A fight is shaping up between the Bloomberg administration and the City Council over a proposal that would protect teachers who blow the whistle on wrongdoing in city schools.

About a dozen council members last week introduced an amendment to the administrative code that would add Department of Education employees to the roster of personnel protected under the so-called “whistleblower law.”

The current law protects city employees from being demoted, fired, or disciplined in retaliation for reporting corruption, criminal activity, or abuse of authority by another city employee. The amendment would also protect teachers from being retaliated against for making a complaint about a school policy or procedure that presents a risk to the health, safety, or educational welfare of students.

The United Federation of Teachers, which is pushing the amendment, claims the law is needed to protect teachers from what it calls a “retaliation campaign” being waged against them by school supervisors. An elementary school teacher in Staten Island, for example, was allegedly given a “U” – unsatisfactory – rating by a principal after complaining about violations of special education regulations, a union official said.

A spokesman for the mayor called the bill “completely illegal.”

“There are some things the City Council can’t legislate,” the spokesman, Robert Lawson, said. “The City Council can’t pass a treaty with France, it’s against the law. And they cannot pass legislation on work rules with teachers.”

The amendment would violate the collective bargaining agreement between the union and the city, as well as state law that prohibits the council from “legislating pedagogical issues,” Mr. Lawson said.

One of the main sponsors of the bill, Council Member Christine Quinn, said the council was seeking to protect teachers, not mandate how they educate children.

“The intention of the bill is very simple and I think it is something any mayor would support,” Ms. Quinn said. “It’s to make sure that a teacher has crystal clear protection, so if he or she is making a complaint about something that is not in the best interest of a child that they do not have to fear being punished for that.”

The union hashed out a new contract with the city last month after a two and a half year stalemate. The agreement called for a 15% pay raise for teachers in exchange for several work reforms, including diminished rights to challenge negative letters placed in their files. The agreement did not provide the specific protection for teachers outlined in the proposed legislation.

Last Friday, the union circulated a letter to the city’s more than 80,000 teachers encouraging them to testify at a City Council hearing on the bill tentatively scheduled for mid-December.

The letter said the legislation would especially protect UFT “activists” from being harassed for speaking out about “violations of law, regulations, and the UFT contract.”

The vice president of special education for the UFT, Carmen Alvarez, is heading up the union’s “whistleblower initiative.”

She said 54% of teachers have been in the system for less than five years and they “feel very intimidated because they have administrators saying that if you tell on me you’re not going to have a job.”

In recent weeks, the UFT president, Randi Weingarten, also launched a new e-mail address that teachers can use to log complaints: iamharrassed@uft.org.