Union blockade
A FLY ON the wall of the Capitol Coffee House one morning a month or so ago would have witnessed an animated conversation taking place at the popular Beacon Hill bistro.
State Representative Michael Moran was meeting with Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, and Robert Haynes, president of the Massachusetts AFL-CIO -- and Moran was telling Stutman that as a newly elected lawmaker serving Allston-Brighton, he wanted the impasse over the Thomas Gardner Elementary School's pilot school plans to end. Which was no doubt a little hard for Stutman to hear, he being the one-man impediment to those plans.
Even though 24 of 29 faculty members at the Allston school had voted to become a pilot, in June of 2004, Stutman, exercising a provision in the contract, vetoed their carefully laid plans. (The union boss's disregard of the wishes of his own members is something charter school teachers might want to inquire about now that the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, the Boston Teachers Union's parent organization, has come courting.)
Stutman insists that pilot schools must be governed by overtime pay requirements similar to those that bind the traditional public schools. Given that the city has already bargained in a previous contract for the right to establish the flexible pilots, where decisions about overtime are made on a school by school basis, that stance is both hypocritical and heavy-handed.
That doesn't matter to Stutman, a man prone to boasting about the many members he commands and the electoral power he wields. Of course, that supposed clout didn't amount to much in the special election to fill the 18th Suffolk seat. The teachers union endorsed one of Moran's rivals back in the March Democratic primary, only to see Moran win that contest anyway.
As for Haynes, several knowledgeable sources say he was there to reinforce Stutman. Moran, however, says that Haynes ''was trying to find common ground." Now, given that Big Bad Bob and bluster usually go together like humidity and August, hearing that the AFL-CIO chief may just have played a constructive role is certainly welcome news.
What Stutman has encountered in Moran is a state representative insistent on the needs of his district -- and willing to press them even if that means a heated argument with the union chief.
''There were times when the discourse wasn't as high as it could have been," acknowledges Moran. ''I respect Richard Stutman and I support the teachers union, but I am looking for resolution to this problem."
Having just come off a hard campaign, one filled with plenty of conversation with parents, Moran says his district wants to see the Gardner converted to a pilot school -- the more so because Our Lady of the Presentation School, the Catholic grammar school in Brighton's Oak Square, has recently closed.
''Parents are looking for some of the cutting-edge type of reforms that pilots are offering," Moran says. ''They want the early-morning and after-school programs, the partnerships those schools create with the institutions around them. For me this is simply about giving families and kids every option and every chance for success. This is what the consumers want, for lack of a better term. This is what the children and families who are going to be consuming the product are looking for."
Let's hope Moran didn't use those odious terms with Stutman. Consumers? Why, that implies that students and parents should have a place in the process, or, to use a phrase Stutman is familiar with, a seat at the table.
Moran is exactly right about the potential of pilots, of course. Indeed, one of the most promising trends in education reform stresses schools that have real managerial autonomy and are flexible enough to meet the needs of their communities, says William Ouchi, a professor at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and author of ''Making Schools Work."
Stutman, says Ouchi, has missed the forest for the trees in his opposition to pilots, since decentralization usually results in more responsive schools and more dollars eventually spent in the classroom.
''As far as I know, he is the only teachers union official in the country who opposes decentralization," says Ouchi.
In taking that myopic position, Stutman has also put his union in the position of blocking an innovation popular with parents and important to the community. And that's all the more reason why voters of the 18th Suffolk District should applaud their representative for his willingness to stand up to the union boss.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com.