Report: Absent Teacher Reserve Draining City of $74M in 2008

At a cost of $74 million to taxpayers, nearly 1,000 teachers will be on the city payroll this school year despite not holding full-time jobs in public schools, a report being released Monday projects.

That total is on top of an estimated $81 million the city spent in 2006 and 2007 combined on teachers who were not hired for full-time positions.

The report is the second attempt by the nonprofit that wrote it, the New Teacher Project, to draw attention to a deadlock between the United Federation of Teachers and the Department of Education on the question of what to do with the teachers creating the excess costs.

The teachers, part of what is known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, are on the payroll as a result of the 2005 teacher contract, which converted the public schools' hiring process for teachers into an open market, meaning both teachers and principals have to consent to every placement in a school. Previously, schools had been forced to hire the most senior teacher looking for a job.

Teachers move into the Absent Teacher Reserve if they are pushed out of their jobs, or "excessed," without being fired, and cannot find a new full-time position in the system.

Under the current contract, both tenured and untenured teachers receive full-time salary and benefits even if they remain in the reserve pool forever.

Some untenured teachers are also earning tenure — a designation that comes with extra job protections and benefits — while sitting in the reserve, sometimes after teaching in a classroom for less than a year.

As of last September, 30 teachers had become eligible for tenure while serving in the reserve, and 51 more in the reserve could become eligible for tenure this year, according to the report.

Some older teachers complain about being put in the reserve, saying the reason they cannot find placements is that they have higher salaries and therefore cost more to principals already under a budget crunch. (The department offers an incentive to hire senior teachers in their first year out of the reserve, but the incentive disappears after that.)

Both the teachers union and the Department of Education have said they would like to address the situation.

Hopes were raised that some kind of solution would be reached when the New Teacher Project released its first report in April, offering proposals such as placing a time limit on how long teachers can stay in the reserve and making senior and novice teachers effectively cost the same amount to principals. However, the president of the New Teacher Project, Timothy Daly, said he has no evidence that the union and the Department of Education have held meetings on the subject.

The sticking point may be the idea of a time limit, which would mean that teachers who cannot find positions would lose their salary and benefits.

A spokeswoman for the department, Melody Meyer, said the department supports adding a time limit that is "reasonable" but not "unreasonable," presumably meaning one that is not too long. The department listed a time limit of one year as a reasonable option.

The president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said in a statement responding to the report that she supports evening the financial playing field between senior and junior teachers. She did not offer support for a time limit, and she also criticized the New Teacher Project as a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the Department of Education that is only pushing for novice teachers to be hired.

Mr. Daly acknowledged that his group holds contracts with the Department of Education, but said that the group's duties include not only recruiting new teachers but also advising senior ones.