A current argument in the education policy world
is between those who argue that the quality of inputs to system matter (i.e.
resources, poverty in communities, etc.) and those who argue that we need to
emphasize the quality of outputs (i.e. reformers). Here is my
tongue-in-cheek argument that this discussion is itself specious. I am
not attacking religion, just trying to demonstrate the absurdity of applying a
factory model in an inappropriate context. It gets ugly fast.
All this input/output business just underscores
the paradigm that organizes our schools: the factory. In a factory, the
quality of the inputs matter, as do the quality of the outputs. I worked
in a factory. We manufactured architectural millwork. Now if I sent
#2 pine to the door shop as opposed to FAS mahogany or rift and quartered white
oak, I'd get a different outcome (I won't mention the injury factor this would
entail.) They'd probably muddle through and call me an idiot, but they'd
get some sort of decent door done. Do this for enough years and it would
degrade the craftsmanship, as workers become demoralized. I could go
"make better doors or you're fired." Workers could organize a
union and push back. Yadda yadda yadda.
Let's apply the factory paradigm to a different
context, say church. So the inputs are the babies that we baptize, batch
process in Sunday school, confirm, marry - the whole 7 sacraments thing.
We send the finished product out the other end feet first in a pine box.
Then we quantify - how many souls went to heaven, how many went to hell?
As our statistical methods become more sophisticated, we could calculate how
many years souls spent in purgatory with, say, their eyelids sewn shut with
barbed wire (see Dante.)
This would enable
us to calculate value added scores for priests and nuns, who we could then
hire, fire, promote to bishop or otherwise "differentially
compensate" as we deem fit.
But wait - some of
the priests object, "our churches are filled with alcoholics, prostitutes,
beggars, and criminals. That's why our numbers are down!" Too
bad! Improve your technique - demographics is not destiny! We
should close failing churches, fire the priest and half the nuns, or turn the
church over to the management of televangelists. We could even have a
nun's union run by bad nuns (and excommunicate the nuns who dared to strike.)
What if instead of applying the factory paradigm
to churches (amusing, but getting tiresome) we applied a church paradigm to
schools? Schools as temples of learning. Just as churches (at their
best) can be incubators of human spirituality, schools could be incubators of
the human intellect.
Of course if we transfer the Roman
military/ecclesiastical hierarchy along with the paradigm (schools are already
organized along these lines), we'll end up right where we are now with no
changes. And I'll personally skip the celibacy thing thank you very much!
Or maybe there's a better paradigm for the
organization of schools - but it sure ain't the factory!
It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks rather
than as individual persons. These tasks
can then be distributed within the system, either to make administration
do-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building level
administrator entirely. Improving
education means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the way
of the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.
Many would say that we need to do
a better job of recruiting, training and inducting administrators. There are also those that would say that we
should look for administrative talent outside the ranks of educators, and
recruit administrators from the ranks of business and industry.
Neither of these solutions has
much promise. If improved recruitment,
training and induction of administrators were a solution, we’d already be doing
it. At best, it can produce a handful of
superstars, when what we need is systems to elevate the practice of the average
administrator. Those systems are doomed
to failure because the job is itself unreasonable – you have to be “superman”
(or woman) to perform it. Systems that speak
to the average are an inefficient way to create the exceptional.
Likewise, recruiting from outside
the profession means you will recruit people with a subset of skills needed for
successful administration, but certain skills, like evaluation, curriculum and
assessment, are so deeply rooted in classroom practice that an educational
leader from outside would be rendered dependent on others, or risk failure in
these key categories.
This points to a simpler
solution: why not re-conceive administration as tasks rather than individuals,
and then distribute these tasks within the organization to people with the
skills and talent to perform individual tasks well? Then a range of administrative solutions
become possible:
Elimination of the building
administrator: The more radical solution is found in a handful of
teacher led schools around the country.
At the Math
Science Leadership Academy, an elementary school organized by union
leaders in Denver, administrative tasks are distributed among a team of
teacher leaders. The existence of a
strategic compensation model, ProComp,
encourages leadership work engagement among teachers. But to succeed, communities have to let
go of traditional paradigms of the classroom and school: one teacher full
time in the classroom (leadership work requires release time within the
student day), and the single “go to” administrator as the ombudsman for
every issue.
Reconceptualizing administration as traffic
control: This model is found in the Plattsburgh
NY City School District where superintendent Jake Short believes in
cultivating and “driving down” decision making capacity in the system to
the level of implementation, where the information to make good decisions
actually exists. Short monitors the
resulting decisions for quality, and legality, and to make sure that the
necessary decisions are in fact made and implemented. When interviewing Short, I pressed him
on how he would behave if he disagreed with one of the resulting
decisions. In matters pertaining to
the legality of the decision, he is obligated to intervene, but otherwise
it becomes a persuasion task; he avoids overruling the decisions of the
people to whom he has delegated in the interest of nurturing a system with
a distributed capacity for excellent decision making.
