(NY) City Plans to Offer Buyouts to Idled Teachers
The city is proposing to offer buyouts to a pool of teachers who draw full salaries but have no permanent jobs, abandoning efforts to have them laid off but potentially solving one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s most intractable education issues.
At a speech Thursday morning before the Association for a Better New York, the New York City schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, did not say how much the teachers would be offered but said the buyouts would be “generous.”
The pool, known as the absent teacher reserve, now numbers around 830 and consists largely of teachers whose positions have been lost through budget cuts or school closings but who cannot be laid off under the teachers’ contract because they have done nothing wrong.
Nearly a quarter of the teachers in the pool have been without regular teaching assignments for at least two years, and 44 percent have never formally applied for a new position at another school, according to the Education Department. The teachers’ union has claimed that the stigma of being in the pool has prevented good teachers from being hired by principals, but city officials and some principals have said many of the teachers are mediocre.
full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/18/nyregion/new-york-city-to-offer-buyouts-to-idled-teachers.html
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