The next contract for New York City’s schoolteachers will be worth billions of dollars. Surely we can afford to include some common sense.
Students deserve a safe learning environment. Teachers deserve a fair salary. Parents deserve access to the teachers. Taxpayers deserve to know their money isn’t being spent on teachers who don’t even teach.
Those ideas are so reasonable and fundamental that they would seem beyond debate. Yet you need only look at the most absurd and alarming provisions of the last contract to be wary about the next one. Some examples:
- Teachers can be absent for up to 20 days without giving any notice or any reason and still face no penalty whatsoever.
- The typical parent-teacher conference often lasts two or three minutes.
- Teachers aren’t required to talk with, e-mail or respond to parents outside the narrow hours of the school day.
- Teachers who sexually harass children can stay in the classroom if an unelected arbitrator sees no reason they should be fired.
- Taxpayers spend a staggering $144 million a year on teachers who no longer have jobs but draw their full salary anyway.
Parents and students have no seat at the negotiating table. But they should get a voice in the debate — and common-sense language that any reasonable observer would see as important to include in the contract.
To that end, parents can now access a new set of recommendations for the next contract, all posted on Common Sense Contract. They’re based on the belief that a successful school requires excellent teachers, engaged parents and a spirit of collaboration between them.
The starting premise: Teachers hold one of the most important jobs in the world. They deserve not just our respect, but also a solid salary and professional support to go with it.
Yet this isn’t solely a contract for teachers. It’s about a common purpose of ensuring children get a truly high-quality education, and that demands enough common sense to give parents some respect as well.
Among the core suggestions for improving the next teachers’ contract:
- Parents should be allowed to reach out to teachers by e-mail or phone and expect a timely response, and they should be promised at least 15 minutes per child in their teacher-parent conferences.
- The starting salary of new teachers should rise from $45,530 to $60,000, an amount that more fairly reflects the job they do and the expense of the city in which they work.
- Teachers who excel or work in high-demand fields should be the ones who get extra pay, rather than raises being based exclusively on seniority and additional degrees in education.
- Tenured teachers facing substantiated charges of sexual misconduct should be suspended without pay. And the chancellor should have final say on firing the teacher after a hearing — not a local arbitrator who is not accountable to parents, voters or the mayor.
- Teachers can’t be absent without notice unless there is an emergency. If they don’t show up without a reason for three straight days, they can be put on unpaid leave and reinstated only if they prove an emergency kept them from alerting the school.
- Teachers who lose their jobs may no longer stay on paid leave for the rest of their careers at taxpayer expense. Instead, they get one year to find a new position or move to unpaid leave until they do.
We hope Mayor de Blasio’s Department of Education remembers the voices and rights of parents as the mayor negotiates a multiyear deal for teachers. And we hope these recommendations will be the guide.
Nothing we propose is radical; remarkably obvious is more like it. If we can all agree that some provisions for teachers, parents and children are so basic that they must be part of a document as powerful as a contract that affects everyone in the city, then it’s time to do more than agree.
It’s time to ensure it. That’s just common sense.