I was at a political event last Saturday in my little rural
town. Bernie Sanders came and spoke. Nothing about education, even
though he is on HELP and has a brilliant education aide in Jessica Cardichon.
I was volunteering (my daughter organized the event.) I was
tempted to stand up and ask a question about Vermont rejecting the NCLB waiver
process, or maybe something about our failure to resource Common Core
implementation, but I didn't. First of all I was sick and exhausted (no
brain cells left.)
Second, I realized if I asked questions of this sort
none of my neighbors would know what the hell I was talking about.
What have we done? Have we made education policy so arcane
that the average citizen cannot meaningfully participate? Has it become a
forest of acronyms and a minefield of political relationships that play out behind
closed doors?
Does this all provide cover for ostensibly progressive leaders to
unleash their inner tea partier?
The evil genius of NCLB was its simplicity. You don't need
to understand the subtleties of VAM formulas, or navigate the bloated world of
"multiple measures" to understand 100% proficiency.
Unfortunately that particular deal with the devil was made a decade ago.....and
he's back to demand payment.
The following is my reaction to an Education Week article, States' Costs Skyrocket on Master's Degree Pay for Teachers by Stephen Sawchuk on July 17, 2012. The narrative is familiar: master’s degrees add no value in terms of student test scores, therefore, they represent the misappropriation of resources. Read the original, then cool your jets:
Let's flip this and consider the single salary schedule for
what it is: a
deferred compensation system. It is
not that senior teachers with advanced degrees are overpaid, but rather that
beginning teachers are underpaid, unless you count the IOU represented by that
top level salary twenty years in the future plus the pension. The highest paid teachers are being paid for
their work, plus an amount representing work they performed many years before. Retired teachers are paid entirely for
services rendered in the past.
Since single salary schedules contain both steps and
columns, master’s degrees, and arrangements which subsidize them, represent a
mechanism for states and localities to control the pace that individuals move
across the schedule towards those top level salaries. In other words, requirements for advanced
education string people along and allow the polity to delay the day which it
has to pay professional salaries.
Rather than pull
deferred compensation from the future into the present, while honoring current
commitments, political expediency leads to attacks on the single salary
schedule itself, including masters degrees, pensions, and tenure, the glue
which gives deferred compensation legitimacy. A social contract is being
broken, without recompense, with the people charged with caring for our
children. Our nation is morally debased
as a result.
The real problem with master’s degrees is that they are
driven by an economic arrangement, rather than an educational one. Many teachers do use them as an opportunity
to improve their practice. Perhaps the
imperfections of advanced degrees stem from not really being intended for this
purpose. The real focus is on delaying
payment for services rendered, with the added bonus of being able to walk away
from the deal when the debts become inconvenient.
Experiences at the 2012 NEA Representative Assembly left me with a lot to think about. As I began to reflect on lessons learned from
working on 3 different New Business Items (4, 5, and 82), I discovered a growing
list. Here are twelve takeaways from the
experience:
Hmmm - can you imagine this being issued in 2012?
Use the “we” voice. Leading in an organization means you
are no longer on your own. “We” is
both more accurate and more powerful.
Thank you Mary
McDonald for the reminder!
Have metrics for success. That way you win no matter what. You have to have a metric to measure success
if your initiative happens, and you have to have a metric for success if
your initiative doesn’t happen. The
latter was certainly the case for NBI #4. But this happened by default – being intentional
about it takes it to the next level.
Planning for success is valuable both in leadership and teaching.
Conviction matters. Genuinely caring about the organization
and outcomes trumps a lot of bad stuff.
Conviction confuses the self-interested. They don’t understand your motivations.
Relationship means knowing what people
are good at.Jo Anderson
of the US Department of Education told me, “Relationship is everything.” I never truly understood what this meant
until this RA. Knowing the
strengths of others, and understanding how they operate, is critical to
trust.
Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork. As a rural leader, I’m used to being
chief cook and bottle washer. As a
team coalesced around NBI #4 in the TURN caucus and around NBI #82 more
generally, I was amazed to watch high capacity leaders quickly deploy
their strengths and figure out their roles on the fly. It was a real eye opener.
Break off pieces of a problem. Doing something specific and actionable
is better than doing something diffuse and rhetorical. This is the theory and practice of being
bold. Actually saying something inspires
meaningful debate, which is a fundamental political good.
Avoid factionalism. Rural vs. Urban, NEA vs. AFT. Sometimes one has to let go of little
things in order to get at the big issues.
Factions are about power.
The antidote to factionalism is inclusiveness. When people actually talk to each other,
we discover other folks care as much as we do, and don’t have horns and a
tail.
