There are 600 teachers in the New York City school system that don’t have permanent teaching positions, but are still collecting full salaries and benefits. The school system is shelling out $81 million over two years to these reserve pool teachers. These teachers have had their positions eliminated, due to personnel shifts, and until they find new employment, they have to be available to substitute.
A new report suggests that many of these teachers didn’t even apply for jobs this year and may be unemployable for a whole range of reasons.
Randi Weingarten of the UFT defends this practice.
5% of the workers at my husband’s company will be let go this year. Downsizing is a bitch, but it’s the real world.
Apt. 11d 
Suddenly, I don’t feel quite so bad about Pittsburgh. My views on teachers’ unions ….
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“down-sizing is a bitch but that’s real life.”
True, but so is lack of health insurance, no maternity leave, and intolerance of part-time work.
It’s a perk (like weird days off) that teacher’s have negotiated in liu of pay. Why do the good teachers who actually do their jobs agree? I’m guessing ’cause pay isn’t on the table, and because folks value security tremondously.
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NYC is such a huge place that I don’t know that 600 spare teachers is as horrific a waste as it would be elsewhere.
Is this the same thing as the famous NYC “rubber rooms”? In the NYT article I turned up, they said that out of a teacher population of 80,000, at any given time 760 would be doing time in a rubber room.
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This seems reasonable to me; in one of the schools my wife taught at, there was a permanent substitute (if any one teacher was out, she covered their classes), and that seemed to work very well.
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This strikes me as just anti-union propoganda, and you are playing into it.
1. First, is “600” a big number, or is it less than 1% of the teachers? Having a small, steady stable of well-qualified subs doesn’t strike me as a bad thing.
2. You write “many of these teachers didn’t even apply for jobs this year,” but that’s not what the article says. The article says “nearly half the reserve teachers had not applied for any vacancies through the city’s new online job posting system.” So, less than 300 did not use one method of looking for a job. How many of those were hired by the school they were assigned to, or were serving as a long-term sub for a teacher who was on maternity leave and wouldn’t be returning next year?
3. The article also says, “More than 90 percent of the roughly 2,700 teachers whose positions were cut in 2006 found jobs at other schools within several months.” So, less than 270 (probably the same as the less than 300 above) did not quickly find jobs.
A better headline for the article might be, “System Requires Immediate, Drastic Change Because As Many As 0.5% (And Possibly Significantly Fewer) May Be Trying To Game It.”
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I have to say, I’m more in Laura’s camp on this one. I’m not saying it’s coming from a good place! I’m just saying that *I* am subject to layoff when times are bad or when I don’t produce. *I* have to work 50 weeks a year. And *I* have also noticed that my kids’ teachers can’t necessarily spell properly.
My sister is a teacher. She gleefully tells me all about getting two days off for the teachers’ conference, and using it to go shopping. She agonizes over the phone about how to use her 3 summer months. She passionately defends the teachers’ union practice of barring firing of incompetent teachers as a way to “foster diversity of thought in the classroom”. (!!! I think she has confused ‘diversity of thought’ with ‘diversity of competence’, but that’s another story.) And my sister is a great teacher! I don’t even want to think about what’s coming out of the mouths of the less-competent.
Yes, she gets crappy pay. Yes, her job is tremendously pressured and I would not want to do it. On the other hand, let me tell you, I don’t exactly see people lining up to do software project management and quality control. People in my office totally get fired if their projects go awry. It’s not that I love this process, but please people — I don’t want to work at the postal service. If you can’t shed incompetent workers, you’re heading down that path.
So in my mind, the crappy pay and the summer off are an even trade. From there, I start arguing.
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Jen, you see it as crappy pay; teachers see it as 9 months of pay. I’m just sayin’. Until year-round schooling happens, it’s a job where people are needed only 9 months of the year.
Re unions: What unions do is protect workers through collective action. One employee vs. one well-heeled employer is an unfair match; many employees vs. one well-heeled employer is more of a fair fight. Unions in other fields also protect incompetent workers, but it’s the price we pay for protecting the rights of workers. Like the guy in Florida who was fired because he did a magic trick in the classroom. He was a sub and had no union protection, but just imagine your sister being fired for a reason like that. You’d be damned happy she had a union then.
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There is a simple word for what Laura describes: Feather-bedding.
In Pittsburgh, we have a Democratic machine and the teachers are the crucial constituency for this machine now that the mills are gone and the state basically stopped the city from giving raises to the city employees.
