Piloting a new path
WHO SAYS the Boston Teachers Union has struck a counterproductive stance when it comes to the need for change in the city's public schools?
Ahem. I guess I would be one of those critics. But I'd like to see the union president, Richard Stutman, change his union's course. Thus I'm pleased at any sign the union recognizes the need to treat Boston families as customers who have other educational options.
As the Globe's Tracy Jan reported on Friday, the union wants to mount an outreach campaign to persuade charter students to return to the traditional school system. So it's good to see charter competition rousing the union to action.
And yet, at the risk of being rude, let's pose a variant of the question that Pioneer Institute founder Pete Peters asked at a recent education forum: Doesn't that ignore the elephant in the room?
To be even more pointed: Isn't the union that same pertinacious pachyderm?
The Jan. 18 event that prompted Peters's question was to spotlight an important new report on pilot schools. Pilots, begun in the mid-1990s, were designed to be the Boston public school system's answer to charter schools, the innovative academies that operate free of traditional public school governance.
Unlike charters, pilots are automatically union schools. Still, they enjoy much more autonomy over budget, staffing, curriculum, governance, and schedule than traditional schools. They now serve almost 10 percent of the Boston public school population.
The report, done by the nonprofit Center for Collaborative Education with data from 2003-2004, says pilots are outperforming traditional Boston public schools ''across every indicator of student engagement and performance."
A few examples: On average, 84 percent of pilot high school students passed the 10th-grade English MCAS in May 2004, compared with 58 percent of students in Boston's traditional public schools, with more than twice as many in the advanced or proficient categories. Eighty percent of pilot students passed 10th-grade math, compared with 59 percent of public school students.
High school attendance is also better and the suspension rate lower at pilot schools. In an era when a college education is increasingly important, pilots send 79 percent of their students to college, compared with 67 percent of traditional public school students.
Pilot teachers can transfer easily if they want out, but the flexibility there has resulted in the kind of schools that teachers often say they want. Class sizes are relatively small, with an average of 20 students in elementary schools and 19 in secondary schools. The overall student- teacher ratio at pilots is also lower than in regular schools, noted Dan French, the center's executive director.
As several presenters and panelists remarked, pilots prove that a joint management-union reform can yield impressive results for the public school system.
And yet, still the elephant loomed, alluded to but never confronted outright until Peters asked: What about the Gardner School?
And a very good query his was. After all, Stutman's June 2004 veto of the Allston elementary school's hopes to become a pilot has frozen the entire process by which schools convert to pilots. Despite the agreement that decisions on extra pay for extra teacher hours would be made at the individual school level, the union chief has demanded that the same basic overtime rules apply in pilots.
In response, Stutman read a letter from the Gardner School faculty, saying they backed his efforts to negotiate pilot school issues. Now, having talked to a number of Gardner teachers and administrators at the time, I know how deeply disappointed they were. So afterward I asked Stutman if he meant to suggest that they somehow supported his decision to nix the pilot proposal they had so painstakingly put together.
''They are supporting our right to negotiate terms," he replied. ''We would be glad to support the Gardner School if they wanted to take a revote."
That's pretty obviously a face-saving formulation. Still, the sense among parties close to the long negotiations to resolve the impasse is that a thaw may be in the offing -- a thaw that would allow the pilot process to move forward.
Let's hope so. The Center for Collaborative Education's report highlights the promise of pilots. Boston teachers deserve huge credit for that public-school success.
That's all the more reason their union should be making that success a banner advertisement for the Boston system, not blocking the path to its replication.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 
