Bruce Randolph School’s bid for autonomy won unanimous approval from the Denver school board tonight.
Board Resolution 3060 basically codified Randolph’s “Professional Autonomy Agreement,” submitted to Denver Public Schools and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association earlier this month. Until and unless otherwise specified in the agreement, Randolph is now free of burdensome aspects of district regulations and many provisions of the union contract.
Rather than having to navigate two bureaucracies to specify what it wants to opt out of, the school instead gets a clean slate, and can choose which pieces of the contract and the bureaucracy it wishes to embrace.
Under a best case scenario (with apologies to singer/songwriter Steve Earle), the revolution starts now. “My hope is that we will soon have 20 proposals like this on our desks,” school board President Theresa Peña said, moments before voting.
That degree of solicited chaos makes some people nervous, including board member Jeannie Kaplan, whose yes vote came “with an asterisk.” Kaplan’s support was qualified, because, she said, the district needs to get a handle on how it will consider future requests of a similar nature, and measure the success, or lack thereof, of schools set free.
Randolph teacher Margaret Bobb, who dissented from the majority view at her school, made a reasoned plea for a different approach. She asked the board to take a deep breath and wait until at least January to vote. Everyone needs more time, Bobb argued, to digest the magnitude of the potential changes, and to assess whether giving the school a blank slate was the best way to proceed.
But there was no slowing down the Randolph express tonight. Representatives of community organizing groups Metro Organizations for People and Padres Unidos spoke in favor of the Randolph plan. So did representatives of the Donnell-Kay Foundation and the Daniels Fund, as well as a slate of Randolph teachers, rookies and vets alike.
The DCTA board will vote on the Randolph proposal in early January. Despite opposing the plan up to now, it’s hard to believe the union will continue to fight a popular, audacious proposal that has such demonstrably widespread support. We shall see.
Now comes the hard part. Randolph will be under tremendous pressure to use its newly-won freedom to continue making steady, sustainable gains in student achievement. The odds are daunting. But this is clearly a tough and dedicated group. I wish them all the best.
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on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Autonomy.
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