Education Worker

Focus On the Learning!

2012-03-04T11:27:00.000-05:00

I really appreciate the phrase “studentlearning.” Unlike “student achievement”or “student outcomes” it has not yet become a euphemism for bubble testscores. I appreciate student learningbecause it enables me to imagine a range of indicators for success in theclassroom: true multiple measures.

What can student learning looklike? When you leave my classroom aftermusic class, I hope there is something you can do, think or remember, something thatyou couldn’t before you walked in. Perhaps you can perform a song, or you can play a simple rhythmicallyindependent accompaniment; perhaps you made a connection to prior knowledge, orhave deepened your understanding of some concept, such as tempo or dynamics,and demonstrated that deepening by using that concept to create a short musicalpiece. Perhaps you can finger a newnote, or have just acquired some fluency between fingerings that leaves youfeeling successful. In any event, myaspiration as a teacher is that you leave my classroom having grown in somesmall way as a creative person, as a human being.

I acquired this focus on studentlearning by going through the National BoardCertification process. Thisdemanding process requires around 300 hours of work at minimum. You produce a video portfolio and take atough six part exam on your knowledge of content and pedagogy. It was in the portfolio process that my braingot reprogrammed to focus on student learning. I had a candidate support provider who helped me go over my portfoliowith a fine tooth comb. At each stage Danwould ask, “What does that have to do with student learning?” Eventually it became my mantra. It has an annoying tendency to slip from mymouth during faculty meetings. Even ifit doesn’t slip out, it certainly echoes around the inside of my brain.

As a union activist, I experiencea similar echo effect inside my head as we operate the levers of unioninfluence: negotiations, grievances and so forth. Ourrecent foray into Interest Based Bargaining is hobbled by the fact that weare not yet focused on student learning. Unlike districtsthat truly achieve Labor Management Collaboration, our contract talks stillfocus on adult issues, and not student learning. In the most progressive districts, the adultsstrive to make the collective bargaining agreement into an educationimprovement plan. In my district we haveyet to cross that threshold.

In this sort of context, thingslike behavior and climate become ends in themselves. We do not want good behavior in ourclassrooms or great school climate because it’s nice to be nice to each other;we want it because behavior and climate are necessary preconditions to greatstudent learning. We do not want greatworking conditions and competitive pay because teachers “deserve it;” again, weneed these things to the extent that they promote conditions of maximum growthfor students by creating supports for the best teaching and by removingdistractions. Without that focus on thelearning as the most vital institutional goal, the school drifts, and climate andbehavior, working conditions and pay, deteriorate anyway.

Why is a laser-like focus onstudent learning beneficial to children? It is the best way that educators can express that they care for thestudents. If we expect that ourclassrooms will be incubators of intellectual, artistic and ethical growth,this indicates that we want the students reach their potential. We all arrive at school with baggage. To focus on behavior or pay as an end is toget mired in the baggage – all the reasons that we can’t treat each otherwell. To put the learning at the centerof the institution is to put the student at the center in a truly profound way.

How does this express itself inactual classroom practice? In theplanning process the teacher keeps standards and curriculum in mind. Not that binder on the shelf, but livingcurriculum which has been internalized. I strive to make the constant connection between the activities I select,and the things that are appropriate for a particular cohort of students tomaster. For example, I might look at agroup of sixth graders and see that they need some conscious experience of 6/8time, so I plan a series of lessons culminating in an opportunity for them toimprovise and/or compose a piece of music in 6/8 time. I love using a creative act for assessment –to me, it demonstrates true understanding.

Without a focus on standards andcurriculum, the focus becomes the activities themselves, and the questionbecomes not what the students will learn, but what the teacher will do to entertainin order to get through the day. Anactivity centered classroom is a teacher centered classroom.

