To: Mayor Bill de Blasio and President Michael Mulgrew From: Educators 4 Excellence-New York Teacher Policy Team

on the Teachers Contract Date: May 1, 2014 Subject: Our Contract We are a diverse group of 15 New York City public school teachers from a variety of grades, boroughs, subjects, and backgrounds. As classroom teachers, we felt disconnected from our own contract negotiations. So, we decided to explore and articulate an overarching vision of what educators and communities might expect in a contract. We want a contract that will transform our schools, benefit our students, and elevate our profession. We envision a contract that would be guided by the following principles and shared interests. Broadly speaking, our contract would: Be student-centered to ensure a positive impact on students learning and development. Recognize teachers as professionals in recruitment, retention, compensation, and career development. Allow teachers and schools the flexibility to be innovative and creative in the use of time, resources, and instruction to ensure that they can be highly effective. Be written in a clear, concise manner so that all stakeholders can use it as a resource. Building on a foundation of these principles, we met regularly over the course of two months to learn about the existing teachers contract, study relevant research, and hear from experts in the field. Despite unanswered attempts to engage union leadership in a discussion and nascent conversations with leadership at the New York City Department of Education, we write to share the following recommendations for a re-imagined New York City teachers contract that: 1. Uses interest-based bargaining, as opposed to adversarial bargaining, to move beyond the traditional zero-sum game and results in the best contract for students and teachers. There is empirical evidence that when the union and management work together, students win. 2. Prioritizes brevity and clarity where doing so does not sacrifice meaning or precision. The contract as currently written is 140 pages of dense legalese. Instead, it should serve as an accessible resource for educators, parents, and administrators. 3. Provides greater flexibility for principals and teachers by improving and expanding the School Based Options (SBO), which allows for modifications of the contract for specific schools. Specifically, doing away with the UFTs near-unanimous standard for SBO-approval; allowing principals to introduce SBOs; extending the SBO term to three years; and publishing a list of SBOs so schools can share best practices. 4. Limits time in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) to two hiring seasons and helps ATR teachers find a permanent position to ensure a quality education for all students, create a fair system for educators, maintain autonomy for schools, and improve financial sustainability to the district and taxpayers.

5. Makes tenure a meaningful professional milestone, granted to teachers who have a track record of success under the current multiple-measure evaluation system. 6. Creates a fair and expeditious due process system similar to the proposal recently endorsed by the American Federation of Teachers. This would ensure that accused teachers are treated justly, while at the same time guaranteeing that processes do not drag on indefinitely. 7. Reduces class size where research shows it improves student achievement. However, effective teachers - with the agreement of their principals - should have an opportunity to take on additional students above the class size cap for additional compensation. 8. Supports innovation through pilot programs that are subsequently evaluated for their effectiveness to learn what sorts of changes work and which do not. 9. Restructures compensation to recruit and retain excellent teachers for all city schools by increasing starting salaries, and rewarding teachers in high-needs schools and hardto-staff subjects. These targeted pay increases should compliment a multi-step career ladder and performance pay system that rewards effective educators who take on additional responsibility. 10. Pays out retroactive compensation, if possible, but not at the expense of other key developments. Back-pay is important because it shows that the city values teachers, but it does not have the same impact for students as other potential compensation adjustments, such as performance pay or bonuses for teachers in hard-to-staff schools. 11. Studies changes to the pension system, which is currently heavily back-loaded in structure and may not adequately recruit or retain a new generation of educators. Instead, smooth-accrual pension wealth systems in which teachers accumulate the same additional pension compensation for every year of service should be considered. This teachers contract will determine the future of teaching and learning in New York City for years to come. Such important decisions, affecting more than a million students and thousands of teachers, should be made through a process that solicits and considers the input of all stakeholders, particularly, in our view, teachers. There is no such formal process in place, and thats why we came together. We are teachers and we believe that our union and our management should hear our voice. The above recommendations are the result of fifteen classroom teachers asking the simple question: how can we imagine a contract that will help us best teach our students?