The term “Innovation School” is a charter school in sheep’s clothing. Sue and I both posted information regarding this bill last year. It basically allows teachers to sign their rights away in exchange for allowing more freedom to teach outside the tight parameters of the curriculum alignment standards.
Our question is, why do teachers have to sign their rights away to teach in a way that they think is in the best interest of their students?
Alternative schools are able to do that now although with the stricter standards as outlined by our former Broad-trained superintendent, many of these successful schools have had to request “waivers” to teach their students in a way that is appropriate for each student’s needs.
Teachers in Seattle, don’t let union leadership sell you and our students down the river. This statement has been issued by Seattle Equity Educators (SEE):
Collective Bargaining Rights Are Civil Rights:
5 Reasons to Vote NO on the “Innovation” MOU
1- We need unity in the UNION: If schools can opt out of any and all parts of the union contract, there can be no unity, which is the basis of a union. This MOU does not specify one single part of the contract that is protected from waiving.
2- We need time to review: Why is it that we are always being asked to vote on agreements with little to no time to review the language and consider the implications of the terms? We should be able to consider what we are presented with and take the contract language back to our buildings to discuss it with the membership. The urgency to pass this should be a big red flag.
3- The SEA contract is NOT the obstacle to innovation: The SEA contract provides basic protections to teachers that help provide stability and support to educators—prerequisites to any school that is truly innovative. The obstacles to curriculum and schedule changes are the district and state rules and not the basic employee protections of the union contract. Moreover, the SEA already has a waiver committee that considers individual exceptions to the contract for schools that want to create an innovative approach. The SEA waiver committee is made up of all union members, whereas only half of the CrAS committee is made up of teachers.
4- We already have Alternative schools: Alternative schools are a truly bottom up, grass-roots education initiative that allow community involvement in setting the priorities of the school without circumventing teachers’ rights to collective bargaining. Yet while these Alternative schools have provided many communities with an innovative approach to education, they have continually been undermined by the Seattle School District. Over the past several years we have seen many Alternative programs threatened with closure, actually closed, or moved from their building. If the District wants to support innovative approaches to education they should support existing Alternative schools and advocate for the creation of new Alternative programs that operate with union rights intact.
5- Prelude to Charters: Contrary to claims that this is a bulwark against charter schools, this MOU to allow “innovation” schools concedes all ground to them. Charter schools have been pushed by billionaires precisely because corporate America does not like unions, and charters are largely non-union. By accepting the argument that rights and protections covered in a union contract are the roadblock to innovation and creative approaches to education, we give ground to those who argue that we don’t actually need a union at all. We would be conceding, in essence, that teachers and their rights are themselves the problem, not the massive education budget cuts, grinding poverty and growing inequality in our society that we and our students face everyday. If we allow a subset of schools to be exempt from the collective bargaining agreement it will be much easier for the advocates of school privatization to argue that we already have schools that are outside the union’s domain so we may as well accept charter schools.
Defend Public Education! Defend Our Union!
Vote NO on the MOU for “Innovation” schools!
Why School Choice Fails
By NATALIE HOPKINSON
Washington, DC
IF you want to see the direction that education reform is taking the country, pay a visit to my leafy, majority-black neighborhood in Washington. While we have lived in the same house since our 11-year-old son was born, he’s been assigned to three different elementary schools as one after the other has been shuttered. Now it’s time for middle school, and there’s been no neighborhood option available.
Meanwhile, across Rock Creek Park in a wealthy, majority-white community, there is a sparkling new neighborhood middle school, with rugby, fencing, an international baccalaureate curriculum and all the other amenities that make people pay top dollar to live there.
Such inequities are the perverse result of a “reform” process intended to bring choice and accountability to the school system. Instead, it has destroyed community-based education for working-class families, even as it has funneled resources toward a few better-off, exclusive, institutions.
My neighborhood’s last free-standing middle school was closed in 2008, part of a round of closures by then Mayor Adrian Fenty and his schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee. The pride and gusto with which they dismantled those institutions was shameful, but I don’t blame them. The closures were the inevitable outcome of policies hatched years before.
In 1995 the Republican-led Congress, ignoring the objections of local leadership, put in motion one of the country’s strongest reform policies for Washington: if a school was deemed failing, students could transfer schools, opt to attend a charter school or receive a voucher to attend a private school.
The idea was to introduce competition; good schools would survive; bad ones would disappear. It effectively created a second education system, which now enrolls nearly half the city’s public school students. The charters consistently perform worse than the traditional schools, yet they are rarely closed.
Meanwhile, failing neighborhood schools, depleted of students, were shut down. Invariably, schools that served the poorest families got the ax — partly because those were the schools where students struggled the most, and partly because the parents of those students had the least power.
Competition produces winners and losers; I get that. Indeed, the rhetoric of school choice can be seductive to angst-filled middle-class parents like myself. We crunch the data and believe that, with enough elbow grease, we can make the system work for us. Naturally, I’ve only considered high-performing schools for my children, some of them public, some charter, some parochial, all outside our neighborhood.
But I’ve come to realize that this brand of school reform is a great deal only if you live in a wealthy neighborhood. You buy a house, and access to a good school comes with it. Whether you choose to enroll there or not, the public investment in neighborhood schools only helps your property values.
For the rest of us, it’s a cynical game. There aren’t enough slots in the best neighborhood and charter schools. So even for those of us lucky ones with cars and school-data spreadsheets, our options are mediocre at best.
In the meantime, the neighborhood schools are dying. After Ms. Rhee closed our first neighborhood school, the students were assigned to an elementary school connected to a homeless shelter. Then that closed, and I watched the children get shuffled again.
Earlier this year, when we were searching for a middle school for my son — 11 is a vulnerable age for anyone — our public options were even grimmer. I could have sent him to one of the newly consolidated kindergarten-to-eighth-grade campuses in my neighborhood, with low test scores and no algebra or foreign languages. We could enter a lottery for a spot in another charter or out-of-boundary middle school, competing against families all over the city.
The system recently floated a plan for yet another round of closings, with a proposal for new magnet middle school programs in my neighborhood, none of which would open in time for my son. These proposals, like much of reform in Washington, are aimed at some speculative future demographic, while doing nothing for the children already here. In the meantime, enrollment, and the best teachers, continue to go to the whitest, wealthiest communities.
The situation for Washington’s working- and middle-class families may be bleak, but we are hardly alone. Despite the lack of proof that school-choice policies work, they are gaining popularity in communities nationwide. Like us, those places will face a stark decision: Do they want equitable investment in community education, or do they want to hand it over to private schools and charters? Let’s stop pretending we can fairly do both. As long as we do, some will keep winning, but many of us will lose.
Natalie Hopkinson is the author of the forthcoming book “Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City.”
Seattle Education 