Considering its role in sparking the most-important teachers union strike in American history five decades ago with its shutdown of New York City's schools, and the years it has since spent making teaching the public sector profession most-insulated from performance management, the American Federation of Teachers is an unlikely name to be found among the wonks and advocates at the helm of reforming America's public schools.
But these days, the nation's other national teachers union is getting some qualified praise for supporting a handful of initiatives that tip-toe toward the prescription of more-rigorous curriculum standards, standardized tests, school choice and consequences advocated by the school reformers the union has long opposed. Whether or not the AFT will fully embrace school reform -- or simply backslide into its inveterate support of traditional education concepts -- is another matter entirely.
In October, the AFT shocked the education world when its New Haven, Conn., local agreed to a new contract that would allow the New England city's school district to offer merit pay to the best-performing teachers and allows for the conversion of laggard schools into charter schools. Given the longstanding hostile opposition to performance pay of any kind, the concession even made normally skeptical education scholar Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute call it "a set of very exciting developments."