Thompson: Come, Let Us Compromise Together

I can’t believe I’m saying nice things about the districts that beat us out for the American Federation of Teachers Innovation Grants. Seriously, each proposal is excellent, and when seen as a diverse whole, and also in the context of comparable innovations by our brothers and sisters at the National Education Association, we glimpse the future of education as it should work. And when you consider the diverse funders, including the Broad Foundation and the Gates, the promise of these innovations is even greater.

The driving force in all of the innovations is collaboration, and an old-fashioned word that is even better - compromise. California fulfills the dream of any teacher/policy wonk with an innovation that "builds on its successful district-level labor-management partnership, and moves decision-making for 10 high-needs schools from the central office to the schoolhouse." Philadelphia will build a "community schools program,"

creating "a full feeder program that will support students for their entire public school career, from kindergarten through 12th grade." And the charter school program in San Antonio will also promote my dream of community schools.

In Broward County "a new compensation plan designed with teacher input that will use student achievement—including standardized test scores in tested grades and subjects—as one of several factors in determining teacher pay."

New York and Rhode Island will use Peer Assistance and Review, and multiple measures, for a comprehensive teacher evaluation system, and they explicitly note that the union "has no interest in protecting incompetent teachers"

Having come to teaching through alternative certification I’m impressed that Minnesota will adopt "multiple pathways to become a full-fledged teacher; and new and differentiated roles for experienced teachers." Even better, they will use "aggressive Fortune 500-style recruiting of college students and midcareer professionals." And better still, Minnesota will act on my struggling school’s desire of "outreach to high school students, to expand the pool of talented people."

Two innovation projects will develop charter schools. In Oklahoma City, the market for charters is already oversaturated so we have concentrated on "enterprise schools" which provide autonomy, and keep the students’ data on the system’s computer so the district also benefits from our skills through higher test scores. Other than that, our proposals incorporated something from each plan which tells me that similar ideas are blossoming all over from the real life experiences of teachers.

Doing our homework for these, and other proposals, I have talked with a wide variety of other professionals who welcome the call to join the civil rights movement of the 21^st century. As we contemplate the challenge and the opportunities before us, I sense a willingness to repudiate the simplistic nostrums that "we know what works" and the passive aggressive jab that it is just a question of whether we have the will to create an urban educational system.

The pattern that I see is:

1.  A decade ago administrators took care of administration.  Nobody would have expected that in their spare time central office staff would become school "turnaround" experts or that principals would magically become instructional leaders.

2.  Neither could we have expected teachers and their unions to miraculously learn how to run school systems in between teaching classes.

3.  But districts and teachers, along with our mutual networks in neighborhoods and in other professions, can launch the great adventure of building community schools and together we can tackle our toughest educational challenges. - John Thompson  

Comments

[dora taylor]

Are you serious?

Gates and the Broad working together?

They have had the same agenda since Day One.

See:

http://seattle-ed.blogspot.com/

[john]

I meant Broad and Gates working together with the union.

But don't you guys in Seattle believe in the forgivenness of sins?

Its easier for me to be hopeful because its been nearly two years since our district's fiasco with a superintendent from the Broad School. In Seattle you have five of them? Its hard to imagine a worst tragedy for your schools. Seattle has so much going for it that I can't understand why they'd risk it all on Broad's crackpot theories.

Your blogs reference to alternative schools might mean you'd be more amenable to my compromise post on Friday. Creating a range of high-quality alternative schools of all types should be in the best interest of all schools of thought. The only reason I can see for not discussing the expansion of alternatives is the perpetuation of the blame game, which of course is the forte of Broad. I hoping Gates isn't as bad, but that's just a hope.