Bob McManus

Bob McManus

Opinion

The possibly catastrophic new contract with NYC’s teachers

“Trust, but verify,” a great man once said — sound advice for judging government in general, and municipal labor relations in particular.

So flash back to Thursday’s grip-and-grin in City Hall’s ceremonial Blue Room, wherein Mayor de Blasio, teachers union boss Mike Mulgrew and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced public-school peace in our time. Then they clammed up on the details.

Hard to verify that.

Indeed, all that appears certain is that teachers presently will be paid a lot more — and will be spending less time in the classroom in return.

Yes, the nine-year agreement between the Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers brings to an end one of the longest labor impasses in municipal history.

And who would argue against that?

But, again, the principals ducked on the particulars Thursday, including how much the pact will truly cost, how those costs are to be covered and whether some highly imprecise claims concerning classroom practices, teacher productivity and workforce discipline have any real-world relevance.

Indeed, de Blasio essentially asked New York to assume his good faith and to accept the $4 billion deal (or could it be $5.5 billion?) on its face, no questions asked.

And that’s asking for a lot. The administration — and especially the mayor himself — are given to flights of rhetoric that rarely survive contact with reality. So prudent people can take nothing on faith.

Case in point: Last February, the mayor dramatically declared the salvation of Brooklyn’s Long Island College Hospital, an effort in which he had invested substantial personal credibility and political capital. It was a “truly historic, transcendent moment,” preened de Blasio of an agreement that — for a variety of reasons — made no practical sense whatsoever.

Sure enough, by mid-April the deal had collapsed into a steaming cowpie — leaving many of those associated with it wondering whether the mayor had even a clue about the economics of ObamaCare-era health care.

Or concluding that he was fibbing the whole time.

All of which is hyper-relevant to Thursday’s UFT announcement.

Terming the deal a “landmark agreement” achieved on an “historic day” (does anybody see a trend here?), the mayor explained that it won’t work without more than a $1 billion in health-insurance savings — but, even so, that it would require no appreciable reductions in health-care services for UFT members.

Not to belabor the point, but this also makes no practical sense, either. It simply doesn’t work on its face — especially given that first-quarter health-care spending nationally is up an astounding 9.9% from a year ago, mostly driven by demand-pull inflation.

If the projected savings aren’t achieved, no matter the reason, the new contract’s overall cost to taxpayers skyrockets from an estimated $3.4 billion to a budget-busting $5.4 billion — a catastrophe, given that the UFT pact will likely serve as a baseline for deals with most of the city’s 150-plus unions.

Economics aside, de Blasio and the union also claim that the deal will incorporate significant programmatic and staffing reform. Don’t hold your breath.

Specifically, the contract apparently provides for up to $20,000 per teacher in merit pay; reduces teaching time in favor of “professional development”; calls for “simplified” teacher-evaluation practices; and even includes a process to make it easier to fire incompetent teachers.

Teachers will snap up more pay for less work any time. Hey, who wouldn’t.

But anyone who expects the UFT to accept more rigorous teacher evaluations, or to clear a path for firing bad teachers, simply hasn’t been paying attention for the past decade.

Mike Bloomberg’s demands for increased teacher accountability was a no-brainer for non-teachers; for the unions, any judgment based on individual performance represents an existential threat.

And so, not surprisingly, there was war.

Yes, the one-for-all, all-for-one ethic that informed industrial-era unionism has long been an anachronism in America — even the United Auto Workers can’t recruit on those terms these days — but the full weight of that history presses against even the most modest reforms in New York City.

To say nothing of a political establishment that is owned and operated by the unions.

That’s why a highly motivated Bloomberg couldn’t fire even teachers who had sex on a classroom desk — let alone those who simply can’t teach.

And that’s why the notion that Bill de Blasio would seriously seek to impose reform stretches credulity; he owes his job to the labor movement, as ossified and disconnected to the real needs of New Yorkers as it is.

Bloomberg fought the UFT, and the UFT won. And while de Blasio wasn’t the union’s first choice last fall, it was there for him in the end, when it mattered.

So on Thursday, de Blasio was there for the UFT, also when it mattered.

Everything else is mere detail — even if nobody cares to discuss them.