An
expansive Wallace Foundation study devoted to examining the traits of
effective school principals has found that high student achievement is linked
to “collective leadership”: the combined influence of educators, parents, and
others on school decisions.
Distributing certain tasks or
functions within the organization: This third possibility, breaking
off discrete tasks in the interest of making administration a more
reasonable job, is exemplified in the many districts nationally who have
implemented Peer Assistance and Review Systems. The first such system was the Toledo
Plan, which dates back thirty years.
Evaluation and support of novice teachers as well as struggling
veterans, is turned over to teachers and their union. Involving teachers in the evaluation of
peers works because teachers are affected by the presence of ineffective
colleagues.
Allowing
teachers, through their unions, to take charge of quality in the profession,
has been shown
in the research to elevate practice.
When a consensus in the teaching community develops around practice, the
union supports removal of non-performing individuals because teachers
participated in the decision and the fairness of that decision cannot be
impugned.
The conceptual
difficulty for boards will be paying teachers for work that is not direct
instruction of students.
In my Vermont experience,
evaluation is the piece of administration which gets short shrift. Administrators, even when they have the skill
set to do the job, do not have the time because of the myriad demands of the principalship. Administrators also often lack knowledge to
be genuinely helpful when evaluating teachers in specialized content
areas.
Breaking off this one piece and
handing it to teachers and their unions seems to me a first step towards
establishing a model of building and district administration that can actually
be accomplished by the real flesh and blood people to whom we entrust the task. But just a first step – ultimately resolving
the issue of rural administration may well require more radical solutions.
It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks rather
than as individual persons. These tasks
can then be distributed within the system, either to make administration
do-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building level
administrator entirely. Improving
education means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the way
of the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.
In my twenty plus years of
teaching/working in Vermont public schools, I’ve worked under fourteen
principals and six superintendents. I
have to temper this assertion by pointing out that, as a rural elementary
school music teacher, I’ve always worked in two schools simultaneously. I’ve been twenty years at one of those
schools, where I have experienced six of those principals and four of the
superintendents, an average tenure of a little over three years for the
principals. The five year average for
superintendents actually exceeds the national average by about two years,
mostly due to our current superintendent having served almost thirteen years
This collection of administrators
has been a mixed bag. As a group, they
lurch from the incompetent, the criminal, and the incoherent, to a handful who
could actually perform enough of the grab bag of tasks that constitute administration
to be considered competent. Proficiency
in administration seems to be less a function of mastery of the craft and more
a question of mere longevity: two of the more ostensibly successful
administrators I’ve served under achieved whatever success largely due to
outlasting their faculties long enough to implement some changes.
Longevity is a pretty low
bar. The task of school administration
itself, however, is impossible. One must
demonstrate skills in curriculum, teacher evaluation, budgeting, scheduling,
contract administration, education law, special education, management of the
physical plant, politics, discipline, transportation, communication, negotiation
and personnel management (not to mention leadership…) I have yet to see the
complete package in any one individual, not because there is anything wrong
with the people themselves, but because the job is itself unreasonable. Proficiency or even distinction in any small
set of these tasks may not be enough to overcome failure in any one area.
Furthermore, administrators are
promoted from the classroom. The
qualities that make one a skilled and effective classroom teacher are not
necessarily the skills that make one an effective administrator - but background
in the classroom is essential to having the “street cred” to run a school. This problem is exacerbated by the lack of assistant principalships in the Vermont to train prospective
administrators.
Anyone that has sat on an administrative search committee in a small town can speak of the thinness of the talent pool. One
often experiences a motley collection of retreads and unproven first timers. In Vermont, the real dance of the lemons
happens not in the teaching force, which tends to be stable and competent, but
in the ranks of administration. The
plethora of small community schools in our state means we have a demand for a
large number of administrators relative to the student population. Then we spend a lot of money hiring people to
do impossible work.
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and School Improvement Grants (SIG) have exacerbated the talent pool problem by creating job instability for principals - who in their right mind would want a job where you face being fired for reasons not under your direct control? Every one of the four turnaround models involve firing the principal, and absent a sensible re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) - or a waiver - 100% of schools face being identified as failing and therefore on the path to firing their principal by 2014. This year 72% of Vermont schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP.)
