Mayor de Blasio and the teachers union announced a tentative contract deal on Thursday afternoon that includes billions of dollars in retroactive pay.
The long-awaited deal will give members of the United Federation of Teachers the equivalent of 4 percent retroactive hikes for each of the first two years — 2010 and 2011 — which alone will cost the city more than $3 billion.
Those payments are stretched out over a number of years so as not to break the city’s bank.
Teachers are then set to get no raises for one year, followed by 1 percent annual raises from 2013 through 2015.
The pay hikes ramp up toward the end of the contract, to 1.5 percent in 2016, 2.5 percent in 2017 and 3 percent in 2018 – the final year of the deal.
In return, the union agreed to cost-saving measures on health care, such as centralized drug purchases, that administration officials put at $1 billion – a give-back that de Blasio had insisted on for months.
On the policy side, the deal also tackled a host of thorny issues that had been plaguing the city for years – including what to do with teachers who are cut from shrinking or closing schools.
Those educators will continue to work as roving substitutes, but can be canned if they get negative reviews from two principals or if they fail to make a real effort at landing a permanent gig.
It also makes it easier to get rid of teachers who engage in inappropriate touching or texting with students, by including those behaviors in the definition of sexual misconduct.
At the opposite end, top-tier teachers or those who work at hard-to-staff schools will be eligible for bonuses ranging from $5,000 to $20,000 – sometimes in exchange for additional mentoring duties.
The deal also loosens Department of Education and union regulations at up to 200 schools – akin in many ways to the freedoms bestowed on charter schools.
That move will turn as much as 10 percent of the school system into a petri dish of innovation, with initiatives like longer school days and fewer seniority rules.
And teachers across the board will face a less complex evaluation system, which will have the components they’re judged on reduced from 22 to 8.
The terms still need to be ratified by the union’s members in order for the deal to be final.
If approved, it would be the first major labor deal for the de Blasio administration – and likely set a pattern for the remaining 151 expired contracts.
Few of those contracts have been unresolved for as long as the teachers’ union has been.