School reform at issue

School may be close to wrapping up for the summer, and wouldn’t it be just swell if the Boston Teachers Union used the coming days to get serious about real reform in the public schools.

The BTU insisted last month that contract negotiations had reached an impasse after 16 months and filed for mediation with the state Department of Labor Relations. The real sticking point in those talks was how much longer the city needs to keep paying for tenured teachers who are no longer wanted in the classroom.

Now that school principals and headmasters have greater leeway to select their faculties — from inside or outside the system — some tenured teachers find themselves on the outside looking in — but still collecting a salary and benefits.

This week the Boston Municipal Research Bureau added its voice to those urging the city to remain firm on the need to reduce the number of those excess teachers still on the payroll and, by inference, for the BTU to see this is a battle they can’t win.

“The genie is out of the bottle for this reform and cannot be put back,” their report noted. “The cost must be managed and the new contract should facilitate reducing tenured teachers not selected by a school after a year.”

The state director of Democrats for Education Reform in a recent op-ed on these pages was even more direct, calling them “teachers without students” and noting that the BTU is holding up a $100 million contract for all of its members while it fights for the unneeded jobs of 2 percent of its members.

Meanwhile the Research Bureau confirmed in its report that the cost of those excess teachers for fiscal 2017 was $7.6 million, bringing the three-year cost to $29 million.

Some, of course, have retired or worked out voluntary severance agreements, but others remain in this limbo “year after year.”

The taxpayers have far better uses for their money, and the BTU does all of its members a grave disservice by attempting to protect the few no longer needed by the system.