It may seem ironic that thedirection of institutional attention to student learning, seemingly external tothe self, can have such a salutary effect. To lose that focus, however, is to lose the soul of the school, andcripple us in the muck of the psychic baggage we carry. To lift one’s eyes, to see that we can bebetter than we are, is to express faith in ourselves and in our students. From time to time we may fail, but it is inthe relentless movement towards growth that the members of a school communitybest express their humanity. This is whywe need to focus on the learning.

How Do You Spell Respect?

2012-02-27T21:07:00.000-05:00

Yes, I know this book was published in 2009. And yes, I know that it's 2012. Perhaps this book was ahead of it's time and it's moment is now.

Against a policy backdrop ofreductionist accountability run amok, The Mindful Teacher by ElizabethMacDonald and Dennis Shirley quietly restores a measure of sanity andbalance. This book could not havearrived at a better time for educators feeling under siege.

The Mindful Teacherdisplays profound respect for the teaching profession by throwing into highrelief the intellectual and spiritual dimensions of teaching. It is a demanding volume that honors thereader by showing confidence in the intellectual capabilities of educators,drawing on the best of the philosophical traditions of both east and west. The book is more than a philosophical tome,however. It constantly grounds thiselevated discourse in concrete examples of improved teaching practice andbetter student learning, through six moving case studies of urban teachers, displayingteaching as a profession in the finest sense.

MacDonald is a teacher in theBoston Public Schools; Shirley is a respected researcher and academic. Together they pioneered the Mindful Teachingseminars, really a professional learning community (PLC) which is a product ofan exemplary school/university partnership. Dennis Shirley is a rare academic who is humble enough to see thecorrect role for academics in the education enterprise. He sought ways to respectfully supporteducators. Rather than pushing an agendaon a group of hard pressed urban teachers, he supported a process enabling themorganically discover the questions they themselves needed to explore.

The seminars took place over afour year period and yielded ten clusters of questions specific toparticipants, but universal in character, and an “eightfold structure” whichcould be adapted to other PLCs with different circumstances. An example of a question I found particularlytelling: “What does it mean to be a teacher leader? How can I help buildsupport networks for teachers in a way that leads to my renewal rather thanburnout?”

An essential part of theeightfold structure of the seminars is the role of meditation in creating aspace in which mindfulness can grow. Theconcept of mindfulness emerges from the Buddhist tradition, and the concept ofmindful teaching is advocated in the book as a means of mitigating alienatedteaching, a concept borrowed from Marx. Theauthors handled the practice of meditation in their seminars in a way that madeit accessible and helpful to people from a variety of spiritual traditions.

The Mindful Teacher concludeswith an exploration of dialectical tensions in the profession of teaching. The Seven Synergies are individuallynecessary and jointly conditions for mindful practice, including concepts suchas a caring disposition, professional expertise and collectiveresponsibility. The Triple Tensionsacknowledge the existence of polarities in teaching practice: contemplation andaction, ethics and power, the individual and collective. The faith the authors show in us, that we canhold these tensions in our minds in what Estelle Jorgensen calls a “both/and”synthesis, demonstrates a profound respect for educators as intellectual andspiritual actors.

I was a bit troubled near the endof the book when the authors referred to teaching as a vocation. As a labor activist, I fight for professionalcompensation and working conditions, and worry that teaching as a vocationleads us down the path to martyrdom. Butthen I realized what The Mindful Teacher had taught me: profession andvocation are just one more tension that can be creatively embraced. I felt both moved and honored.

One Mouth and Two Ears…

2012-02-26T19:47:00.001-05:00

SharlaSteever is a fourth grade teacher from Hill City SD. She is a National Board Certified Teacher,and a Classroom TeachingAmbassador Fellow for the United States Department of Education (I was aTAF in 2010-2011.) Sharla is also a dearfriend, with a powerful commitment to the Native American community. Her guest blog here fits with the socialjustice orientation of EducationWorker.

Please view the video Tokata:Moving Forward in Indian Education

The last few months I have spenta great deal of time travelling around the rural beauty of the state of SD toplaces even I, who have spent my entire life here, had never seen. I had thehonor of holding a variety of teacher round tables and personal interviews withthe educational leaders of our Native American Reservation schools and videoedevery bit of it.

