In a close vote, members of the Cleveland Teachers Union have rejected a new three-year contract.
That deal would have overhauled the district’s 3-year-old merit-pay system, under which only teachers who scored satisfactory marks on evaluations got raises. The union’s move sends negotiators back to the bargaining table.
Following the teachers’ vote, the school board rejected the contract as well. District CEO Eric Gordon requested the vote, The Plain Dealer reported, as “a measure of respect for what we heard from members (teachers).”
Among the union members’ objections to the contract, according to the newspaper, were that it didn’t restrict the number of standardized tests administered to students or roll back the district’s test-score-heavy teacher-evaluation system.