Locally, public school teachers here make a good salary. The average is over $60k without coaching or any summer work. That may not seem like much, but it is well above median household income in the area and enough to buy a house well-above the median house price. Plus, you can’t get fired. Plus, teachers only pay a piddling sum for their health insurance and retirement while these cost my thousands. Basically, it is a good enough deal that you have to know somebody to get a job teaching.
And, teachers aren’t required to live in the district (which has higher taxes and worse schools than the surrounding communities where they actually live and educate their kids). Enrollment is down by 10,000 kids but the number of positions has barely dropped by 100. Enrollment is dropping much faster than the population because quality is dropping.
I’m sure most of them are smart and dedicated, but that doesn’t change the fact that as an organized body, the teachers are producing profoundly negative effects in my area. Eventually, the state will step-in and force change, but they won’t do that until things get worse and more people have fled the city or put their kids in private schools.
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Wow. Amy and Ragtime are totally on the money. According to the Broad Foundation, there are over 80,000 teachers in the NYC system. Those 600 teachers are less than .75% of all teachers. And the $40.5 million per year (it says $81 million over two years) spent to pay them is about .2% of the school system’s budget of $17 billion.
You got suckered, Laura. Six hundred teachers being paid $81 million sounds like a lot…until you do the math.
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Wow, I’m to the right of Amy P on this one. What a strange position for me. I’m a little light headed.
OK, I’m going to be really politically incorrect and harsh, but let’s just say it. Fire ’em. If they aren’t working, they shouldn’t get paid. It may really be that their positions were eliminated through no fault of their own and they are really trying to find a job. It’s sad. But tough. The fact that these teacher only represent less than 1% of total teachers doesn’t concern me at all. I don’t think that they should employ one person who does no work. It’s a drag on morale and undermines the political culture of teaching. It’s bad politics. And it’s just not fair. That $81 m may be chump change in the whole scheme of things, but it still should be used for programs that benefit kids. Every penny should go to programs that benefit kids.
This report has been highly publicized by local media around NYC. People are ticked off about it. I think it doesn’t do teachers any good to have their union supporting these unemployable teachers. Public sentiment around here is very hostile to these reserve pool teachers, since they are enjoying protections that the rest of the population no longer has.
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WendyW, I am actually a fairly pro-union person. As a Chicagoan I’m an outlier in this way; many folks in Chicago believe unions will be the end of our economy. (And frankly, one trip to the convention center will only reinforce that opinion.) I can’t help but note what life was like in this country before unions, before River Rouge. Anyone who expects to work just 40 hours a week owes much of their happiness to unions.
However — however — unions do a disservice to their constituency and endanger their own power base when they protect blindly. A union is right when they weigh in to help someone who did a magic trick in their classroom. But I am not fooled into thinking the union is therefore justified in any protection of any teacher. If a teacher is incompetent, the union is wrong to protect them. The union is wrong to protect those who were laid off, if that protection pulls significant funds away from classrooms.
The teachers’ union currently helps my sister in some ways, and harms her in others. They handle collective bargaining for when negotiating for health insurance. (Good.) But they also help to stymie a culture of performance, which means she is often surrounded by unqualified colleagues, and that she gets no respect from parents or society in general. (Bad.)
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And I’m to the left of everybody, on a question relating to public schools. This is weird.
My thinking is this: I’d say the “out rate” (proportion of teaching days that a substitute is needed) for teachers is more than 1%. So if <1% of teachers have no permanent assignment, but are the first-line substitutes, they aren't being paid for no work; they are being paid as teachers, for teaching. And having seen one system that had a permanent substitute, permanent substitutes have some significant advantages.
Now: if the teachers are unemployable, or incompetent, that's a problem. Deal with that problem; it's only vaguely related to a system where laid-off teachers are allowed to hold permanent substitute jobs.
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Yeah, I have no problem paying these people for a limited amount of time if they lost their jobs through no fault of their own. Especailly if they are required to substitute. A good sub is very hard to find. I really don’t see how this is difference than a severance package. My husband was laid off last year and recieved his salary for 6 months afterwards. He was not working, but was being paid. I don’t think it’s all that different than with the teachers.
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I agree with SamChevre–the number of teachers in this pool actually seems inadequate for covering all teacher absences. I also agree with his last point, that incompetence is a subject that needs to be dealt with separately. All things being equal, it is good to have a more qualified pool of substitutes. I’d suggest that the unoccupied pool members be sent out to work as teacher’s aides, playground aides, etc., rather than just sitting around. It’s not like there’s not plenty to do–copies to be made, work to be corrected, library books to shelve, field trips to chaperone, and so on. The pay scale would probably be way out of line for the work done, but you could always add motivation to leave the reserve pool by freezing salary increases for pool residents.
