Perhaps the most pressing concern for the city and the union is the expanding pool of teachers without permanent positions, officially called the absent teacher reserve.
Sustaining high standards will surely be easier if the capital has the largest possible pool of teachers to draw from, rather than a dispersed and shrinking one.
As a result, the pool of teachers who might have considered administrative positions after 5 or 10 years' experience is not there.
Ms. Anderson has said that Newark spends $8.5 million a year to maintain about 100 teachers in an "excess teacher pool" of teachers who are deemed not qualified to teach but have been hard to fire.
The city is proposing to offer buyouts to a pool of teachers who draw full salaries but have no permanent jobs, abandoning efforts to have them laid off but potentially solving one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's most intractable education issues.
With this system, a large pool of teachers are asked to identify students they believe are proficient in a given subject; those students are then tested, and their grades stand as the proficiency range.
He said: "The rise in pupil numbers, which is easy to predict from birthrates, is putting huge pressure on school places and an increasing demand on the shrinking pool of teachers.
There are also reports of teachers moving to jobs in the police and military, which are seen as more secure, further depleting a small pool of teachers in a country where there is only one trained teacher for every 124 children in school.
Referees, drawn from an impressive pool of teachers and researchers across many disciplines, exemplified the dignity that is rightly accorded to the ideal of peer review as a safeguard against bias and as a mechanism of the kind of cooperation and community input that is so important to the success of the scientific method.
He's also brought his recruitment message to communities of color, such as a January visit to Morehouse College with Spike Lee, to help diversify the pool of teachers.
