Competition can be an awfully powerful leverage tool

By Liam Day
July 23rd, 2008

There is a terrific piece in the Globe today from the Reverend Ray Hammond of the Bethel AME Church in Jamaica Plain and Horace Small of the Union of Minority Neighborhoods. In it, they extol the virtue of pilot schools and explore the civil rights implications of restricting minority students’ access to these schools of reform. As they rightly argue:

What cannot be accepted is the notion that anyone should be able to block the road to good jobs, decent pay, and citizen participation for the next generation of public school children. Of course the rights of unions, the rights of teachers, and the right to fair contracts should be supported. What should not be supported is the idea that children should be sacrificed on the altar of adult power politics and game-playing.

To what they refer, of course, is the Boston Teachers Union’s efforts to block the creation of the seven new pilot schools they agreed to in a compromise with the city and offering as an alternative instead what they call discovery schools. As the Reverend Hammond and Mr. Small point out, why endorse untested discovery schools, but block pilot schools, which studies have demonstrated succeed. Why indeed?

I think the answer lies in an erroneous assumption the authors put forth in the very first paragraph of the op-ed (the lone quibble I have with the piece). There they refer to pilot schools as “a bold experiment in public education”. Bold might be overstating it just a tad. It’s worth remembering that pilot schools were only created in the wake of charter school legislation. They represented a compromise between reformers and the unions, who, quite frankly, were spooked by the then new charter schools. My colleague Jamie Gass likes to refer to the current Governor’s proposed readiness schools as charter school lite; that is also what pilot schools are. Basically, in a political atmosphere the unions then deemed dangerous, they were scared into bellying up to the reform table.

So why, more than a decade later, block them? Apparently, the BTU no longer deems the political atmosphere dangerous to its interests.