PolicyGuy

Tuesday, July 31, 2007


Union Industry Schools to Charter Schools: Come Join Us
Competition with charter schools for students has forced the traditional, union-rule schools to respond. Sometimes the response is outright hostility and obstructionism, such as when a district refuses to sell a surplus building to a charter school.

Sometimes the response is a little more friendly.

From the archives of draft posts that never got published, I noticed that the Boston public schools are trying to bring charter school employees back to the union shop.

Today, 550 teachers and principals in the city's 14 charter schools will begin receiving letters asking them to consider converting their schools, which are under state jurisdiction, to pilot schools, which are autonomous but fall under the Boston public school system. The letters were mailed by the Boston Teachers Union on Saturday.

I don't know what sort of reception this invitation received--when I put this item in the queue, it was well over a year ago--but I do see this as an interesting response of the traditional school systems to charter schools. At least it's better than trying to shut down those schools outright.

Where did these pilot schools come from?

Pilot schools, created in 1995 in response to competition from charters, have more autonomy than traditional schools but less than charter schools .... The school system has 19 pilot schools, which are popular among parents.

There's certainly public demand for shaking up the system:

In February, after a yearlong standstill, the system reached an agreement with the teachers union to create seven more pilot schools by 2009. Roughly 6,000 of the system's 58,600 students attend the pilot schools. About 4,300 Boston residents attend 14 charter schools.

Looks like something else for the "I ought to look into that" pile.

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"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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