Was all the hoopla for naught?
Central Falls Superintendent Frances Gallos announced yesterday that the district has resumed discussions with the union. This, just days after President Obama himself praised Gallos for taking the hard line with a perpetually failing school. (And that's after Duncan, Weingarten, and everyone from Diane Ravitch to the David Horowitz Freedom Center weighed in.) According to the Providence Journal, what was just days ago tearing this tiny Rhode Island mill town in two has turned into a big love fest. Here's the timeline:
Monday: Obama praises Gallo for firing all the teachers at the town's only high school. With proficiency levels in the single digits and a graduation rate in the low 40s, strong measures were called for, he says.
Tuesday: Union reconsiders position; presents Gallo with a plan very similar to the one she had originally proposed before the firing announcement. It's basically a version of SIG's "transformation," the weakest and least likely to succeed of the turnaround models.
Wednesday: Gallo says that her "heart skipped a beat" when she read the union's proposal. Re-opens negotiations with union. Union president Jane Sessums accepts.
Thursday: State Supe Deborah Gist throws her support behind the reconciliation. Cue "Kumbayah."
Whoa, what? So probably a few things happened. 1. The unions, local affiliate and both national orgs, were in a really tough spot. That was perfectly evident in Weingarten's backpedaling after her initial strong reaction to Obama's Monday comments, and Van Roekel's delay in releasing any comments at all. 2. Gallo has to be feeling the heat of being thrust into the national spotlight. Sadly, she apparently doesn't like being burned. Solution: back off. 3. Now that this has turned into a national story, there was tremendous pressure for Gallo's plan to work. You better believe that 1, 2 years down the line, had Gallo stuck to her firing plan and the school's scores were only so-so, the AFT and NEA would have dug up this story again and said "See, firing all the teachers doesn't work!" Combine that with the fact that school turnarounds are very hard to do, let alone do well, and this probably shouldn't be a huge surprise.
Still, it's depressing, because here was the top brass all the way down in D.C. standing up for the very tough decision of little district's supe. And here was the union scrambling to find a way to respond to the situation, when the stats at Central Falls HS basically spoke for themselves. And where was hard-knocking reformer RI State Supe Deborah Gist while all this reconciliation was going on?
And so goes the 24-hour media cycle. Sadly, Central Falls students are definitely no better, and maybe even worse, off today than they were earlier this week.
