As I go around the country talking to business groups and legislative leaders, I find increasing recognition that big cities are going to have to attract the best teachers possible in order to survive. It's that simple. If city kids, victimized by poverty and its resulting social ills, don't make it in the public schools, urban America is finished.
The problem is that, for some years now, the teaching profession has been having a hard time attracting the best and the brightest among college graduates. In 1989, only 8.2 percent of all entering college freshmen were interested in a teaching career. There are just too many other higher paying job possibilities.
In circumstances like these, a city school system must take what it can get. A few years ago, some teacher candidates in Baltimore who couldn't pass a simple writing test were given jobs when it became obvious that the city was about to start its school year with a severe teacher shortage. And Baltimore is not the only example of this kind.
Slowly, big cities are beginning to recognize how closely their survival is tied to their public school system, and they are making an effort to deal with the problem by attracting quality teachers. Chicago, which has had nine school strikes in the past 18 years, is now in a 3-year contract with 7 percent raises each year. Los Angeles, which had a nine-day strike 2 years ago, is in its third year of a contract settlement providing 8 percent increases each year.
But in New York City, a modest, single-year 5.5 percent salary increase just negotiated by the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) is under attack by influential business leaders and some editorial boards as "too costly" during a fiscal crisis.
New York City, with its nearly one million students, is the nation's largest, and perhaps most troubled, school system. Two-thirds of its children are poor and in dire need of the best educational support available. New York City also typifies the problems large city school systems encounter in holding on to excellent teachers.
Twenty-five percent of the city's new teachers are leaving in their first year on the job; 41. 7 percent leave in their first five years. Within the next five to six years, nearly one half of the city's teaching force -- some 30,000 teachers -- will be eligible to retire. They are New York's most experienced educators.
Suburban communities offering much higher salaries are now being flooded with applicants from the New York City school system. Right next door, for example, is the city of Yonkers, which, like New York City, has severe fiscal problems. But recognizing that it must save its school system in order to solve its urban problems, Yonkers recently settled on a five-year contract offering teachers a 9 percent increase in each of the last four years. Now, New York City teachers are applying up there, too.
The pressure to abrogate New York City's one-year, 5.5 percent teacher pay increase is not coming from management or from the mayor. School Chancellor Joseph Fernandez, recognizing that he must offer teachers a professional salary in order to keep those he has and attract new people, has been pushing for the increase. And Mayor David Dinkins, who knows there is no future for the city without a good school system, has been taking a lot of heat for negotiating the settlement.
The heat is coming essentially from the city's big business interests led by Felix Rohatyn, chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation, a fiscal watchdog group. He and other business leaders and the editorial writers they influence oppose the 5.5 percent increase, claiming it will break the city. This is not true; the contract took the fiscal crisis into account - that's why the city accepted it in the first place. And it's equally specious to claim that giving the teachers the 5.5 percent increase would mean giving it to every other union. Only teachers are leaving in droves to find better-paying jobs.
I was president of the UFT in 1975-76 during an earlier fiscal crisis in New York City, and I remember how the school system was decimated in the name of short-term financial savings. More than 12,000 teachers were laid off; class size shot up past 40; guidance counselors were virtually eliminated; art, music and other programs vital to a child's development were wiped out.
Today, New York City is paying for having nearly destroyed its school system in the 1970s. Children who were in elementary school back then are now in their late teens. According to a story on page one of the New York Times last April, the jobless rate of the city's 16-to 19-year-olds is double that of their peers nationwide. Some 90 percent of the city's prisoners are school dropouts - many products of a school system crippled by the loss of thousands of teachers.
Given the opportunity to do so, Rohatyn would have the city make the same mistakes it did during that fiscal crisis. Chicago, Los Angeles and other cities have obviously learned a great lesson from those days. Isn't it ironic that New York could make the same mistake twice?