In just six months, Californians have seen a welcome shift in the public education landscape. President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top challenge provided the impetus for California lawmakers, school superintendents and boards, parents, teachers and civic leaders to join forces in new ways to improve public education.
In coming months, a prime area for action at the local level will be getting the right teachers to the right schools and creating schedules that meet the needs of today’s students.
That includes getting beyond 19th-century farm economy scheduling to a longer school day and year. It also means challenging everybody to think differently about the role of unions in public education.
As U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in a speech last year, teachers unions are at a crossroads. Policies created over the past century, he said, “protect the rights of teachers, but they have produced an industrial factory model of education that treats all teachers like interchangeable widgets.”
He’s encouraging union-management partnerships “to develop better hiring, compensation, evaluation and turnaround strategies.”
Already, we’ve got some exciting local possibilities. A local group has proposed a Hmong-focused charter school in the Sacramento City Unified School District to better meet the needs of students and parents who believe traditional public schools aren’t achieving adequate results for them. This school seeks a year-round calendar (no long summer break), a four-day week (Monday through Thursday) and a longer day (8 a.m. to 5 p.m.). It seeks a flexible hiring and transfer system unfettered by seniority.
This can happen in one of two ways:
• Using district teachers, but seeking waivers to the existing union contract.
• Going independent, without district teachers and without the union contract.
Superintendent Jonathan Raymond sees this as an opportunity to forge a new partnership with the teachers union, a “template for change.” With a public hearing Feb. 18 and a March deadline for a decision on the charter school, Raymond and the union begin talks next week on a list of waivers. If successful, it could set a tone for negotiations when the teachers’ contract ends in June 2011.
And it is not unprecedented. The Sacramento City Unified district, like many districts in our region, has negotiated waivers with teachers unions to gain flexibility for schools on assigning teachers, length of school day and year, and standards-based evaluations. The leverage is that if such negotiations are unsuccessful, charter school proposers can seek independent status.
As school districts across the state identify turnaround strategies for chronically underperforming schools and more options for struggling students at the best schools, they’ll need new partnerships with teachers. This is a chance for a fresh start, creating a culture of partnership and professionalism – and moving away from rigid, obsolete rules-based contracts.
And if educators don’t respond, lawmakers have given kids and parents new options for going around those stuck in old, ineffective ways of doing things. That’s a good thing.