The Scaled Down Contract: Boon or Bane to the Teaching Profession?
Today I am sharing a guest post by Moira Saucedo, who is the mother of a special needs student in the Arlington County Public Schools, in Arlington, Virginia.
by Moira Saucedo.
My interest was sparked by a June, 2011 notice on Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's website of a $500,000 grant to the Future Is Now Schools, (FIN) a charter schools management organization founded by Steve Barr. FIN has been recently re-branded (some say divorced) from the LA-based Green Dot Public Schools, founded by Barr, and from Green Dot America, an effort by Barr to open charter schools nationally. The purpose of the grant is "to provide national support for the use of a scaled-down collective bargaining contract and to amplify the voice of reform-minded teachers in select cities by sharing organizing expertise."
The "scaled-down collective bargaining contract" phrase gave me pause. Our nation has just gone through a harrowing year of stripped-away collective bargaining agreements (CBAs), and rollbacks of pensions and