Please don’t interpret this post as an
indictment of every administrator. I
have worked with some excellent administrators; the problem is that they are
the exception rather than the rule. The rest? Good, well-meaning people plying a 1950's role cursed with 21st century expectations.
After years of toiling for
unions that protect lazy teachers and allow them to harm innocent children,
I’ve finally come to my senses and bought into the neo-liberal agenda.
Privatization, choice, competition and markets….think of this as my reverse
Diane Ravitch moment. If you can’t beat’em, join’em.
This is my ticket to the gravy train and I want to share some great ideas I’ve
come up with.
We have a problem. As
taxes on the wealthy approach zero, foundations are no longer going to be
necessary to shelter the wealth of the rich from taxation. Revenues will
decline as the middle class (the people who get taxed) shrinks. How are
we going to fund our schools with neither revenue, nor foundations?
The answer lies in the
financial markets. Wall Street has the talent and the capacity to develop
innovative investment instruments that can save our schools. Why did this
never occur to me before? There are so many smart people on Wall Street –
I know this is true because they have more money than I do. If we unlock
the genius of Wall Street everything will be OK.
There are a couple of key
innovations that make this financial miracle possible. First of all,
thanks to standardized tests, education has become a commodity. It can be
traded just like pork bellies or Brent crude. Second, when a product
becomes a commodity, the efficiency of the market allows the producer to be
paid below the rate needed to sustain life, meaning that education costs cannot
only be controlled, but radically cut. The commoditization of education provides
a way to quantify costs per unit output (test scores.)
I propose that investors be
able to make direct investments schools – in essence, buy shares. The
value of the investment will fluctuate according to the value of the school,
which will be a function of test scores and per pupil spending. Like any
good commodities business, schools that can squeeze higher test scores at lower
unit costs will be more valuable. When this occurs, the value of the
security will rise.
This market could be part of
the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Investors will be able to use put and
call options so they can bet either for or against student learning. In
addition, a futures market would allow accurate predictions of test scores at
individual schools through the price fluctuations of these securities.
With securities pricing information in hand, management could bring resources
to bear on problems pro-actively. The miracle of the invisible hand will
improve schools even as everyone gets rich – and all with no messy revenues to
raise!
One difficulty this poses for
the wealthy investor is exposure to conditions in individual schools. For
example an outbreak of flu, or an inconvenient school shooting during testing
could cause an investor to lose money. Plus, statisticians have warned us
of the instability of VAM when applied to the relatively small student populations
of individual schools and teachers’ classrooms – what rational investor would
want to be exposed to this sort of risk?
Luckily, we can use derivatives
to hedge against these risks. Individual school securities can be sliced
up and bundled with other schools with similar characteristics. These
derivatives could be sliced and bundled a second time to allow creative money
managers to customize investment portfolios for the risk profiles of their
wealthy investors. Investors would be able to hedge their risks and bet
for and against student learning simultaneously, while continuing to make
money. These derivatives could become so divorced from the underlying value
of student test scores that they increase in value indefinitely. This
will encourage the wealthy to pour their money into schools, now guaranteed
money makers.
I believe that similar
mechanisms can be employed on other public goods. A prime example is
infant mortality rates – a candidate for commoditization if there ever was
one. We have a statistic which can float up and down, and a measurable
unit cost. The use of derivatives in this case would create an efficient
market that would allow infant mortality rates in a community like East St.
Louis to settle to an economically sustainable level.
The miracle of the market is
that by removing irrational considerations, like ethics, that distort the
economic system and lead to inefficiencies, like doctors and hospitals, we can
achieve the best possible rates of infant mortality at the lowest cost.
Self interest flows naturally to the public good, with no sacrifices.
I am so glad to have discovered
the power of unregulated markets. I’d like to pitch this idea to Goldman
Sachs, and the Gates Foundation. I don’t think I’ll bother with the US
Government, since there won’t be much of it left in a few years.
My daughter Liz Beatty-Owens gave this speech at a labor rally at
Johnson State College in October. Liz is
20, and is already a skilled organizer, with a deep understanding of the
political and educational issues we face.
She and I work together when we can on behalf of the Vermont Workers Center. Liz spent last weekend at Zuccotti Park in
New York City participating in Occupy Wall Street (that's Liz serenading Mayor Bloomberg)
I am standing here today because-
I am a student- half way done with my college career and I am already $20,000
in debt. And yes- in terms of debt I am one of the lucky ones.
I am here today because I am a
student with a 15-credit work load, working 2 part time jobs, thousands of
dollars in debt and I still cannot regularly afford to live comfortably - and I
know I am not the only one.
I am here today because I have
followed the rules. I graduated from
high school and I went to college - the path laid out for us by our society -
yet it has not been made a sustainable path.
