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Teacher cooperatives: what happens when teachers run the school?

Article Excerpt
Cris Parr stands in a sunny room in an old high school surveying rows of drill presses, saws, and other outmoded industrial behe moths. Clearly no one has taught shop here in a long time, not since the goal was to prepare kids from the struggling neighborhood outside for a life in the trades.

Parr would like someone to haul the machines away so she can replace them with drafting tables configured for computer-aided design. In most high schools, this would be the principal's problem, or something for facilities management. She's a teacher, but it's very much her responsibility to change this room full of curios into a place that graduates kids ready for a high-tech workforce.

Parr is one of six members of a teacher cooperative that contracts with Milwaukee Public Schools to run the School for Urban Planning and Architecture, or SUPAR. She thought up the idea for the charter school and negotiated its partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She is directly accountable for the success of the 84 students, 93 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

This is precisely the type of small, nimble program envisioned by charter schools' creators. Twenty years ago, when the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed the notion of innovative schools operating outside conventional district bureaucracies, his aim was to put teachers at the helm. "If you want to hold teachers accountable," he posited, "then teachers have to be able to run the school."

Parr's school is also a lineal descendant of one of the early success stories profiled in Joe Nathan's celebrated 1996 survey, Charter Schools. When Parr began to consider applying for a charter, her first stop was the teacher-owned cooperative Minnesota New Country School. Galvanized by its collaborative atmosphere, she and her father, lifelong teacher organizer John Parr, spent the drive home drafting union bylaws that would allow her to start a similar school chartered by a large urban district.

Fast-forward two decades from Shanker's then-radical proposition and there are nearly 80 teacher-governed charter schools around the country. Although most are legally constituted as worker cooperatives, they better resemble the partnerships long enjoyed by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals used to viewing their practice as a collective...

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