Teachers union contract goals offer insight into upcoming talks

A list of bargaining goals distributed to union delegates at a meeting on Wednesday night offers the first real glimpse of what the UFT hopes to gain from its upcoming contact talks.

Though delegates and chapter leaders were told not give the document to the press, one kind teacher sent me the list today, and it’s worth a read. As reported in the Daily News, the first goal on the agenda is a “substantial salary increase in each year of the agreement,” though it does not say how much. Another item of note is a proposed teacher apprenticeship program, which may be the result of the agreement the city and UFT reached concerning parent-paid teaching assistants.

The document also calls for an end to the way schools currently receive their funding.

The Board will modify its funding methodology so that individual schools are allocated funds for the actual and entire cost of every employee’s salary, so that principals are motivated to select the most appropriate employee instead of the least experienced one.

As far as I can tell, the six-page document makes no mention of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, which contains teachers who’ve been laid off from schools that closed, or could no longer afford their salaries because of budget cuts.