Bellevue Teachers Strike Ends

Good news Sunday night. Members of the Bellevue teachers' union voted to end their illegal strike and return to the classroom, accepting a contract agreement that boosted pay and curriculum flexibility. 

While it's good that agreement was reached relatively quickly, the successful strike again demonstrates the toothless nature of the laws prohibiting public employee strikes.

Two recent articles provide an intriguing frame for the dispute. Sunday's Seattle Times looks closely at the "push for perfection" that led to the now-controversial - or at least unpopular with teachers - common curriculum promoted by Mike Riley, Bellevue's acclaimed former superintendent of schools. It worked.

A $1.9 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006 allowed the district to pay more teachers to write curriculum for six core subjects, post it to the Web and add supplemental materials. Teachers' daily calendars and lesson goals were posted. Some teachers created videos to reteach difficult concepts.

Bellevue parent Susan Edmond remembers her daughter struggling with math three years ago as a freshman. She hadn't understood a teacher's explanation, but she went online and watched another teacher's video of the same lesson? over and over until the light went on.

"That's the beauty. Everybody is doing the same thing. It lets parents partner with teachers to make the kids more successful," she said.

But many teachers balked.

[A district teacher]  remembers a meeting at which teachers asked Riley when they could use their professional judgment to deviate from the set lesson plans.

"Riley told us that the judgment had already been made and we were to teach the lesson as written," [he] said.

Rob Prufer, a social-studies teacher at Newport High School, said Riley was an inspirational leader and a personal mentor to him, but he believes the superintendent began to view teachers as an obstacle to improving education.

Nonetheless, the district consistently ranks among the state's highest-performing public school districts.

And as Marysville school board member Michael Kundu reminds us in this Everett Herald op-ed, we still have a long way to go.

During the 2007-08 school year, only 39.7 percent of Washington's 10th-grade students met state standards in science. Fewer than half (49.3 percent) met math standards. While science percentages reflected a small (slow) increase over 2006-07 (science 36.4 percent, math 50.4 percent), and 2005-06 (science 35 percent, math 51 percent), math scores reflect a gradual decline.