Who Lost the Boston Globe?
From this morning’s Boston Globe editorial page about the Boston Teachers Union (BTU):
But the union has a more basic, and less justifiable, objection: It maintains that laid-off teachers should be retrained for empty positions – even if, in practice, the laid-off teachers aren’t cut out for the vacancies.
And the union has shown its unreliability as a partner in reform in even more overt ways. In 1994, the BTU and the Boston Public Schools agreed to establish pilot schools, flexible but still unionized schools that were meant to be the system’s response to independent, nonunionized, charter schools. When that reform bogged down because of union concerns about the number of unpaid hours teachers were putting in at pilots, the city granted the BTU concessions in a 2006 pact aimed at resolving that issue.
Despite that, however, the BTU leadership unsubtly discouraged efforts to convert traditional schools to pilots. Although the 2006 agreement called for at least seven new pilots, the administration says just four have been achieved. Only through creative counting can the BTU maintain that the target has been reached. After years of frustration, Mayor Menino finally threw up his hands this spring and announced his support for in-district charter schools.
So here’s a word of advice to the BTU. If you want to be treated like a partner in school-improvement efforts, you have to show that you’re a willing partner.
For more of the “Who Lost?” series, click here.
October 12th, 2009 at 15:14
So, is the editorial board of the Boston Globe slowly coming to the realization that the purpose of a union is to get the best deal for its membership regardless of whether the membership does the job they were hired to do? The tone of the editorial suggests the BG is running out of excuses to tell themselves to buttress their belief in the inherent goodness of unions but I’m just ever hopeful so, maybe not.