PROSE are given a wider latitude to operate outside of union rules and City regulations. They can pursue different policies for selecting and evaluating teachers and handling grievances. They also have the freedom to experiment with the length of the school day, staggering school days, changing class size and utilizing small-group instruction, among other things.
The schools are supposed to be laboratories for experimenting with reform. The Union claims they are not charter-school wannabes. Jenny Sedlis of StudentsFirstNY affirms the fact that these schools are not charters because they lack a wider latitude to do things like demolish seniority rights and tenure.
Schools had to receive at least 65% approval from their staff in order to make the transformation to a PROSE. According to the UFT, schools approved to become PROSE voted overwhelming in favor of the change, as high as 95% in half the schools, and over 80% in a "vast" majority. Yet, the staff in ten of the 72 schools approved jointly by the D.o.E. and the U.F.T. failed to approve the plans.
Of the 62 PROSE, the specifics of the reforms to be enacted have only been spelled out in three schools. Some of the changes involve staggering start times for students in different grades, changing evaluation procedures and allowing the use of the kitchen to help students learn about healthier food choices. In and of itself, these changes don't seem to be on the scale of the type of reforms needed to best help students succeed in life. I guess we will need to wait and see what the other 59 schools have in mind.
It's my guess that the success of these schools will be limited compared to some of the most "successful" charters as long as PROSE cannot screen out applicants, expel others and function in ways contrary to the mission of a true public school or redefine success to mean something with standards very contrary to that of traditional test score measures or most measures of "college readiness."
Let us hope that PROSE will be anything but prosaic which Mr. Google defines as "having the style or diction of prose; lacking poetic beauty; commonplace; unromantic."
If I could open a school for experimentation, I would propose ideas which seem to have fallen out of favor today, ideas that basically represent renewing respect for teaching as a profession and affording students better learning conditions:
1. Cut class size so that teachers can better focus on the needs of the student before them.
2. Offer more services to make sure that the needs of students outside of school do not interfere with their ability to reach their potential in schools.
3. Offer students a wider variety of learning options, including more music, art and drama as well as vocational training with links to real-world employment.
4. Stop concocting tests to purposefully fail students, simultaneously cutting down their egos and those of their parents in an attempt to "prove" that teachers suck and parents dote overly on their little dullards.
5. Stop attacking the protections of teachers, including the due-process rights associated with tenure and seniority protections that denigrate experience in favor of a cheaper, more malleable workforce.
6. Pay teacher salaries at least comparable to that of the suburbs to attract and retain better teachers in the City. In the best of all possible worlds, and in my wild imagination, since the conditions are more challenging, City teachers might receive even higher pay than those in the suburbs.
I know these ideas will not gain favor with many due largely to cost and the fact they counter the simple solution of using teachers as scapegoats. In my mind, however, these ideas put into action would be anything but prosaic. They might even become poetry.
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