If you can't beat charter schools, join 'em.
The nine-year deal hammered out between the teachers union and Mayor de Blasio on Thursday includes a surprise plan to exempt 200 regular city public schools — 10 percent — from union and Department of Education rules.
Those are the same rules from which charter schools are exempt, a policy supporters say allows charters to flourish with longer school days, a focus on teacher merit instead of seniority, and other innovations.
The new flexibility is an admission by both the mayor and the union that the charter-school model works — after years of bashing the popular alternative schools.
Charter-school advocates took the move by the mayor and the United Federation of Teachers as the sincerest form of flattery.
"By emulating some of the best practices to come out of the charter-school movement, the administration continues to evolve on charters and recognize their important place in the city's educational landscape," said Jenny Sedlis, executive director of the advocacy group StudentsFirstNY.
"I would hope that they keep looking to the best charters for ideas of how to improve the entire system."
Asked about the similarities with charters, de Blasio said the main goal of the initiative was to get bureaucracy out of the way of creative approaches to education.
"What this says is, if you get an agreement at the school level . . . the last thing that should happen is to have either chancellor's regulations or UFT work rules stand in the way of innovation that everyone agrees on," he said.
Among other changes, the deal:
n Makes it easier to get rid of pervy teachers by expanding the definition of sexual misconduct to include inappropriate touching and texting.
n Seeks to reward and retain the best teachers by giving them bonus pay of between $5,000 and $20,000, in some cases for taking on additional duties.
n Keeps the 1,200 educators who have been shed from shrinking or closing schools working as roving substitutes — but provides new ammo to cut them loose if they perform poorly.
n Reduces the number of criteria for evaluating teachers from 22 to eight.
The long-awaited agreement, which still needs to be ratified by the rank-and-file, will give UFT members the equivalent of 4 percent retroactive hikes for 2010 and 2011 paid out across a number of years. Teachers are then set to get a $1,000 payment for 2012, followed by 1 percent annual raises from 2013 through 2015.
The pay hikes ramp up toward the end of the contract, to 1.5 percent in 2016, 2.5 percent in 2017 and 3 percent in 2018 — the final year of the deal.
In return, the union agreed to yet-to-be-determined cost-saving measures on health care, such as centralized drug purchases, that administration officials put at $1.3 billion. With the deal set to cost $5.5 billion through Fiscal Year 2018, the net cost would be $4.2 billion when factoring in the health savings, officials said.
That excludes payments for the retroactive raises, and for which administration officials couldn't provide a price tag.
They said the mayor would identify more savings connected to the UFT contract in next week's executive budget release.
"This agreement will be a gateway to great progress in our schools system," said de Blasio, who hailed the deal as "historic."
His negotiating partner, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, drew a sharp contrast between the tone of the current administration and the former one under ex-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
"We're talking about ideas that are based on what makes sense inside a classroom, versus what makes sense in a sound bite in a political atmosphere," Mulgrew said.
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