UFT's Worthy Proposals

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein entered the lion's den last Saturday when he attended the United Federation of Teachers' annual spring conference. After he endured some boos prior to his brief remarks to the gathering, UFT President Randi Weingarten told her members that he deserved respect for showing up before an audience that figured to be unflattering.

This thaw in what has sometimes been a frigid relationship between the two officials did not mean that Ms. Weingarten tempered her criticism of the school system under Mr. Klein and Mayor Bloomberg. But she also offered constructive ideas about dealing with some of the system's more-intractable problems, and we hope the Chancellor was taking notes.

Even in the days when the city school system was considered a national model, it was sometimes joked that its Teachers were people who started out wanting to save the world but ended up looking for the most-comfortable assignment. Reality has a way of intruding upon idealism: even the Teachers whose dedication drives them to want to teach the students who need help the most often become discouraged or burned out when their job conditions are too onerous.

Ms. Weingarten's proposals in effect ask the Department of Education to acknowledge that working in the toughest schools is a special task by affording special treatment to Teachers there. There is nothing earth-shaking about any of her ideas, and the most costly one - paying those Teachers more - has already been done: for Teachers under former Chancellor Rudy Crew, and for Principals under recent contracts, including one just approved by the Bloomberg administration.

In most cases the problem schools are based in neighborhoods where poverty and crime are relatively high. Having to worry about being robbed or your car being vandalized if you park too far from the school can be reason enough for a Teacher to opt for safer precincts. And so Ms. Weingarten's call for improved parking arrangements, while it seems like a minor matter, could make a major difference.

If anything, her call for discount MetroCards and EZ-Passes is too modest. Police officers are permitted to use mass transit for free because their presence on trains and buses is viewed as a public benefit. Wouldn't the same principle be at work for Teachers in the city's more difficult schools? A bill to give free EZ-Passes to law-enforcement personnel has stalled in Albany because of questions as to how you could determine when they were using the privilege for work, given their rotating work schedules. That shouldn't be a problem with Teachers, who work set schedules on weekdays.

There is no disputing that in the hard-to-staff schools there are likely to be more children in need of individual attention and that teaching figures to be more demanding than in schools where most students are high-achievers. Given those realities, it makes sense to reduce class size or allow Teachers to have one fewer class, as Ms. Weingarten proposed.

Allowing groups of Teachers to transfer as a team into those schools also is a sound idea, notwithstanding any worries that might exist about cliques developing. Going from a high-achieving school to a struggling one is a daunting task; it would be less so if Teachers did so with colleagues whom they trust and can lean on for feedback.

Many of the best Teachers in the system are innovators who deviate from the standard curricula; the chance to get paid extra and have the pride of seeing their original work improve an entire school would be powerful twin incentives for leaving an ideal setup for a riskier but potentially more-rewarding one.

In essence, Ms. Weingarten was calling on Mr. Klein and Mayor Bloomberg to apply a basic capitalist principle: if you want somebody good to try something different and difficult, make it worth their while.

Mr. Bloomberg has long spoken about the value of a first-class educational system to the city's long-term future. He would do well to spend more to persuade good Teachers to leave their comfort zones because they believe the transition has been eased so that they can gain greater psychic satisfaction in less-likely surroundings.