Even as our students fail, NYC teachers rewarded with generous contract

They don’t teach this in New York City public schools, but: Good morning, children, the teachers union is adding to the city’s looming fiscal crisis.

The city reached an agreement this week with the union for a new expensive contract.

Everyone knows there are budget deficits, except, it seems, the union and the elected officials behind them. The city’s new contract — which gives teachers raises and bonuses of up to 20% and retroactively to 2022 — is particularly rich when taxpaying companies, from local McDonald’s to major corporations such as Morgan Stanley and Meta are making major layoffs.

At a $37.5 billion total budget, the city Department of Education spending per student is higher than any other system in the world, let alone country.

The public-district schools’ per student spending is $36,000, against the per public-charter-school-student cost of $18,000. Once the smaller-class-size law Gov. Hochul signed is implemented, it will in effect give more compensation to teachers as a group and raise costs per student in district schools.

Meanwhile, study shows that on average, the public charters do better academically than public district schools. Out of the top 25 city public schools in math, 23 are charter schools. City charter schools, mostly with minority and poor students, do not use union teachers.

We clearly need more school choice, more options as families weigh where to send their children to school or whether to leave the school system or city altogether. New York was able to get only 14 “new” charter schools from the zombie licenses recently, what’s just a recycling rather than addition of schools. Again, elected officials, under the pressure of the union loathing competition, would not allow for what families want and need — the charter cap to be raised.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s schools’ report card, shows that the city is not getting its money’s worth: fourth-grade math and reading scores have dropped for more than 10 years (so don’t just blame the pandemic), and performance lags behind the rest of the state and the country.

The compared performance levels and costs both get low grades and hardly seem to justify adding a major fiscal burden on the city.

Did the city even do more than hear and accept the union’s asks? In an unusual move, there were no concessions made by the union.

Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city had gotten additional instruction time from the teachers so that our students benefited. Under Mayor Adams, top teachers can get over $150,000 and be sheltered from removal after just four years of teaching.

What did the students get from this? More virtual learning!

In theory, this new virtual-learning program, which would be the first in a large school system, could be great for students. Instead of getting instruction for easy subjects from mediocre teachers, better students could get higher-level classes virtually with other students in the city if the resources or demand for higher-level courses at a given school are lacking. Our best students and teachers would get and give the most in this program.

Reality, though, tells us this will be hard to produce. Pandemic remote-learning results were shown to be, on average, widely inferior to in-person learning.

In a time of fiscal constraints and terrible test results, we should have gotten a more measured contract that kept in mind students — the ultimate reason why our schools exist.

Wai Wah Chin is the founding president of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance Greater New York and an adjunct fellow of the Manhattan Institute.