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Laura, do you support the abolition of tenure?
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I don’t know about getting rid of tenure altogether. Maybe make it just as hard to get tenure as it is for academics. Maybe it should take 7 years, instead of 3. Maybe there should other kinds of evaluations involved. Maybe tenure should only support out of work teachers for two years, rather than for a lifetime. Let’s reform the system, rather than throw the whole thing out.
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“Maybe it should take 7 years, instead of 3.”
5 is good enough, but 3 is ridiculously short.
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Sorry, I was unclear — I meant do you support the abolition of tenure for academics? Should deadwood researchers and ineffective teachers “aren’t working, and shouldn’t get paid” face firing?
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Yeah. They should. I have no problem with that. The point of tenure is to protect diversity of thought, not deadwood.
However, there really isn’t much deadwood in academia. It’s so hard to get tenure that only the most dedicated, smart, crazy people get it. There’s 8 years of grad school, a post doc, then eight years of pre-tenure. During that pre-tenure period, you are observed by your peers, by administrators. You are evaluated by your students. You have to send out articles and get them approved in peer reviewed journals.
I’m not sure that tenure is necessary in higher ed, but that’s another story.
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“You are evaluated by your students. You have to send out articles and get them approved in peer reviewed journals.”
…you get well known and start writing and publishing the same article over and over again, but you keep getting published because you are already a name, and your salary is much bigger than it was back when you were actually making a difference in your field.
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…and you complain about how for some reason, graduate students aren’t interested in taking your classes or working with you.
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Overgeneralizing a bit here, we have something of a debate on two positions:
1. I (or people I know) have a bad deal; other people (teachers in this case) should have a bad deal, too.
2. Teachers have a good deal; how can other people get as good a deal?
Am I off base here?
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Doug, another way to characterize position 2 would be: children have a bad deal because the protections the poor performers among their teachers have mean that those poor performers can stay in place for years and suck up wages which could be going to good performers.
There are arguments for tenure, you don’t want the principal of Upper Flatbush to be able to credibly threaten his teachers with firing if they don’t screw him, or come over on Saturday and mow his lawn, or if they are Republicans and the principal is a Dem, or Dems and the principal is a Reep. But it seems to me that you ought to try and keep that kind of thing from happening in some other way than having life employment for folks who are not suited to classroom work.
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“However, there really isn’t much deadwood in academia. It’s so hard to get tenure that only the most dedicated, smart, crazy people get it.”
This is simply not true. Practically every department has an example of deadwood in its ranks. Folks who got tenure before the department got better, folks who’ve just given up as things got tough. Some have been squeezed out of teaching because they are actively abusive to students. And, you can’t force anyone to do creative thinking in the form of research. My guess is that most universities have some percent of deadwood (and wouldn’t expect it to be much different than in teaching). We tolerate it ’cause we think the benefits *we* get from tenure are worth the deadwood we have to deal with (though that balancing act becomes tougher if there’s too much deadwood). I’m guessing most good teachers do it for the same reason (like Jen’s sister). And, the bottom line is that they negotiate for this benefit (in trade for crappy pay).
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Lets not forget the alcoholic who has difficulty showing up for class and periodically needs an adjunct to teach his course for him.
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Bah! Amy’s drunken tenured prof reminds me of a VP I used to work for.
Don’t forget that poor performers are all over the place. Any organization can experience the problems you get when certain people are protected — this is not specific to academia.
Other areas of the economy have found other, less extreme ways of balancing performance culture with employee protections. Most of the time these days it’s thru litigation or threat of litigation. Ironically, I think collective bargaining and unions would be a more efficient way of dealing with these issues, if the unions were better about picking and choosing their fights. They are killing their own golden goose, in my opinion.
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Honestly, bj, I haven’t seen much/any deadwood at any university that I’ve been at, especially among the younger cohort that went through so much to get tenure. I’ve never seen the fabulous teacher/research/colleague immediately stop working once he/she got tenure. It would be such a personality switch that it would have to involve a major mental breakdown. But if there is really deadwood at the university, I think they should be fired. No work, no pay. Or maybe help them to find work that is more suited to their personalities. But if their personality is just lazy, then time to go.
Yeah, Dave, there’s lots of good reasons to keep tenure, but maybe the bar should be a bit higher.
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I’m in an interesting situation because I work at a university where we (gasp) have no tenure. (We do have promotion, though, and a system by which faculty have to achieve certain standards to get promoted.)
Trust me. Getting rid of tenure won’t solve the problem of deadwood profs, who *do* exist.
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