My goal? To bring the voices ofthis unique group of people, with their unique educational issues to ED intheir own words.

These people are from places inour own backyard that are dealing with levels of poverty, alcoholism, andunemployment far exceeding national averages, but they are also some of themost self-determined, creative, beautiful people I have ever met in my life.

I began this project with adesire and hope to educate myself and others about issues in Native Americaneducation on our reservations. What I didn’t expect was the gift it wouldbecome to me. As I sat across from each person in this video and so many more,I was given the gift of story – some sad, some inspiring, some anger-filled,some so beautiful they moved me to tears. Through all of them I discoveredsomething very important. If we truly want to impact change, we must firststart by listening…not only to the words that are shared, but to the heartbehind the words.

I learned a great deal about theissues facing our educators and students in these areas, but more than that Ilearned that there are amazing people doing incredible work day after day andyear after year in areas of poverty that are far beyond most of ourimaginations. If we want to help improve the situations these schools arefacing, we must begin by working to understand them. How do we do that? We doit by listening to their stories. My hope is that this video provides a glimpseinto these incredible stories and helps to inform those in positions to createchange.

I hope you will enjoy and share,“Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education.”

More on Vermont Teachers Negotiations

2012-02-23T00:23:00.000-05:00

Iappeared on CCTV on October 28 with Avery Book and local VT-NEA leader AmyLester, who is vice president of the VermontWorkers Center. Just discovered itwas online. I was incorrectly identifiedas an executive board member - in fact I am a member of the VTNEA board ofdirectors. This broadcast speaks to thereasons that we need to reform teacher negotiations, and to the reality that weneed to act in solidarity with others on matters of social justice.

Please view the video. The teacher negotiations issues start at around minute 10 for those ofyou in a hurry. The program happenedover three months ago, but all the issues are still valid.

Relate this back to ReformingVermont Teacher Negotiations.

Vermont and NCLB Waivers: Student Learning or Power Politics?

2012-02-19T18:11:00.000-05:00

In order to understand theVermont NCLB waiver application you have to understand the waiver processitself. Anop ed in the Times Argus recently critiqued certain features of the state’sapplication, including emphasis on high stakes testing, and failure to addresspoverty as a factor in low student achievement, but the waiver process is aFederal policy of the United States Department of Education.

To understand waivers you alsohave to take into account the power dynamics in Washington. There is an ongoing effort by CongressionalRepublicans to block virtually every Obama administration initiative. The Republicans strive to deny theadministration a signature domestic policy achievement during an election year,even though an Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorizationhas been the first term hallmark of virtually every administration sinceLBJ. The last re-authorization happenedin 2001 during the Bush administration. We know this iteration as the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act.

I believe the Obamaadministration put ESEA on the back burner for a variety of valid reasons. There was the possibility of bipartisanship. They expended political capital on fixing theeconomy, on wars, on health insurance reform, and embedded a major educationpolicy initiative in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act – Race to theTop (RTT). RTT was a highly successfulcompetitive grant program which leveraged states to make wholesale educationpolicy changes at a very modest cost – just four billion dollars.

Against the background of severerevenue problems in almost every state, RTT moved policy in significant wayseven in states that did not receive grants. For example, Vermont’s State Board of Education adopted Common CoreStandards along with 45 other states and joined the Smarter Balanced AssessmentConsortium to develop a new generation of tests for Common Core. But we did not even apply for RTT. The results of RTT were well nighastonishing. Seldom has so much changebeen achieved for so little federal money.

NCLB waivers are a continuationof RTT. There is enough similaritybetween the requirements of the two programs to make this assertion. For example, the adoption of College andCareer Ready Standards (Common Core meets this requirement) and the adoption ofnew teacher accountability systems that take into account test scores in someway are salient features of both programs. So Vermont’s waiver application makes perfect sense – these arerequirements for a waiver. If you don’tmeet the requirements, you don’t get a waiver.