I can’t help but feel discouraged
when each semester I have multiple peers drop out of college for financial
reasons- going off to minimum wage jobs or, in two cases, the military, with
semesters of debt looming behind them.
I don’t know about you but I want to live in an educated society where
a college degree is not considered a privilege but recognized as a social good.
I have had the opportunity these
last two semesters through numerous political science classes to speak to many
of our Vermont political leaders and active community members. And more often
than not the question is asked of me in this situation- why aren’t more young
adults involved with politics- more active and driven in this field?
And as this question resonates
with me I can’t help but turn to them and say: How can we expect the majority
of students to support the government when students are not being looked out
for by our government. We are
underfunded and consequently unsupported. It’s a give and take deal.
That said, it has become clear to
me this semester that the student population at Johnson is no longer willing to
stand idly by. We have groups forming
such as Students for a Democratic
Society (Wednesday nights at 7:00) and an ambitious group of students named
Johnson to Wall Street (Tuesdays at
7:00).
And lastly, I would like to see
the creation of a student union to represent our voice and our expectations at
a state wide level- initially here at Johnson but then becoming VSC wide. There is power in numbers- and we have the
intelligence, the energy and the drive to create change right here, right now.
I would like to invite every
Johnson student to sign up for the Student Union. Our table is right over there….
With a unified voice we can stand
up for students and create change at a localized level.
Let’s ask Vermont to once again
set an example for the rest of the country- we’ve done it before with health
care and same sex marriage- let’s do it again! Let’s support our students, fund
our colleges and create social justice!
I gave this speech April 4, 2011 in Burlington, VT as a participant on a panel "Which Way Forward for Unions?"
I love my union. I believe that unions are a fundamental
social good. They are institutions that
elevate not only the workers who are their members, but all workers in general
by raising the bar of good employment practices and fair compensation.
I’m second third generation union. My mother worked 34 years for the county jail
and her union guaranteed that after a lifetime of toil and difficulties she
retired in dignity and could fulfill her greatest wish – that in old age she
could be independent and not a burden on her children.
VT-NEA has helped guarantee a
middle class existence and a dignified retirement for thousands of Vermont’s
teachers. For me personally, engagement
with my union has given me tremendous opportunities to develop professional and
leadership skills. For this I am very
grateful.
Part of caring deeply is to be
critical and encourage improvement and greater efficacy in the union. VT-NEA and all teachers unions are in a time
of great flux. The ability to change is
key to our survival. But we must do this
in a way that honors and is built on the strengths that we have inherited from
the hard work and sacrifice of those who have come before us.
Where do we stand right now? Here in Vermont, the system of teacher
negotiations is broken. We have an
expensive, ritualistic political theatre of teacher negotiations, a divisive
process which has become detached from the fundamental purpose of the
educational enterprise: great student learning, and produces incremental
language changes and pay raises below the rate of inflation
However, in one district I work
in, I assisted in an interest based process that quickly arrived at a three
year settlement including a lift up and set down of the salary schedule, which
yielded new money in excess of 11% over three years. The contrast was stark.
When I went to Washington last
summer for my Fellowship, I was puzzling about this contrast. I had a chance to sit down with one of the Department’s
top experts on unions and after a half hour of analysis he looked at me and
said “you guys have a mess.”
My take away from this
conversation was that we needed bargaining reform in Vermont. But as I continued to work with the
department on labor management questions, it became apparent to me that
bargaining reform could only exist in the context of comprehensive union
reform. What does this look like?
Industrial Unionism uses
collective power to meet bread and butter needs of members and ensure fairness
from management. It is the bulk of what
we think of when we consider teacher union work: negotiations, grievances, and yes strikes, or
near strikes. It assumes an adversarial relationship
with management. The Industrial Frame has elevated the profession, but presents
some problems.
First, industrial style labor
relations were adopted from industry. As
schools evolve away from a factory model, the foundation of the industrial
frame is shifting beneath us.
Second, the political conditions sustaining
this model are changing – think Wisconsin.
Not only are we facing a coordinated, well financed attack on our
collective bargaining rights from the radical right, but the Democratic Party,
to which teacher unions hitched their fortunes, is no longer a reliable ally or
protector.
Third, the public, as well as
rank and file, may be becoming impatient with the inefficiency of teacher
negotiations, detached from the fundamental purpose of education: great student
learning.
Professional Unionism seeks
control of the profession to ensure quality.
In this frame, focus is on professional development and quality of
teaching/learning. The methods include
collaboration with management. I believe
many teachers identify with this frame, because confrontation is not in our
character. The problem here is that it
is naïve to think that teachers’ good intentions will make stupid or
duplicitous behavior by bureaucrats, politicians and administrators go away.
