New UFT Contract: Money and Evaluation

Unless you are living under a rock in the education world by now you know that the UFT has successfully negotiated a new contract for its 115,000 members and a lot of the details have come out. There are obviously still more questions and local organizations are beginning to stake their claim on what is "good" and "bad" in the contract, but it is a win for the teachers that there even has been a new contract as the last one was from 2009. 

One of the most important points is how salaries have not been raised since that time. One of the best breakdowns to help understand it comes from Chaz's School Daze blog:

While the salary schedule gets bump over the course of the upcoming years, the retroactive raises (i.e. lump sum payments of owed money) will not come in its majority until 2018-2020. For people like me who just joined the system, this is not the worst thing in the world. However, for those who have been teaching for years and could be owed $10,000+, having to wait to receive it for 4-6 years is pretty annoying.



Teacher evaluation is another sticky issue brought up in the new contract. According to the Union's proposed contract site:

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The union won major changes, including a focus on eight instead of 22 Danielson components and a better system for rating teachers in non-tested subjects

According to this ICE-UFT blog post from June 2013, however, it is also considered better to have all 22 categories considered.

1. The complete Danielson rubric – Commissioner King ruled, following the UFT’s proposal, that principals must take into consideration all 22 components of the Danielson Framework for Teaching when rating a teacher. The DOE had wanted to cherry-pick only a small fraction – the most difficult ones. That means everything that you do for your students counts towards your rating, including artifacts of student learning and portfolios, planning and preparation, classroom environment and parent engagement strategies.

Which am I to believe? That UFT President Mulgrew wants more or fewer categories to have for our evaluation? It seems disingenuous to rally behind both possibilities.

I will likely share more of my thoughts concerning the contract but I wanted to get the first nuts and bolts out there.