Klein's Bargaining Ploy

If it's true that those who have been divorced five or six times are the biggest believers in marriage, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein must be the most ardent advocate of the collective-bargaining process. As often as it gives him reason for regret, he just doesn't seem to get enough of it.

Professional negotiators often say that they don't like negotiating in the media. For amateurs like Mr. Klein, the media is the favorite venue for tinkering with contracts. More than once, he has done it just as a contract deal was about to be reached, hoping for last-second changes; he has also sought to do it in the midst of a contract's term.

The latest example came with the release of a report last week by the New Teacher Project concerning the Absent Teacher Reserve which found that too many Teachers who were displaced from jobs when their schools were shuttered were insufficiently industrious about finding new positions. The report recommended that those who do not find jobs within a certain period should stop being paid.

A few days later, the United Federation of Teachers produced figures that took issue with both that finding and the estimated $81-million cost of the ATR program over the past two years, according to the New Teacher Project. According to the UFT, the actual cost was $37.4 million once the savings the ATR provides in covering full course-loads and not requiring per-diem substitute Teachers are factored in, and nearly 30 percent of those in ATR are already teaching full schedules. The union last month brought a lawsuit contending that the Department of Education and Principals have prevented many older Teachers in the pool from getting permanent positions because of a preference for younger, lower-salaried instructors with no experience.

In her initial reaction to the report, before her union produced statistics that punch holes in its key findings, UFT President Randi Weingarten dismissed the New Teacher Project as a "wholly-owned subsidiary of the DOE."

DOE officials insisted otherwise, with a spokeswoman saying, "We did not ask them to write this report, nor did we pay for this report to be written."

On the other hand, the New Teacher Project is under contract with the DOE to help run its Teaching Fellows alternative certification program. Since there is no apparent connection between that program and the Absent Teacher Reserve, we have to wonder why the group would have taken it upon itself to do a comprehensive - if flawed - study of the ATR.

If we seem overly suspicious, consider the fact that the day after the report was released, DOE's chief negotiator, Daniel Weisberg, told the New York Sun that he hoped to negotiate a change with the UFT to allow Teachers to be dropped from the payroll after 12 months in which they had been unable to find a permanent position. The speed of that reaction - conveyed to a newspaper whose coverage Mr. Klein finds consistently favorable to his side in combat with the UFT - suggests that if DOE officials hadn't commissioned the report, they were anxious to run its findings up the flagpole as quickly as possible in the hope that the rest of the media would sound a cavalry charge.

The Chancellor and Mr. Weisberg have one unfortunate obstacle in their quest, however: a UFT contract that doesn't run out until next October, near the end of the Bloomberg administration. Ms. Weingarten isn't about to be stampeded on this issue, as she made clear later in the week in a letter to her members who are in the ATR pledging to reject any change in the "rock-solid job security clause" for those in the program.

The ATR was created as part of a 2005 contract negotiation that gave DOE significantly greater flexibility in Teacher deployment. It eliminated the seniority rights that veteran Teachers had under which if they faced loss of a job because of changes at the schools that employed them, they could "bump" less-senior instructors at other schools, even against the wishes of Principals. The Bloomberg administration regarded this as a significant breakthrough; Ms. Weingarten agreed to it despite much criticism from some of her members because she believed the overall merits of the contract package and the protection given to Teachers under the ATR made it worthwhile.

Now, at a time when the union believes older Teachers in the pool are being discriminated against, DOE decides to add insult to injury - aided by a mysteriously inspired report by a consultant on its payroll.

Principals may in fact be concluding that when budget considerations are balanced against experience, in some cases it makes sense to go with new instructors rather than trying to reorient veteran Teachers to their way of doing things. But the conditions under which the ATR was created were designed to protect those Teachers when such decisions were made.

Now DOE wants to blame those Teachers for not getting new employment faster when their lack of permanent positions may be attributable to circumstances beyond their control. It's not quite as blatant an example of chutzpah as killing your parents and asking for mercy because you're now an orphan, but it's not that far off.

Mr. Klein and his acolytes, on and off payroll, may think this is a splendid excuse for a second bite of the contract apple in mid-term. There is no compelling reason, however, for Ms. Weingarten to come to the bargaining table at this time.
 

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