Social Justice Unionism seeks
equity for our students through active engagement in the community. It wraps the unions’ arms around bigger
social problems, problems that if they were solved would help make the
curriculum accessible to even our most vulnerable students. Social Justice Unionism represents the
pinnacle of our work. How do we get
there, especially in the overt hostility of the current environment?
First, it is important to note
that these three frames are symbiotic.
You don’t get to choose. Living
exclusively in one is perilous. The
three frames are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for
the success of teachers’ unions.
Second, I used to believe that
the three frames existed in equality.
Events in Wisconsin and other states this year have taught me that they
actually exist in a hierarchy. For all
of the historical and political problems of an exclusive industrial unionism, a
robust capacity to attend to the bread and butter issues of both members and
unions themselves is the foundation for the existence of meaningful progress in
the Professional and Social Justice Frames.
There will always remain the need for working people to confront
power. Anything else is wishful
thinking.
The possibilities of Professional
and Social Justice Unionism flow from the power of Industrial Unionism. Professional Unionism unlocks the potential
of collaborative labor management relations to improve educational outcomes,
but is defended from foolishness by the shield of Industrial Unionism. Social Justice Unionism extends the benefits
of our work to stakeholders outside our membership, especially children, and
creates a stable political base that cannot be provided by an exclusively
industrial/adversarial approach.
Professional Unionism enjoys the enhanced capabilities of students and
families whose basic needs are being met.
Where does Wisconsin fit in this
vision? The political vandals like Scott
Walker who are seeking to end teachers’ collective bargaining rights are
essentially destroying the possibility of teachers unions becoming strong,
responsible partners in creating great student learning. Unions need excess capacity to operate in the
Professional and Social Justice frames.
Attacking our sustainability by eliminating dues deductions, as in
Alabama, or forcing us to hold certification elections each year, as in
Wisconsin, compromises our ability to put our shoulder to the common challenge
of a creating a great educational system.
I want to close with one last
thought concerning Social Justice Unionism.
Before I became active with VT-NEA, I was active with the Vermont
Worker’s Center. I came away from that experience
with an insight: how dangerous it is for my union to go it alone. Solidarity with other workers is a keystone
moving forward in the current hostile labor environment. I foresaw that to the extent we failed to
help others, it meant that we were failing to push problems away from ourselves
proactively. I predicted the present
crisis; I am shocked at the scale and virulence of the assault.
Dr. Martin Luther King was
assassinated on this day in 1968 after coming to the support of striking
Memphis sanitation workers. He didn’t
need to do this, but he did, because he fully grasped the necessity of workers’
struggle for justice. I hope that
tonight we are in some small way honoring the spirit of solidarity in which Dr.
King gave his life. Thank you.
How you spell relief? I spell it SB5. Finally the tide has turned in the corporate
anti-labor assault on public sector unions.
If there were teacher unions in
any state that didn't deserve SB5 it was those of Ohio. Ohio is the home of the Toledo Plan, the
ground breaking Peer Assistance and Review System (PARS) which has been a
national model of teacher taking control of professionalism for decades. According to new
research, deployment of a PARS system leads to more collaborative labor
management relations.
Another example: The Dayton local
was recently highlighted in NEA Today for using the grievance procedure to
acquire textbooks for special needs students.
But I discovered the most
significant example of the progressive work of Ohio's teacher unions in Denver,
at the US Department of Education's Labor Management
Conference. At a reception, I spent
considerable time talking with several representatives of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,
a federal agency charged with improving relations between labor and
management. At one point I was talking
with an FMCS mediator from Ohio, who turned to a colleague and asked,
"What percentage of teacher negotiations we do in Ohio do you think are interest
based?" The colleague thought
about it for a moment, and replied, "Eighty percent."
Eighty percent. As a VT-NEA local leader, I've been working
to encourage the use of interest based bargaining (IBB) in two Vermont
supervisory unions, a state where the labor-management relations often have an adversarial
character because they rely on distributive tools. We are just taking our first baby steps to
achieve what has been achieved in Ohio.
And Ohio, where FMCS deploys this tool 80% of the time, which has been
using contemporary conflict management tools for decades, where unions join
with their communities to create great student results, experiences SB5. I was shocked, saddened and angered.
Ohio's unions did not deserve
this assault. They were punished for
doing some of the most progressive, collaborative and innovative work in the
country. I am incredibly relieved that
the citizens of Ohio recognized the treasure they have in these great civic
institutions, public sector unions, by not just repealing SB5, but repudiating
their governor by an almost two to one margin.