The difference between theprograms is rather than dangling cash in front of revenue starved states likeRTT, the waiver program dangles regulatory relief from the NCLB ticking timebomb of 100% student proficiency on tests by 2014, a statistical impossibilitythat will label virtually every school as failing and subject them to adraconian set of restructuring requirements, including firing their teachersand their administrators.

In essence, the Obama/Duncanadministration is doing a political end run around a recalcitrant anduncooperative Congress. In my view, thewhole thing has a lot more to do with Washington power politics and whole lotless to do with student learning. Ifstates adopt the basic tenets of the “Blueprint”, the Obama/Duncan plan forESEA reauthorization, wholesale via RTT and waivers, then the ESEA becomesmoot, and the administration has won the political battle for education reformwithout firing a shot. An ESEA reauthorization, if it occurs, will merely becodification of changes led at the state level. It is an audacious politicalstrategy.

Why is student learningjeopardized in this scenario? Waiversassume that all states have a similar capacity to assimilate thesepolicies. I found it interesting thatstates like Massachusetts and Colorado already have waivers in hand. The former was a round 2 RTT state that has ahuge jumpstart on the work. The latteris a state noted for pioneering many of the innovations that are becomingembedded in Federal education policy. InVermont we are starting from scratch. Ten years of slash and burn budgeting during the Douglas administrationhave reduced our DOE to a shell of its former self, a compliance agency forFederal formula grants. Whatever littlecapacity to respond to national policy is left is embedded in outsideorganizations like VT-NEA.

We are left askingpermission. Instead of treating thewaiver process as an opportunity to rethink systems, we treat the waiverapplication like a bunch of hoops to jump through - hardly a way to makeeffective policy. And student learningis left out of the equation.

The great danger here is that ourlegislature will panic and do something nonsensical, like New York or Tennessee did around teacher evaluation. Ourlegislature has a history of doing that sort of thing at the eleventhhour – things like the “two vote mandate.” I hope instead that our leaders think about how to bring together peoplewith interest and expertise in great education policy to rebuild Vermont’scapacity so that we can not only respond effectively to the national policycontext, but learn to lead it.

Navigate Towards Your Best Hopes

2012-02-06T20:37:00.000-05:00

The following post is from an interview with Brad Jupp by JamesLiou, a 2008 Teaching AmbassadorFellow from Boston. James’ excellentblog The Teaching Pulse gives unofficialvoice to the aspirations of members of the Boston Teachers Union. I selected excerpts which follow the broadthemes of Education Worker, and urgereaders to check out theoriginal interview, which is much longer - a rich and profound essay on thecontemporary education policy scene.

Brad Jupp is Senior Program Advisorfor Teacher Quality Initiatives in the U.S.Department of Education. He has the ear of Secretary of EducationArne Duncan and has considerable, if not central, influence on any federalpolicies that relate to teacher quality and effectiveness.

As a former middle school Englishteacher and union activist in the Denver public schools, he is most known forhis role in the development of Denver’sProComp teacher compensation system—one which ties teacher incentives toboth school and student performance and growth.

JL: How has being an accomplishedunionist affected how you do your work now?

BJ: I think what I bring from mybackground as a union leader, first and foremost, is the sentiment that workingpeople want first and foremost, good, fruitful jobs; not the political strugglethat they often find themselves in. And then second, I bring a really three-dimensionalunderstanding of the psychology that [often] occurs in the relationship betweenunions and school districts, [and between] unions and state legislatures…Frankly, I’ve been on all sides of the table. And I have an insight intowhat’s in people’s heads on all sides of the table at this point. Andthat’s because [like I mentioned earlier], I pay attention to [connectingevidence to shifts in understanding with] whomever I’m working. Over theyears, [I’ve gathered] an experience base in thinking like a leader of a local,of thinking like a leader of a state affiliate, or thinking like asuperintendent or thinking like a governor’s education policy aide.

So the union experience isdouble. I understand the aspirations of the people that unions representand I also understand the motivations and sentiments of people who representlarge numbers of teachers.

