CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A hard-fought effort to rewrite the Cleveland teachers contract places the district in the thick of a nationwide challenge to entrenched unions and their rights.

School systems across the country are pressing for more flexibility in managing buildings and assigning teachers. Unions, on their heels and facing layoffs in a bleak economy, have given ground in stunning ways.

But in Cleveland, with the teachers' existing contract set to expire June 30, negotiations have essentially broken down.

The stalemate may jeopardize an "academic transformation plan" that Chief Executive Officer Eugene Sanders is to launch this fall. Nearly 550 teacher layoffs, which could be avoided if the union agrees to salary concessions, would swell classes to as many as 45 students and make the plan difficult to execute, Sanders has acknowledged.

The national agenda is simple: Evaluate teachers based on test scores, swiftly fire those who can't cut it, fill positions on merit, not seniority, and put charter-school operators in control of buildings. Encouragement and financial incentives come from an unlikely source: a Democratic president who won office with backing from teachers unions.

The reforms remain too new to have built much of a track record. But here are some examples:

*In Philadelphia, a new contract allows principals to choose their teachers from a pool of applicants, rather than go by seniority. Operators brought in to turn around failing schools will pick their teachers with input from the community.

*Denver began piloting a pay-for-performance system in 1999 and expanded it to the rest of the district in 2005. Teachers can receive raises and bonuses for getting good evaluations, meeting student-achievement goals and working in hard-to-staff schools or subjects.

*A tentative contract would allow Washington, D.C., school leaders to decide which teachers are laid off when buildings are shut down for financial reasons or declining enrollment. (In return, teacher pay would rise by more than 20 percent by 2012.)

Sanders wants to gut seniority rights, clean house at failing schools, adopt data-driven evaluation, institute longer work days and years and welcome charters to be partners. He also has asked for pay cuts and other economic concessions.

Cleveland Teachers Union leaders say they have agreed to and even initiated progressive reforms in the past. They insist they are willing to go further but believe Sanders doesn't want to bargain with those who work most closely with students.

"We get absolutely no respect from this district for teachers," union President David Quolke said. "When you don't respect teachers, you don't respect children."

What a difference three years make.

When the present agreement was signed in 2007, Sanders toasted it as a landmark in collective bargaining, remarkable for shared emphasis on reducing class size and closing the achievement gap in the earliest grades. Now he sneers at what he calls incremental improvement, plodding labor-management committees and pointless choruses of "Kumbaya."

"As long as nearly half of our graduates leave our schools without diplomas in their hands, systemic change is no longer a negotiable item in the Cleveland Metropolitan School District -- it is a moral imperative," Sanders said.

Cleveland contract restrictive, critics say

The existing contract book is only the width of a folded road map, but it's an inch thick, and, critics say, weighted down with impediments to education. Its layers, not atypical for a large urban system, give teachers a voice in matters as piddling as the location of the vending machines they use.

Cleveland teachers enjoy one of the shortest workdays among large U.S. school districts -- 6 hours and 40 minutes, including 40 minutes for lunch and at least an hour of planning or "unassigned" time -- according to the National Council on Teacher Quality. The union also has negotiated one of the more generous helpings of sick and personal days.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which sponsors charter schools in Ohio, rated the Cleveland union's 2000-03 contract as the second-most restrictive among those in the nation's 50 largest school districts.

The institute has not rated the current agreement, but Cleveland's remains stifling, said Terry Ryan, a Dayton-based Fordham official who analyzed the document for The Plain Dealer. He predicts the provisions will paralyze the transformation plan.

"Trying to reform education under the constraints of the district's current collective bargaining agreement is akin to trying to do health-care reform without upsetting doctors, patients or the insurance companies," Ryan said in an e-mail. "The space for real change is marginal."

The transformation plan, approved by the school board in March, provides for customized school-by-school reform, a broader choice of school options for families and a high level of accountability for all employees.

Sanders, who needs agreement from the union on many of his reform strategies, listed seniority and evaluations as top contract issues in a letter he sent to school benefactors on May 11. He said the district, because of its tight budget, also needs a "rational" increase in the size of classes for preschool through third grade. The present agreement caps classes at 20.

