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The Boston Herald
February 19, 2003, Wednesday, Op-Ed, p. 29

Promise of pilots puts them in peril

By Thomas M. Keane

Boston’s pilot schools have long existed on the fringes of the school system, serving only a small fraction of the city’s 62,400 students. But the number of pilots may soon increase dramatically - and if that happens, it could change everything.

In many respects, pilot schools are much like charter schools. Last week I wrote about the backlash against charters, and how many were trying to use the state’s fiscal crisis as an excuse to stop their particular brand of reform. Pilots are also proving controversial. That’s an odd twist, though, because they were originally invented as a way to stave off change.

In 1994, the city’s school department and its teachers’ union saw charters as a genuine threat. They feared proliferation of the independent schools could undermine the tightly centralized school system. In their contract negotiations that year, the two created the idea of pilots - a kind of home-grown reform, it was hoped, that would prevent charters from catching on. They offered the promise of some experimentation but no one expected pilots to threaten the status quo.

Like charters, pilots would be largely free of normal union work rules. They would be more independent of the school system: Days could be longer, curricula could be unique to the schools, and they could govern themselves.

They weren’t supposed to be too independent, however. Teachers still had to be members of the Boston Teachers Union. More importantly, pilots still reported directly to the school department and in many ways, large and small, they were still under the city’s yoke.

Still, the idea had appeal to parents’ groups, non-profits and others. Over the years they pushed the school department to open 13 pilots, now serving 3,900 students. Nevertheless, that only represented 6 percent of the kids in system - not much to worry about.

Along with the city’s exam schools and a few other bright lights, pilots quickly emerged as the best schools in the city. As a group, the city’s pilot schools now outperform other city schools on the MCAS. They are also superior in other, intriguing ways. They have higher attendance, they are more successful at retaining their students, they have fewer suspensions (despite being tougher on discipline), they have higher graduation rates, and they send vastly more of their students on to college. Parents rave about them. And every pilot school has a waiting list.

Although pilots were supposed to be part of the Boston Public Schools system, the innovative schools soon discovered they had more in common with each other. They formed an organization, the Boston Pilot Schools Network, housed within a larger school reform group, the Center for Collaborative Education. The network allowed pilots to trade good ideas, provide technical and administrative assistance to each other, and promote the idea of even more pilot schools.

And therein lies the promise - and the peril.

Last fall, the network worked with the Boston Foundation on a plan to boost the number of pilot schools. The Boston Foundation agreed to offer planning grants of $15,000 for existing schools that wanted to consider converting to pilots. At first, the Boston Teachers’ Union attempted to kill the effort, telling its teachers not to participate. But after a wave of negative publicity - as well as a backlash from teachers themselves - the union relented.

Many schools applied and earlier this month the foundation awarded grants to 13. The network expects that many, perhaps even most of those, will opt to convert - even though a conversion requires an affirmative vote from 70 percent of a school’s current teachers. It is thus possible that by this September the number of pilots will be over 20 and that up to 15 percent of all Boston kids will be enrolled.

That’s the promise. The peril - at least to the status quo - is this: Pilot schools are a bit like the old USSR’s experiments with glasnost. Openness was offered up by the communist regime in the hopes that it would dampen reform. Instead, it had the opposite effect. I was in Moscow in 1988 and saw what was happening. The genie was out of the bottle. A small taste of freedom was not enough. People wanted it all.

And that may well happen in Boston.

In his book “The Tipping Point,” Malcolm Gladwell described how small changes in society can suddenly accelerate and become widespread. What’s the tipping point for pilot schools? When 15 percent of kids are enrolled? Twenty percent? At some point, the number of children that pilots serve will be so large that those who are denied a slot will be unwilling to take “No” for an answer. Why, parents will eventually want to know, can’t every kid have the kind of education a pilot school offers?

There is no good answer to that question

Tom Keane can be reached at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.

Copyright 2003 Boston Herald Inc.