JL: Can you think of some practicalways and avenues that you might suggest for teachers to understand, influenceand implement policies….in our school districts at the local level? Howdo we make policy less abstract and how do we understand it, influence it andimplement it?

BJ: Be a building rep for your union,be on your building faculty senate or building committee, partner with peoplein the central office so that you are a practitioner [figuring out] thedifficult problems of execution with administrators, because just like teachersdon’t want reform to be done to them, they want it to be done with them,administrators want policy implementation to be done with them, not policyimplementation arguments done to them. And we should assume that no onewants to be part of that kind of loud argument.

And don’t hesitate to use thoseopportunities to be building reps and union leaders and district leaders asvehicles for career advancement. The ambitions of teachers to besuccessful and efficacious are the things that actually animate the best thingsabout their career. And we should always be encouraging teachers to acton those aspirations.

JL: What can we do, as teachers and asmembers of our teachers union, to make this happen more often in general?

BJ: In a sentence, navigate towardsyour best hopes and away from your worst fears.

Too much of the adversarial discoursein public education is discourse buttressed by worst fears. ‘What if theworst principal in the world were in charge of that school?’ We need arule to protect all teachers against the possibility of the worst principal inthe world.

It’s the wrong way to beorganized. [We] should be organizing instead on ‘how do we get the bestprincipal in the world in as many schools as we’ve got? That means thatwe’re going to need really great incentive packages for principals, and bygolly they might need to be paid more than teachers and as maybe as a teacherunion leader, I need to advocate that we accelerate the pay for high schoolprincipals so that the working conditions in my high schools get better.

It’s a simple example, but if youbegin to think like that, then you can begin to proliferate other examples.

JL: So is it up to the individualteachers in our buildings as building reps, as partners with districtofficials, to talk and frame the conversation in that way? Becausesometimes a lot of the rhetoric out there is very negative, as you’re probablyalready aware….how do we break through that?

BJ: We didn’t say, when we negotiatedProComp, ‘let’s embrace the arbitrary and capricious.’ We said instead,‘let’s embrace the reasonable, the consistent, the credible…’ and then we said,‘let’s make sure we’re protecting against the arbitrary and capricious byembracing [the] reasonable and consistent and credible.’ We never saidanything about getting it all right. We always said though, we want tokeep our antennae up and avoid treating people badly. And what’s more, wemade a commitment to use data as a way to inform our future decisions so thatwe were not being arbitrary and capricious.

Again, check out theoriginal interview!

Once a Fellow Always a Fellow

2012-02-01T06:25:00.000-05:00

The United States Department ofEducation has opened the application process for TeachingAmbassador Fellows (TAFs) for 2012-2013. In 2010, I was a Classroom Fellow for the Department. I urge any teacher with an interest ineducation policy to consider the Fellowship.

The path of every Fellow isunique. We are urged to pursue ourpolicy passions, which in my case was labor-management collaboration. I had applied for the Fellowship in part onthe basis of my work as an NEA leader on the local level. As a veteran ofseveral negotiation cycles, I was frustrated by the disparity between processesI saw in my two districts.

Through the Fellowship, I wasintroduced to Gettingto Yes and the work of the HarvardNegotiation Project. Astoundingly, given all the negotiationstraining and experience I had with VT-NEA I had never heard of this work. The Fellowship also introduced me to the Teacher Union Reform Networkand got me on the team that performed the qualitativeresearch for the Denver LaborManagement Conference. It was in Denver that I had extensiveconversations with folks from the FederalMediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), an incredible outfit which hasgot to be one of the best kept secrets of the Federal government.

As a Classroom Fellow, I was able to bring this knowledge and these resources right back to Vermont. In the Washington Central Supervisory Union,FMCS mediators are guiding us in an Interest BasedBargaining process which is proving a revelation to participants from bothsides of the table - in fact there is not a table and no sides.

