Baltimore City Contract Negotiations and the Arts

If you are a Baltimore City teacher, or your child attends Baltimore City schools, you have been following the ongoing conflict between the teachers' union and the district's Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Andres Alonso. Despite a recent visit by Dr. Alonso to our school, and a short spurt of related messages over our PTA listserve, I'm still getting most of my information from local news sources. Recently, the Baltimore Sun posted this article with a good synopsis of events, so far: Schools, city union struggle for planning. Though it is a bit biased against the teacher's union, it does offer enough information to stimulate further curiosity.

In essence, our contracts have not yet been negotiated. The issue that keeps finding its way into the press is planning time. Alonso would like to give principals the ability to mandate shared planning time for teaching teams, once a week for 45 minutes. The union's arguments primarily target elementary school teachers, who are currently guaranteed only 3 planning periods per week. According to the article, the city's contract also allows for longer lunch periods and shorter days compared to other Maryland schools. This is not true at all schools. K-8 schools often have much shorter lunch periods (15-20 minutes) to allow all classes access to a single cafeteria. A colleague recently reminded others that the union does not necessarily represent the opinions of all teachers. It should also be noted that the contract does not represent the situation in all schools. If that were the case, all music teachers would have a tuned piano in their rooms, by now.

Art, music, and other "resource" teachers represent a small portion of teachers affected by the stall in negotiations, but we also have additional challenges. Even though I teach middle school, our department chair lobbied classroom teachers and administrators to make time for shared resource planning once a month. The request was denied. Depending on the team, middle school teachers have one or two planning periods per day, while resource teachers all have one. At the elementary level, resource teachers often only have planning time in 15-minute increments, 3 times per day. I've heard both teachers and parents suggest that schools should offer more resource classes to open up more planning time for classroom teachers...and not to benefit the overall education of their children.

At this point, I am still young and inexperienced in the political aspects of education, and it is difficult to "choose sides" on this important issue. I can't say whether increased team planning/reduced individual planning will help children or hurt them. (If it hurts teachers' ability to complete important paperwork, provide tutoring, etc, then arguably, it may hurt children, too.) What worries me is the implications for arts education. We just finished developing an arts curriculum last year. We don't all teach the same units, but we are expected to teach the same skills. We don't have a daily or weekly schedule to follow, like other subjects do. Would team planning within our own school be effective? There are so many variables; only experience and time would yield the answer. Resource teachers already struggle against the attitude that the arts are secondary in importance to tested subjects under No Child Left Behind. Yet, we are expected to produce artwork for the hallways or performing groups for concerts because they make the school more attractive to prospective parents. We do these things before and after school, and yes, during our precious planning time, too. (If I didn't think that I had to run an extra-curricular choir to keep my job, I'd find a better way to do it. Thankfully, the city pays a stipend to secondary teachers who have performing groups. They don't offer the same benefit to the elementary teachers.)

The purpose of any educational "product" should be learning, but in some cases the purpose is political. Which school can earn a positive story in the newspapers? Who can gain mayoral recognition? It's not about finding a cure for cancer, it's about winning a Nobel Prize. If resource teachers lose planning time to supplement shared planning for classroom teachers, no one wins.