the city pays more. In other pension news, Bloomberg negotiated a new pension deal with the teacher's union that saves $2 billion over 20 years.

United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten is reportedly stepping down from her position next week, according to Daily News sources. Weingarten is also the president of the American Federation of Teachers (the UFT's parent union) and a union source said, "It's hard to maintain a foot in both jobs." Another source said, "Many of us are unhappy that she's not completing her term. We would like to see her negotiate a new contract," referring to how teachers do not have a contract with the city yet, "With all the things she's agreed to, I hope we're getting something for this. She's agreed to back off on mayoral control. She did a complete 180." UFT COO Michael Mulgrew is expected to take Weingarten's place until an election can be held in 2010. And Weingarten also made Page SIx today, "They could be the lesbian power couple of all time: Randi Weingarten, the new president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers, is dating Hilary Rosen, former head of the Recording Industry Association of America, who appears on CNN and is Washington, DC, editor-at-large for the Huffington Post."

Weeks after the Department of Education sent a memo around to principals trying to get them to crack down on teachers expressing their political views in the classroom, the teachers' union has responded with a lawsuit saying the rule demanding they maintain neutrality in front of students violates their First Amendment rights. The suit comes on the heels of one teacher being asked to remove political buttons they were wearing and another having the Obama poster they had put up on a union bulletin board taken down. Before the recent enforcement of the rule, teachers say that the Department had turned a blind eye to it and wearing political buttons--as recently as this year's primaries--was second nature. Randi Weingarten, the union president, said to the Times, “Students can only benefit from being exposed to and engaged in a dialogue about current events.”