People
don’t like being forced to do things.
They don’t even like the smell of it. All the pro-NBI #4 speakers tried to be
clear that this would not force anybody to do anything. The anti-NBI #4 speakers painted it as a
top-down initiative that would compel people to do things they might not
want to do. That rhetoric swayed
the assembly. We’re going to need
to think about the implications very carefully in the future.
Language matters. With 5000 wordsmiths in the room you
have to get the language right.
Leveraging the talents of some of those wordsmiths is a valuable
thing to do.
Power and position are just platforms
to get things done. It is a terrible mistake to value these things for
their own sake. Using power and
position to strengthen the organization is correct; using these things for
self-aggrandizement diminishes everyone.
Developing leadership capacity means
having experiences. Nobody can
tell you how to do leadership work.
You have to thrust yourself into the maelstrom. As the old adage says, “Experience is
what you get when you don’t get what you really want.” This is an example of #2 above,
succeeding either way. Nobody can
teach you how to speak in front of 9000 people, how to file a New Business
Item for optimal effect, or how to lobby Congress. You just have to do it and take your
lumps. If you value engagement as a
fundamental good, you have to encourage others to have these experiences
as well – whether or not you agree with them.
Reflection is as valuable in
leadership as it is in teaching.
I’m a National Board Certified Teacher. It doesn’t mean I’m better than you; it
just means I’ve enhanced my capacity for reflection and improvement. Reflection is priceless for improving
classroom practice. It is equally
valuable in leadership.
So here’s hoping I don’t repeat too many mistakes, and that my future
mistakes are novel and exciting….
The role of teacher leader is fraught
with challenges. In my union work, it became apparent to me that there
are at least two different mutually exclusive definitions. First, is the
definition some superintendents have: a teacher leader is a sort of
non-commissioned officer in the chain of command of a district, with a role of
carrying out policies determined by higher-ups. This traditional role
includes roles like department chair, and service on district committees, the
latter because in a top-down hierarchy administrators merely use committees for
cover, so they can lend a sort of pretend legitimacy to their decisions.
The second definition is exciting and
cutting edge: teachers having an actual voice in making local, state or
national policy. This idea might seem self evident to those of us who are
practitioners, but in reality it is quite alien to the policy process in many
places.
The traditional venue for this role,
and the one in which I cut my teeth, is the union. Negotiating and
administering a collective bargaining agreement gives one a voice in local
policy. Joining with others in state and national organizations which
lobby for wider policy and legislation creates a collective voice. In the
current environment, with public sector unions under serious and sustained
attack, union activism is fluid and challenging.
One thing which school districts and
unions share is that they are hierarchical organizations. The bureaucrats
who live farther up the hierarchical food chain have a significant advantage
when it comes to policy: they can spend all their time working on it.
Those of us with classrooms live with the joy and challenge that the best hours
of our day are spent with students. Any time or thought that we have for
policy or politics comes out of our hides or out of the hides of our families
and relationships. I can say this from personal experience – my union
work is unpaid. Each cycle of negotiations comes at a personal cost of
200-300 hours of my personal, unpaid time. That doesn’t count grievances,
trainings, rep and executive council meetings, Regional Bargaining Councils (I
have 3 to attend), meetings with the superintendent, or, now, my work on the
VT-NEA Board of directors, which requires a Saturday each month.
I’m not saying this so that anybody
feels sorry for me – I love the challenge of this work. But it does give
me a clear eyed view of the very real impediments to the development of effective
teacher leadership in the best sense. People go into teaching because
they want to work with kids. This we all know is an all -consuming
passion. On top of this teachers, legitimately, need to tend to families
and relationships. We are human, and we cannot sustain ourselves without
love from friends and family.
When I challenge a colleague to step
up to a leadership role in our local, I do this with trepidation because no one
knows better than me the human cost of what I am asking them to do. On the
other hand no one knows better than me the absolute necessity of accomplished
practitioners taking a role in the governance of the educational
enterprise. As a leader, I am stuck between human empathy for my
colleagues, and the enormous peril of my own empathy.
And this brings me to another thing
that I learned: the three meanings of leadership. So far I’ve
spoken in detail of just one: the ability to influence followers, the rank and
file of an organization. Influencing their behavior, inspiring them to
try some little bit of activism – this is encapsulated by the term
organizing. I think this is what most people think of when they consider
the word leadership. But there are two other equally important aspects of
leadership: influencing peer leaders, and influencing those leaders above you
in the hierarchy of an organization or government. These two aspects
require different skill sets than organizing
Influencing peer leaders is the sort
of thing I’ve done on the VT-NEA board, in regional bargaining councils, and in
our discussions on the Teacher Leader Network Forum. It was the bulk of
the work in our debates on the New Business Items and resolutions at NEA
Representative Assembly. In a friendly environment like this it is about
developing consensus around the best course of action, and it involves building
relationships, and ability to be persuasive.
