WE ALL KNOW WHAT THE PROBLEM IS:

Boston's breakthrough schools (Neal Peirce, 3/26/06 Seattle Times)

Could this city's "pilot schools" — a cross between charter schools and regular city system schools — signal a "tipping point" in the long struggle to reshape urban America's embattled public-education systems?

Paul Grogan, author of the 2001 book "Comeback Cities" and now president of the Boston Foundation, believes so. He predicts that pilot schools, part of the formal school system but granted charter-like powers over budgets, hiring and curriculum, may prove the missing key to overcoming stifling bureaucracy and conquering "the final frontier of inner-city revitalization."

For a flavor of pilot-school culture, I visited the four-year-old Boston Community Leadership Academy (BCLA), formerly a problem-plagued district high school with low academic scores. But when headquarters moved to close the school, the recently appointed principal, Nicole Bahnam, her teachers and parents protested vehemently and asked for pilot-school status.

Headquarters agreed. With help from the Boston-based Center for Collaborative Education, Bahnam and her staff rewrote their entire school mission to focus on a rigorous academic experience and personalized attention — in Bahnam's words, "a program driven by kids' needs, not by any bureaucracy."

Sure, if you can end-run the unions and public bureaucrats you can improve schools, but doesn't it make more sense to break them permanently?

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 27, 2006 7:17 AM