Classroom warfare

The top guns in state politics say charter schools will solve the public-education problem. The teachers' union disagrees.

by Michael Crowley

On the Eve of a potentially bloody political battle on Beacon Hill, a variation of an old adage looks to be holding true: you can't teach an old union new tricks.

With the legislature ready to start debating the future of Massachusetts's fledgling charter-school program, a seemingly unstoppable squad made up of the heaviest hitters in state politics has lined up on the side of the upstart schools: Governor William Weld, guv-in-waiting Paul Cellucci, House Speaker Thomas Finneran (D-Mattapan), Senate President Thomas Birmingham (D-Chelsea), and state Board of Education chairman John Silber.

But standing in the way is a notoriously immovable force: the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA), one of the mightiest special interests in the Commonwealth and a defiantly staunch opponent of the state's most fashionable policy idea of the moment.

What happens will be determined when the two sides collide later this month -- and perhaps as early as next week -- over a proposal to expand the two-year-old charter-school experiment born of Massachusetts's sweeping 1993 education-reform law. The stakes are huge: at issue is the identity of the state's public-school system. And the differences are many. After a tame House budget debate that put Bay Staters to sleep, the charter-school fight could be the biggest brawl of the year so far on Beacon Hill.

Partisans in this battle have been left guessing all year where and when charter-school legislation will appear on the docket, especially after Finneran's no-nonsense House budget show excluded debate on the issue. Now it looks like the legislature will take up the question this month, possibly as part of the Senate budget debate. That would be good news for charter schools, which are more popular in the Senate than in the House, and would likely result in a law that gives us more of them soon.

But it's an impressive testament to the power of the MTA that the fate of charter schools in this legislative session remains uncertain despite their all-star team of political backers. The 75,000-member union has historically been one of the state's most powerful Democratic interest groups, providing influential endorsements, running expensive ad campaigns, raising money, and even fielding its own candidates. But as the sorry condition of state education has come into focus in recent years, the MTA's power has waned. Its often inflexible attitude toward school reform has frequently left its members looking like knee-jerk defenders of a crusty status quo and their own interests, or -- as Tom Finneran bluntly called them two years ago -- "selfish pigs."

But even at a time when old-fashioned party-machine politics are dying away, the MTA holds enough sway over the legislature that it could still overcome the collective will of the governor, House Speaker, and Senate president to keep charter schools in check. The union employs a full-time lobbyist on Beacon Hill to do just that. Bold opposition is a risky strategy, however. A high-profile defeat in the charter-school debate would further erode the union's credibility and influence, leaving it reeking of a stale and discarded past.

"This really has to do with the clout of the MTA on Beacon Hill," says Nick Paleologos, a former Democratic state representative and a leading backer of charter schools who chaired the legislature's education committee in the 1980s. "They're going to pull out all the stops. . . . Their strategy is to stop charters from expanding, and once they've accomplished that, they'll squeeze the ones that do exist until they die on the vine."

The specific question at hand is whether to raise the state's current "caps" on the numbers of charter schools and their students (corresponding to 25 and .75 percent of statewide public-school enrollment, respectively). A bill filed by Governor Weld calls for raising the cap to allow for 75 additional schools, which would increase enrollment from 6500 to 90,000 of the state's 900,000 students.

Charter-school backers -- a group of impassioned think-tankers, legislators, and activist parents -- argue that charter schools are the last, best hope for revitalizing a comatose and seemingly unreformable public-school system, and for providing educational options to parents all too often stuck with inadequate and unsafe public schools.

Run by private groups with public money, charter schools are free from the shackles of school-committee oversight and teachers unions. That, their supporters say, allows for new standards of innovation and efficiency that will force public schools into a reform-sparking competition for students.

"These schools are designed from the ground up," explains Jim Peyser, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based think tank that serves as a headquarters for the movement. "They take a blank piece of paper and create . . . a theme or culture or a particular approach to teaching in a way that traditional public schools don't."

Opponents in the education establishment, led by the MTA, make the broad case that the movement is a foolish attempt to apply free-market ideology to education, and effectively gives up on the public-school system -- a system whose union structure and collective-bargaining agreements are the lifeblood of the MTA.

And so the fight is on. "Our members would have nothing less," says Steve Wollmer, communications director for the MTA. "We wouldn't be representing teachers if we didn't defend the resources that let teachers do their jobs."

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Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.