It takes place in adversarial contexts
as well, such as negotiations and grievance hearings. Insofar as a local
president is the peer of the superintendent, there is an art here of refusal,
of parrying, and of persuasion, each of which one deploys according to the
problem.
Finally there is influencing top level
leaders in an organization, those “above you” so to speak. While a
premium is placed on the “elevator speech”, I think top leaders are bombarded
with these and probably have filters. My own approach is two fold.
First I like to identify the people who advise the leader in question and seek
to influence those people. Second, I like to identify those places I
agree with the approach and send a positive message, in part by working for and
actively supporting initiatives.
This second point is very important in
my estimation. In the present environment, the messages tend to be negative
– opposed to what various policy makers are doing. I believe however,
that the policy landscape is subtler than that, and that people need to hear
what they are doing right as well as what they are doing wrong. Without
positive feedback when they get it right, policy makers are flying on
instruments.
As a Teaching Ambassador Fellow, and a
Bernie Sanders style socialist, it was a challenge for me to find a point of
contact with the Department where I could support their efforts with freedom
and integrity. Yet I did find one: The Department under
the current administration works to build the capacity of teachers to lead in
the best sense of the word. An example of
concrete action that support teachers as real leaders was the Denver Labor-Management Conference, a high profile event designed to help teachers and their
unions deal creatively and pro-actively with the current political and
policy environment. Unfortunately this event was over-shadowed by
events in Wisconsin.
I would be the last to say that
efforts of this sort are perfect, or that the outcomes are satisfactory to all
parties. But I take it as evidence of positive
disposition towards teacher leaders, and a willingness to build the capacity of
teachers to participate in the policy conversation. Encouraging
engagement is in the spirit of democracy and helps to overcome the very real
impediments to teacher engagement that I outlined earlier.
In my work, I’ve done my best to
encourage the Department to build the capacity of teacher leaders and
unions. I think many people want immediate results, an impatience which
is the result of the uncertainty of the political cycle. Taking a longer
view, an empowered and policy savvy teaching profession is the best route to
better education policy, because policy will be rooted in the wisdom that is
the product of actual practice.
That said, I tend to be shocked and
saddened by the dearth of our most accomplished teachers in union leadership. I was shocked at the antipathy of NEA delegates to NBCTs at
the recent NEA Representative Assembly in Chicago. I was saddened that of
124 NBCTs in the State of Vermont, only three of us were at VT-NEA
Representative Assembly in March. Taken together, these indicate to me
that most union members have not experienced NBCTs as people who use their
achievement as a tool to help others. I find this very disappointing.
Those of us who are high achieving and
have excess capacity have an obligation to our colleagues as well as to our
students and families to lighten their burden. At the same time, the rank
and file of the profession needs to see that policy and engagement is simply
far too critical to be left to “the other.” Federal, state and local
policies that encourage all varieties of genuine practitioner leadership and
engagement are in the long term best interest of our profession, of grounded
education policy, and, ultimately, fantastic student learning.
This is a cross posting from my friend Patrick Ledesma's Leading from the Classroom on Ed Week Teacher Magazine. He was kind enough to let me guest blog. I'm putting it here for readers who normally read my stuff on Education Worker.
Back in Vermont, in 2011 I was entering my fourth cycle as a negotiator and second as local president. Our negotiations had always been protracted and contentious, requiring thousands of hours of teacher and school board member time. The traditional process goes through a predictable sequence: bargaining, impasse, mediation, fact finding, crisis buildup, and, in rare instances, imposition and strike. Mediation and fact finding employ private consultants costing thousands of dollars. Boards often call on private attorneys to negotiate, the costs of which often exceed the amount needed to settle the economic issues.
This scenario is repeated dozens of times all over Vermont. Each negotiation is for a small number of teachers by national standards, resulting in minor changes to “mature contracts.” It is a time consuming and costly way to preserve the status quo.
Our previous negotiation had required at least 200 hours of each of the ten teachers on our team. The board commitment was similar. Rancor adds no value. Unions, boards and administration should be partners in the cause of student learning, but are instead trapped in a ritualistic process.
I returned from Denver determined that our pending negotiation would be collaborative, and facilitated by FMCS. It took months of persuasion – one board member could not believe that FMCS services were free. Finally, a pair of skilled FMCS mediators trained both teams together in the techniques of Interest Based Bargaining.
