SBO = School Based Option. Each position was posted in an SBO listing (citywide) and applicants sent in a 1-line “I am interested” In the school, a committee, the majority of whose members were union members, drafted criteria for each position, and sent them to the the applicants. The applicants returned more detailed written information. The committee chose which applicants were to be interviewed, conducted the interviews, and hired.

A big deal here is that the committee laid out a criteria for being qualified for the position. Each candidate was deemed “qualified” or “unqualified” and from the pool of qualified candidates, the most senior was offered the job.

Note two things that this was not: The most senior candidate was not automatically offered the job. And the most qualified was not automatically offered the job. (there was an out for wildly perfect qualifications – eg the candidate was for a program that included a sports journalism elective, and the candidate had written the NY Times guide to writing about journalism…)

Problems:

Power relations. Even with a majority of teachers, it was hard to disagree with your principal.

Work: writing the criteria was a lot of work. So was doing the interviews, verifying that the scoring was by rule, etc.

Scope: In big schools with lots of openings, writing boutique-y job descriptions didn’t make much sense for most departments: Need 6 math teachers, mostly for Course I (algebra), eventually teaching a range of courses.

In no year did anything near a majority of schools sign on.