UFT SEES EXODUS OF OLDER TEACHERS

By Deidre McFadyen

The Chief-Leader, Friday, 28 January 2000, Page 1, 6

The United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten Jan. 20 called for early contract talks with the city to confront “a dilemma of unmatched proportions” posed by the expected retirement of 14,000 Teachers over the next 18 months.

According to a new UFT survey, two-thirds of the 21,000 Teachers who are currently eligible to retire said that they were seriously considering leaving by the summer of 2001. The Board of Education had projected the same number of retirements, but over the course of five years.

`Labor Market Issue'

Calling it an issue of supply and demand, Ms. Weingarten contended that only higher salaries would persuade senior Teachers to delay retirement and attract qualified recruits to replace those leaving. Studies show that city Teachers earn between 20 and 30 percent less than their counterparts in the neighboring suburbs.

“Not since the fiscal crisis and mass layoffs of the 1970s have New York's public schools faced this kind of staff turnover in such a short period," said Ms. Weingarten at a press conference at the union's Manhattan headquarters. “If this happens, the effect on kids and schools will be absolutely dramatic and we will not be able to recover from it.”

Ms. Weingarten said that the sudden loss of the system's most experienced Teachers poses a serious threat to the effort to raise academic standards. She noted that student test scores declined in 1992 and 1997, following early retirement incentives that led to an unusually high number of departures among senior Teachers.

The prospect of mass departures, she said, prompted her to send letters to the Mayor's Office and Interim Chancellor Harold O. Levy requesting early contract negotiations. The current UFT contract expires in November.

A Board of Ed. spokeswoman said that Mr. Levy promptly called Mayor Giuliani to “coordinate a response” to the UFT's request. The day before, on his first day on the job, Mr. Levy said that city Teachers deserved a salary hike of $10,000 to make city schools competitive with the suburbs. The Mayor did not return Mr. Levy's call, the spokeswoman said.

Mr. Giuliani told reporters that he was “ready, willing and able to negotiate” with the union but contended that salary comparisons with the suburbs were not pertinent.

“The same point that we've made with the police, we have to make with the Teachers,” he remarked. “In the suburbs, the school system is funded by taxpayers who directly vote on a budget.”

The city, he said, cannot afford to fund schools at the same level.

Mr. Giuliani contended that the new Teachers contract should include merit pay for Teachers, pegged to the performance of their students, and the elimination of tenure.

Telephone Poll

The UFT conducted telephone surveys last fall of 5,000 Teachers who were age 54 or older. Teachers must be 55 before they can collect any pension benefits. An average of 2,600 Teachers have retired annually over the last decade. This June, however, according to the union survey, 5,000 Teachers plan to retire, while by June 2001, another 8,800 are likely to leave.

New York's impending Teacher shortage is linked to a nationwide demographic shift as the baby boom generation starts to reach retirement age.

Exacerbating this demographic “bulge,” Ms. Weingarten said, older Teachers have held off retiring in order to reap the full benefit of the 1995-2000 contract, in which the full pay hike was given in the last three years. The last 6 percent raise, which took effect in mid-December, brought the top salary to $70,000. Teachers who work for a full year at that level would retire at a higher pension.

Cite Hostile Climate

Ms. Weingarten said that many senior Teachers told the union that they were retiring sooner rather than later because they felt demoralized by Mayor Giuliani's “Teacher-bashing.”

Donald Nobles, a Teacher at Martin Van Buren High School in Queens Village, said that 19 Teachers, including seven science Teachers, were planning to retire in the next two years at this school. In an average year, he said, his school loses two to three Teachers to retirement.

Mr. Nobles said Teachers were growing tired of “being lambasted in the press for things that are out of their control.” The Board of Ed. projects that the city will need to hire as many as 54,000 new Teachers over the next five years to reduce class size and replace those who quit or retire.

Those projections do not include replacing the 10,000 Teachers – 13 percent of the city's total teaching force – who are not fully licensed. Statewide, only 1 percent of Teachers are uncertified.

“If salaries don't go up, we could be looking at 25,000 uncertified Teachers if we can't find certified Teachers to replace the Teachers who are retiring,” said Ms. Weingarten.

Stable Schools Hit

She noted that Queens, Staten Island and other pockets of the system, including District 2 in Manhattan, would be hardest hit. Senior Teachers tend to cluster in the more stable parts of the system since they have first dibs on systemwide vacancies.

Ms. Weingarten contended that Teachers at all stages of their careers deserved a substantial pay hike. She said that new Teachers, who earn a starting salary of $32,000, must be paid more, as well as more senior Teachers, who are cherry-picked by the suburban school districts.

“They can go 20 minutes out of the city and make $10,000 or $15,000 more,” she said. “Our mid-career salaries lag behind even more than the starting salaries.”

Ms. Weingarten noted that city Teacher salaries were among the highest in the region until the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s. Salaries began to fall behind, she said, after the city wrested full control from the Board of Ed. of the school budget and labor negotiations. During the six years of the Giuliani administration, she said, the salary gap with the suburbs has grown even wider.

She has called for an end to pattern bargaining, under which increases for teachers have been closely tied to those given to other city workers, many in titles for which there are no recruiting problems.