Another issue is each teacher's right to unilaterally remove persistently disruptive students.

Teachers can remove as many as three students at a time, banishing them for up to five daily periods or two full days. Sanders' letter says evicting students without "intervention" is "simply wrong and consigns a lot of students to academic failure."

"This kind of thinking, which puts the interest of the adult above the interest of the child, too often results in a child's slide toward dropping out, and this has to change," he wrote.

Union says contract deters abuses

Cleveland Teachers Union leaders say the contract guards against abuses by management and that many, if not most, teachers go far above and beyond its requirements. For example, union officials say teachers are in schools well before and after the official workday, though the contract requires only that they be there 10 minutes longer than their students.

Michelle Rzucidlo-Rupright, a teacher at Anton Grdina Elementary School, said she recently traveled at night to a homeless shelter to speak with a mother about her son's special-education plan. And she and other teachers say they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars of their own money each year on school supplies and necessities like coats and shoes for needy students.

Teachers contacted by e-mail said they are all for getting rid of incompetent colleagues, but they defended seniority and extolled the benefits of experience. One teacher said she was reluctant to give subjective-minded principals too much power over her evaluation or pay.

"There are plenty of instances where a teacher is well-liked one year and disliked the following year when there has been a change in administration," said the teacher, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for her job.

Cleveland teachers say they are willing to take cues from their national leader, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Weingarten visited Cleveland in January, trying to patch up the widening rift between Sanders and Quolke.

Cleveland was Weingarten's first stop following a speech in which she pledged significant cooperation from the AFT on reform. She expressed support for more-thorough evaluation of teachers and speedier removal of those who are unfit, provided that districts ensure due process and a fair opportunity to improve performance.

CTU leaders say the critics of the Cleveland agreement ignore additions such as "peer assistance and review," a new mentoring program proposed by the union. It gives flailing teachers a second chance but can lead to dismissal within a year if they don't improve.

In the first round of results, the school board recently fired four teachers on the recommendation of their colleagues and administrators. Two other teachers retired, one took disability and 10 will be monitored for another year, said Quolke.

The union also has signed separate memorandums for district "innovation schools," allowing the schools to hire from the outside and set longer workdays and school years. Officers say they are willing to discuss expanding that flexibility to other schools, though they caution that more work will mean more pay.

Pressure strong to institute reforms

Like other districts facing financial and academic crises, Cleveland faces external pressure to go far with reform.

President Barack Obama's Race to the Top program is dangling millions of dollars in front of states and school systems that agree to use student data to assign, fire and determine pay for teachers.

As part of Ohio's application, Cleveland and its teachers have agreed to discuss most of those principles. They opted out of the merit-pay provision.

Cleveland officials also are hearing from the Cleveland and George Gund foundations, faithful financial backers who ideally would like to see the teachers' contract started anew with a single sheet of paper. Foundation representatives openly lobby to weaken seniority and give principals more authority to determine who teaches in their buildings.

"The most important element in an organization is people," said Helen Williams, who oversees education programs for the Cleveland Foundation. "If you don't have the right people in place, you're not going to get different results."

Even when urban teachers unions agree to reform, don't expect students' test scores to surge, said Adam Urbanski, who has served as president of the Rochester Federation of Teachers for nearly 30 years. While poor children clearly can learn, staggering numbers of them overwhelm classrooms with learning deficits, illness and other handicaps, he said.

Urbanski, head of the national Teachers Union Reform Network, jumped out way ahead of the change curve in the mid- to late 1980s. He said his seizing of the initiative caused a Rochester superintendent to accuse him of meddling in management affairs and his union members to howl over what they viewed as collusion.

The Rochester union long ago negotiated a peer-review program that leads to dismissal of 8 percent to 12 percent of new teachers every year. Parents get a say in teacher evaluations. The union is moving to give principals more flexibility in determining working conditions.

After all the compromise, test scores are up only slightly, Urbanski said. Still, he doesn't think his efforts were wasted.

"We face long odds if we work together," he said. "We are dead in the water if we don't."