Bonuses of Up to $8,000 to Teach in Struggling New York Schools

NEW YORK — At 180 public schools in New York City, many in the Bronx, hiring and keeping teachers is a constant struggle. These are schools that are in some of the poorest neighborhoods and are often a long trek from the nearest subway stop.

On Thursday, the city reached an agreement with the powerful teachers’ union on an initiative that Mayor Bill de Blasio called a “very powerful pointed tool” to address this problem.

Under the agreement, the de Blasio administration will give bonuses of $5,000 to $8,000 to teachers who work in schools that many teachers avoid.

The United Federation of Teachers signed a $2.1 billion contract with the city seeming to acknowledge that union rules about how teachers can be paid, hired and fired have stymied progress in the city’s struggling schools.

The agreement, settled as part of a contract renewal with the union, signals a new phase in both the city and the union’s strategy for poorly performing schools. De Blasio’s current program, known as Renewal, has produced mixed results at best since 2014.

The mayor described the new initiative, known as the Bronx Plan, as a complement to Renewal, not a replacement for it.

At a news conference Thursday, de Blasio said the bonuses “address something that has nagged this school system for decades, and a lot of other school systems, and to say once and for all let’s see if we can break through and get teachers to stay in some of the most challenging environments.”

The question now is whether the three-year plan will lead to lasting change in the schools that are in serious need of it. And it remains unclear whether those schools will be able to attract the city’s best teachers, as the bonuses aren’t tied to success in the classroom and apply only to teachers who are interested in working where others won’t.

A bulk of the contract includes raises for all teachers of 2 to 3 percent per year for the next three years.

De Blasio and Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, were adamant Thursday that the bonuses are not a version of merit pay, a policy linking bonuses with teacher performance that the union has long fought to avoid.

There are still limits to how much the city can control staffing in struggling schools.

The agreement between the union and the city does not include any new ways to shrink the Absent Teachers Reserve, a group of hundreds of school staff members who have been let go from permanent positions but remain on the city’s payroll.

A budget watchdog group recently estimated that the pool cost the city $136 million annually, and critics say many of the pool’s teachers should not be in a classroom at all. In a signal of how wary schools are of absorbing those teachers, Renewal schools are exempt from having to hire teachers from the pool.

And the schools that will be selected to participate in the Bronx Plan do not have to join it, union officials said, because a school’s principal and a teachers’ union chapter leader must approve. The city did not provide details Thursday about which schools will participate.

The new contract includes a plan to screen teachers for various personality traits and stamina to teach in the city’s public schools before they start work. But few details were given because the test is still being developed.

Of the contract and the mayor’s support, Mulgrew said: “Here in the largest school system, the most challenging school system in the United States, we have some of the greatest challenges. Most politicians would never go near trying to tackle this.”