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NEW YORK, NY November 21, 2003 — City teachers and school employees got to air their views yesterday, in the last of a series of city council hearings about their work rules. Pamela Price Haynes of PS 161 in Harlem said teachers were being demonized.

HAYNES: I feel that you are helping to ring the death knell of unions which have been instrumental in making this city a great city.

With the mayor and the chancellor vowing to reform the labor contracts, WNYC's Beth Fertig reports on the challenges that lie ahead.

The council hearings have been filled with rage and finger-pointing. School officials complained about a lack of control over principals and custodians. And principals sounded equally frustrated by how difficult it can be to fire teachers.

MAN: The principal can stay there 5 years with an incompetent teacher, rated year after year incompetent there's no set rule.

WOMAN: It became a nightmarish existence for close to a year and a half. The union has people whose job it is to know exactly how to dissect a letter. That's all they do.

The dramatic testimony, some of it from anonymous witnesses, gave the hearings a sense of intrigue. Teachers' union president Randi Weingarten lashed out at comparisons to hearings on police corruption.

WEINGARTEN: I went into a school yesterday and people were astounded. People were astounded that anybody would have - relate - the Frank Serpico Knapp commission issue to teachers in the school system right now.

The school contracts are dense, complicated documents. They include rules governing everything from how custodians change the lightbulbs to seniority protections for teachers and principals. But remember, they were agreed to by generations of chancellors and mayors.

ROBINS: I guess cause I've been around so long, for me it was theater.

Harvey Robins is a former deputy chancellor who was also a top official under mayor David Dinkins. Under the old system, contracts were negotiated by three sides: the board of education, the unions, and the mayor - who was often beholden to labor. But now that the mayor is running the schools, it's Bloomberg versus the unions. And as Robins notes, this mayor was elected despite opposition from the teachers. So getting them to join his reform effort requires a different approach.

ROBINS: It seems to me now he needs to use a huge amount of political capital and say that the focus now must be on these entrenched labor rules. They must be changed, he can't do it alone.

Robins says the mayor needs to engage the business community and parents if real change is going to happen.

But some say the mayor already had his chance. Last year's contract settlement gave the teachers a big raise in exchange for working an extra 20 minutes each day. The Bloomberg administration may feel that entitles the city to ask for greater productivity savings this time around. But lawyer Terry McGinnis - who represents the transit workers - disagrees.

MCGINNIS: Having granted the raise from teachers point of view for him to come back and insist on work rule changes that would undercut their wage base or their earnings expectations would be like giving the raise back and that's not likely to occur.

Chancellor Klein wants to pay more money to experienced teachers and principals working in struggling schools. The head of the teachers union has proposed a simplified contract in 100 schools as an experiment. The current contract is hundreds of pages long.

But real change doesn't happen by negotiating in public, says Linda Kaboolian - who teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She's been an independent consultant during education contract negotiations in San Francisco and Boston. She says convoluted work rules result when cities don't want to pay for higher raises or when unions fight for protections. She calls the rules scar tissue.

KABOOLIAN: It represents in many ways a kind of sclerosis of bad relationships. And the way that you deal with peeling off some of that scar tissue is by working and problem solving with each other. It's not about banging each other over the head in public.

With Bloomberg leading the charge in a tight fiscal climate - and a national push toward vouchers and charter schools - some say this may be a moment for change. Especially since unions are feeling more pressure as the old model for public education is chiseled away. For WNYC I'm Beth Fertig.