The NY Daily News has the latest on the finger-pointing in the $81 million teacher reserve mess in Gotham. For those of you not keeping score, a firestorm erupted recently after The New Teacher Project released a report showing that the city is paying $81 million for teachers who lose their positions in schools for various reasons but are not selected for other jobs by principals.
The idea is that principals, tasked with building successful school cultures, shouldn't be required to take any teacher who isn't a good fit with the school. Under previous contractural arrangements, teachers leaving one school could "bump" a less-senior teacher out of another school.
So to make that happen, we're supposed to pay the unwanted teachers who sit in a reserve pool their full salaries until they either find work in a city school, quit their job to work elsewhere, or retire, even if we're talking about years and years of paychecks for not teaching.
The teachers union disputes some of the numbers that are being thrown around, but the fact that they are blaming the city and the city is blaming the union suggests that both sides at least agree that this is a mess. That's a good thing, at least if your main concern is not who wins or loses but how we solve this problem.
So look at the extremes:
— The cash-strapped city continues to pay non-teaching teachers forever.
— We go back to the old way where we allow older teachers to bump the living crap out of younger teachers, disrupting staffing at most schools in the city.
It would seem there is enough room for a compromise to drive a truck through, no? Surely there is some magic number of months to pay unwanted teachers that meets some sort of fairness test, even by public education's bizarre standards of fairness for big people. Surely there is some way to keep unwanted teachers in the pipeline so they could get tapped sometime in the future if they are needed/wanted. And surely there is a way to do this that doesn't take so much cash out of our kids' classrooms right now.
This seems to be a question of leadership. Who will emerge as the real leader here, Mayor Bloomberg or Randi Weingarten?