Putting the public in Seattle Public Schools

LABOR talks between Seattle Public Schools and its teachers appropriately provides no role for the public, but the confidential nature of union negotiations should not negate the potential influence of citizens.

Public opinion matters.

Our Schools Coalition has many citizens and community groups within its tent, including El Centro de la Raza and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle as well as the district's fundraising arm, the Alliance for Education, and elected officials such as Seattle Councilmember Tim Burgess.

A poll commissioned by the coalition outlines priorities that ought to cast a thoughtful shadow as district negotiators and the Seattle Education Association begin talks later this month. The results are pretty straightforward. Families want good teachers, a fair way of evaluating them and an overall system that looks beyond the number of years a teacher has sat in a classroom.

These things are on the radar screen of Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson. The schools chief must tread carefully, acknowledging the public's priorities but setting a realistic tone for what emerges from an agreement with the district's 3,000 teachers.

Contracts offer a ripe opportunity to make school improvements. It was during a previous negotiation that the district and the union shifted away from a seniority-based layoff system for South End schools, protecting a lot of good new teachers.

Seattle has streamlined to some extent its evaluation process, ridding it of some of the time-consuming hurdles that discouraged principals from properly evaluating teachers.

Guidance may come from the experiences of West Seattle and Hawthorne elementary schools and Cleveland High School, schools using stronger evaluations as a condition of federal aid.

The state Legislature has developed a multitiered accountability system including a pilot project on teacher and principal evaluations.

A still-recovering economy requires a calibration of expectations in this round of union negotiations. But a group of concerned citizens rightly seeks to add the weight of its influence.