AS EDUCATION reform moves forward, Boston Teachers Union president Richard Stutman says he wants an inclusive process. Testifying at a recent State House hearing, Stutman told the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education that “the solution to better school lies in working with us, not in working against us.’’ But no collaborative spirit is evident in the union’s resistance to bringing the acclaimed Teach for America program to Boston or creating more pilot schools.
Teach for America trains new college graduates who weren’t education majors to work as teachers in urban and rural districts, generally in hard-to-fill areas such as math, science, and special education. The school system opened itself up to union criticism by signing an agreement with Teach for America that could be construed to give its teachers more job security than union teachers, offering Teach for America recruits two years of employment while regular recruits can be laid off after one. The School Committee has pledged to rectify the discrepancy.
In theory, a quick settlement could be a model for the kind of cooperation Stutman says he wants. But the union has a more basic, and less justifiable, objection: It maintains that laid-off teachers should be retrained for empty positions - even if, in practice, the laid-off teachers aren’t cut out for the vacancies.
And the union has shown its unreliability as a partner in reform in even more overt ways. In 1994, the BTU and the Boston Public Schools agreed to establish pilot schools, flexible but still unionized schools that were meant to be the system’s response to independent, nonunionized, charter schools. When that reform bogged down because of union concerns about the number of unpaid hours teachers were putting in at pilots, the city granted the BTU concessions in a 2006 pact aimed at resolving that issue.
Despite that, however, the BTU leadership unsubtly discouraged efforts to convert traditional schools to pilots. Although the 2006 agreement called for at least seven new pilots, the administration says just four have been achieved. Only through creative counting can the BTU maintain that the target has been reached. After years of frustration, Mayor Menino finally threw up his hands this spring and announced his support for in-district charter schools.
So here’s a word of advice to the BTU. If you want to be treated like a partner in school-improvement efforts, you have to show that you’re a willing partner.