We invested in success. The results?
·Zero dollars spent on a board attorney, mediators or fact finders
·Settlement was achieved in 6 months rather than 18
·Respect between board and teachers, a result of “tough minded collaboration.”
Is this process reform sustainable? Can it become a template for our state? An innovation of this year’s LMC is critically important in answering these questions: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants. Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, presented. Their teams highlighted work they have done to support local collaboration.
Vermont sent a team of statewide leaders. We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the collaborative work already happening at the local level. I am confident that our state leaders found inspiration and practical ideas at the conference.
Process reform is not enough. Sustainability depends on connecting to a greater goal: excellent student learning. In Vermont, dealing proactively with contemporary policy challenges requires this focus. Collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation, and become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools.
The tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont is a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to the cause of great student learning. Our children deserve no less.
On July 1, I introduced New
Business Item #4 at NEA Representative Assembly. It was supported unanimously by the Vermont
delegation. A team of fantastic leaders from
the Teacher Union Reform
Network (TURN) Caucus organized to support NBI #4, including Mary McDonald
of CEC Illinois and CETT chair Maddie Fennell, who mobilized the entire
Nebraska state delegation to yield microphones.
An all-star cast of union leaders
spoke for NBI #4, including Massachusetts Teachers Association president Paul Toner,
Montgomery County MD president Doug
Prouty, former Fairfax VA president Rick Baumgartner, and Wisconsin State
Senate candidate (and CETT member) Shelly
Moore.
This is the text of NBI #4:
NEA will create a plan for presentation at
2013 RA to implement recommendation 9c on page 22 of the NEA Commission on
Effective Teachers and Teaching report “Transforming
Teaching” which reads: “Transform the UniServ Program, making UniServ
directors advocates for educational issues to advance NEA’s professional
agenda.”
The NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and
Teaching (CETT) produced the policy brief “Transforming Teaching” with
recommendations from real teachers on reform.
Recommendation 9 calls for NEA to “Address internal barriers to
organizational engagement about teaching quality and student learning.”
The Rationale/background as
published in RA Today is a follows:
The Commission on Effective Teachers and
Teaching provided recommendations from accomplished teachers which highlight
that educational issues have come to the forefront more than ever before. One of the recommendations from the report is
substantial and actionable within the current budget.
Pretty technical stuff…. Why
then, did it inspire the opposition to organize a floor strategy against
it? NBI #4 became a screen on which the
regressive forces in NEA projected their worst fears. The opposition did not listen to our
arguments. They simply let their
imagination run amok.
While NBI #4 was defeated by
voice vote, much was accomplished:
·A substantial debate about progressive unionism occurred
on the floor of RA, exactly the type of internal debate which a healthy union
needs.
·The entire body of RA delegates took notice of “Transforming
Teaching”
·The progressive leaders of the Association
flexed their muscles and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to organize on
short notice.
·A substantial minority of RA delegates stood up
on division and supported a progressive action.
I’m sure the NEA leadership took note.
·9000 people heard about TURN and saw demonstrated
the group’s excellent work.
For the record: here is the text
of my speech introducing NBI #4:
While bread and butter issues remain an
essential task of our work, in the 21st century, unionism is
shifting. We have the opportunity to take control of the quality debate more
than ever before. We see the link between controlling this
debate about quality and our continued success in providing our members with
professional pay, benefits, and working conditions.
We need a Uniserv program prepared to
support elected leadership at the local level in meeting 21st
century challenges. Our Uniserv
directors need detailed knowledge of the policy challenges we face as local
leaders, and the ability to respond to those challenges – bread and butter and
teaching quality, with a full range of contemporary technical skills.
In many places, local leaders tell me this
is already happening. The plan we are requesting
will not change that.
New Business Item #4 has three parts:
1.We are asking for a plan to be brought to
the 2013 Representative Assembly.
2.We are asking that plan to address
professional development for Uniserv directors to support our locals on issues
of education quality and leading the profession.
3.We expect that plan to align the Uniserv
program to the NEA vision and the needs of our local and state affiliates to
take the lead on teaching and learning.
Many of us are encountering challenges to
the survival of our union and the well being of our members. We request NEA create a plan of action for
Uniserv professional development and report back to next year’s RA, so that our
local and state affiliates have the support they need.
Please support New Business Item #4.
Update, state caucus positions on NBI #4:
Support: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin
Support - leadership: Maine
Oppose: District, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada
Oppose - leadership: New Jersey
Refer - Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana
No position: California, Delaware, Federal, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia
