It's a shame, what's happening in Boston now. For a number of years, if you'd asked people what they associated with Boston's public schools, they'd probably have come up with a pretty unfavorable list of things -- like school desegregation marked by racial conflict and violence and a school committee considered racist and corrupt. But in the past several years, we've begun to hear that Boston schools are turning around. And last May, the Boston Teacher's Union (BTU) and the school administration with a tremendous boost from the Boston Compact, a business and civic group dedicated to improving Boston's schools -- collaborated to produce a contract that was hailed all over the country as groundbreaking, a landmark. Now, though, the agreement seems to be coming unraveled.
What's the problem? Everybody agrees the contract is terrific and could make Boston a national leader in school reform. It calls for shifting a great deal of authority from the central administration to individual schools. In those schools, councils made up of principals, teachers, parents and (in high schools) students, along with representatives from business, higher education, and community groups, would sit down together to decide how to run things. A school's goals (and how to meet and measure them), what is taught in its classrooms, how its budget is to be spent, who is to be hired -- all these questions would be handled by the school council. The administration would monitor schools' success in meeting their goals. And they'd send joint labor-management teams to assist schools that were not doing so well and take sterner measures with those with continued to fail. The contract gives authority and accountability to just the people who should have them - the ones who are closest to the schools and have the biggest stake in their success.
Most people agree, too, that the 7 percent annual increase in teachers' salaries the contract calls for is reasonable. An editorial in the Boston Globe, for example, suggests that, in a city with an annual inflation rate of about 4.9 percent, a 7 percent raise is "not overgenerous," especially given the teachers' additional responsibilities under the new contract. And if you look at teacher contracts in other school districts that are restructuring their schools, the Boston contract is even a bargain. But money is, in fact, the problem. Mayor Raymond Flynn says the city is facing a big deficit next year, and he seems prepared to let the contract -- and, with it, Boston's school reform package -- go down the drain.
Mayor Flynn doesn't complain about the terms of the contract -- he couldn't because they include, and even go beyond, the school reform measures his own commission on education reform called for. He simply says the city doesn't have the money to fund the three-year contract.
If he's right about the city's finances -- if the cupboard is bare -- Mayor Flynn needs to try the painful step of using new taxes to raise money. However, according to the Boston Teachers Union, that's not necessary; it's discovered $33 million eligible dollars in the city budget, which would more than cover the first year of the contract. But wherever the money comes from, "the city cannot," as the Boston Globe says, "afford not to fund" the contract because Boston's students are "the city's best investment."
How are the teachers taking all this? They agreed to go back to school in September and start implementing the revolutionary new contract, even though they are not drawing the salary increases that go with it. But now, three months after the beginning of school and nearly six months after they accepted the contract, they are getting worried and angry. They are planning a one-day strike for December 14 and have not ruled out further strikes.
Why don't the teachers just get on with the school restructuring laid out in the contract and forget about the salary increase the contract calls for? Some of them certainly would. But heroes are rare, and most of us whose job description was revised so that our duties increased and who were expected to change entirely the way we did our job -- lead a new sort of professional life, almost -- would expect our paychecks to reflect these changes. And most teachers are like most of us.
Of course, this is a painful story for all concerned: the union and the administration, the business community, the parents, even the mayor and, most of all, the kids. But it's not just a Boston story.
All across the country, people are talking about how poorly prepared our high school graduates are and wondering what this will mean to our nation's competitiveness in an international economy. Will our standard of living decline? Will we become a second-class power? So in some places, they're also asking school people to make the enormous effort and take the risks necessary to restructure their schools. But all this serious talk can disappear in a minute if money becomes tight. And school reform can suddenly take a back seat to balancing a budget or maintaining a cash reserve.
A few weeks ago I talked about some school systems where teachers were offered incentives only to see them cut back or even withdrawn when money became a little scarce. The Boston story is an example of the same skewed priorities. We might call it the penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to school reform. And there's no question that if people in Boston and elsewhere subscribe to it, they'll get what they pay for - a shrug from the teachers and other school people they count on to reform their schools and the same bad schools we are suffering from now.