Grade A nonsense

Those schools have been among the few bright spots in Boston's troubled education system.

Boston Arts Academy, the Lyndon school, Another Course to College, and many others are enormously popular. That's partly because the 18 schools are free of some district and union rules that can gum up innovation.

Pilot administrators hire teachers without regard to seniority rules. They gather faculties of enthusiastic, like-minded educators prepared to work longer days than usual and try new approaches to educating kids.

Together, teachers and administrators agree on the rules they'll all follow: An "election to work agreement" spells out the hours and days teachers are expected to put in and how much professional development they'll get. Everybody signs the agreement in the spring to make sure they're on the same page in September.

Pilot schools work. Though they're not all stellar academically, they boast of better attendance, higher graduation rates, more students headed to college, and fewer discipline problems on the whole than mainstream public schools.

So here comes Stutman, with a labor grievance that makes a joke of them.

Stutman has complained that those agreements the pilot school teachers sign every spring amount to negotiations on working conditions and that only the union can bargain for those. So the union is asking an arbitrator to nix the internal agreements. If that happens, the innovative working arrangements pilot schools have been deciding for themselves would have to be negotiated through the union.

This is ridiculous. Teachers have been entering into these agreements for 16 years, and the union never complained about them before. That may have been because they were the union's idea in the first place.

"The union wanted all pilot schools to spell out clearly to its members what the working conditions were, and that's how the election to work agreements came about," said Albert Holland, a retired principal who was on the BPS/BTU joint Steering Committee when discussions about the pilot school rules took place.

What the teachers' union is looking for here challenges the very essence of pilot schools. The whole point of them is to give the people who run the schools - including the teachers - the autonomy to realize an educational vision. If a school decides that requires an extra hour each day, they can make that happen without a protracted bargaining process.

Chipping away at some of the most popular schools in a district that has hemorrhaged 10 percent of its students over the last seven years isn't just short-sighted, it's self-destructive. Fewer students in the schools means fewer jobs for teachers. At a time when the city's schools need visionaries, the union's stance on pilots is reactionary.

But this isn't the first time Stutman has pitched sand into the works. The union chief has been undermining pilots for years.

When most of the teachers at Thomas Gardner Elementary School in Allston voted to have their school become a pilot in the summer of 2004, Stutman vetoed it. He has gone into other schools on the verge of becoming pilots to scare teachers away from the two-thirds' majority required to convert.

He finally relented on the Gardner - and agreed to the city's plan to add more pilot schools - after winning tight rules on any extra time pilot school teachers work in the interests of their students.

In keeping with his quiet campaign to torpedo pilots, Stutman wouldn't speak about his latest efforts. By way of defending the union's commitment to innovation, a spokesman noted that the union will open a new pilot school this year.

That new pilot school will make for good cover as Stutman goes about gutting the rest of them.

Yvonne Abraham is a Globe columnist. Her e-mail address is Abraham@globe.com.