LONG-TIME observers of the Boston City Council know that members of that august body are usually happiest when pursuing pothole repairs or extending salutations to possible inhabitants of Mars’ second moon.
But Councilor John Connolly has a novel idea: The council could actually play an important role in city affairs by helping make Boston’s schools more responsive to family needs.
Connolly has seen firsthand that the body can accomplish something meaningful. By showing a little gumption in June, councilors got the firefighters to give back some of the windfall an out-to-lunch arbitrator had dropped in their laps.
Now, with the Boston Public Schools and the Boston Teachers Union negotiating a new contract, the at-large councilor wants to bring parents and students to City Hall to share their educational expectations with the council, the Menino administration, school system officials, and the union.
“Students and parents, the people who have the most at stake, are never given a seat at the negotiating table,’’ says Connolly, who chairs the council’s education committee. “So we want them to tell the city decision-makers what they want from our schools.’’
That hearing, whose mid-September date has yet to be finalized, will come at a pivotal moment. The need for sweeping change is apparent, yet it remains unclear whether a system bound like Gulliver by contractual constraints can rise to the challenge.
Boston Superintendent Carol Johnson, citing the importance of more school time in closing the urban achievement gap, is pushing teachers to work an additional hour a day. “We know that our best teachers routinely put in extra hours and stay later,’’ she says. “We are saying we want to formalize that so it is not just some teachers getting great results.’’
But the union, which has come to expect annual raises as a matter of course, has said its members also need to be paid on a pro-rata basis for any new time they are required to work.
The system can’t afford that in these tight times, says Johnson, who notes that Boston teachers already earn some of the highest pay in the state for one of the shortest contractual days among the nation’s urban districts.
In the past when I’ve argued that teachers should be willing to extend the school day without demanding to be paid for each extra minute, piqued pedagogues have posed this query: Do you know anyone willing to work more without additional pay? So let me answer in advance: Yes. Most private-sector professionals.
The better question is whether BTU teachers will respond like true professionals and embrace a longer day or continue to insist on being paid as though they were assembly-line workers. Sadly, if past is prologue, we should expect the union to fight tenaciously against needed changes while demanding extra money for any it ultimately agrees to. Oh, yes, and then to try to scuttle the very reforms it has supposedly embraced.
The union has gotten away with that sort of behavior too often in the past. And yet, the ground is shifting under the BTU’s feet. About 5,000 students from Boston are already in charter schools. With charter slots slated to double over the next half-decade or so, thousands more of the traditional system’s 56,400 students will soon have other options.
Johnson recognizes the pressure that competition will bring. “The charter schools are routinely offering students more time,’’ she says, adding that when given a choice between a school that lets kids out in the early afternoon and one that keeps them until 4 p.m., most hard-pressed working parents will opt for the latter.
But will the BTU’s myopic leadership, whose old-guard intransigence helped create the momentum for lifting the charter cap, respond to that same reality?
That’s where Connolly’s hearing comes in. If ever a city union needed to hear a loud, insistent message from the public, that union is the BTU. So if you have kids in the Boston schools, or if you care about the system, this will be your opportunity. Make yourself heard.
Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com