The Fellowship program looks forteachers with a record of leadership and existing networks to help facilitate conversationswith practitioners. What I did not dreamof was that participation in the Fellowship would lead to the exponentialgrowth of my own networks.

I joined the Teacher Leaders Network Forum at the Center for Teaching Quality. This organization functions both as a virtual policy think tank for teacher leaders and as an action tank in promoting education change.
I became active in the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), where I get to meet like-minded union leaders striving to bring the union voice to great education policy.
I joined the Board of Directors of my state NEA affiliate, VT-NEA, attended RA, spoke in front of 9000 delegates, and helped organize a TURN caucus that supported the NEA leadership on the policy statement on teacher evaluation.
I attended the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards conference in Washington and learned how to do effective Congressional lobbying.
Finally, all this work led me to create a resource for other teachers interested in Labor Management Collaboration – Education Worker.

As the TAF Director GillianCohen-Boyer is fond of saying, “Once a Fellow, always a Fellow.” In fact, on the website it says that “ForFellows, the program adds greater knowledge of educational policy andleadership to their toolkits to contribute to solutions at all levels for longintractable challenges in education.” Ihope I was of service to the department during my official Fellowship year, butI know they trained and prepared me to be far more effective than I everdreamed going forward in what Mark Simon calls “advocating in the public interestfrom a teacher’s perspective.”

Every Teaching AmbassadorFellow’s journey is unique. The diversity of the group and the diversity of theleadership work of past and present TAFs is astonishing … but it’s also only abeginning.

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Reforming Vermont Teacher Negotiations

2012-01-29T14:02:00.000-05:00

There are better alternatives. Recent proposals in Vermontconcerning changes to collective bargaining in Vermont are both unnecessary andcounterproductive. Defangingparticipants by prohibiting union strikes and board impositions is patentlyabsurd because it strips the collective bargaining process of any means toforce the two sides towards each other. Replacing strikes and impositions with binding interest arbitrationcertainly has the potential to turn down the temperature, and it provides ameans of bringing the sides together, but doesn’t get at the systems problemunderlying the issue: the collective bargaining process we have in education was never designed for education.

I worry that legislative energyspent on tinkering around the edges of collective bargaining will bewasted. It has the potential to createtremendous controversy without any payoff in terms of improved public policy.

It will distract educators and boards from their primary task ofproducing great student learning.

The real next step in movingVermont education forward via collective bargaining is reforming the processitself, reform that cannot be performed by legislative fiat. Even as government leaders considerlegalistic solutions to the chronic problem of strikes and near strikes ineducation, local leaders in Vermont are creating real solutions based ondecades of research in alternative conflict management, using proven practicesthat can save districts and union tens of thousands of dollars, improve schoolclimate, and make collective bargaining agreements into education improvementplans.

The main tool in this effort is InterestBased Bargaining (IBB.) IBB is theterm used for methods developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project in the 1980’s. The classic formulation is found in the wellknown book Gettingto Yes by William Ury. IBB needsto be adapted for education, and those adaptations are well represented in thepractice of leaders who gather in the Teacher Union Reform Network.

Best of all, Vermont districtsand unions do not have to go it alone. The Federal Mediation andConciliation Service (FMCS) provides free support and training to teams oflocal leaders who want to create a negotiation process that speaks to thebenefit of students. In the WashingtonCentral Supervisory Union we are using FMCS mediators to reform ourprocess. While the work is in itsinfancy, the early results have been a revelation to participants.

In a traditional adversarial negotiation,the two sides exchange proposals. Theytake positions and use whatever power or persuasion they can muster to win fortheir position. The result is massivelytime consuming and ritualistic, burning up thousands of hours of time ofteachers, school board members and administrators, time which would be betterspent thinking about students. Theprocess inevitably wends itself to impasse, when the two sides admit that theycan’t get any further. With extremelyrare exceptions, it then proceeds to mediation and fact finding. Generally, private mediators are used at thisphase, at a cost of thousands of dollars both to the board and the union. In addition, mediation and fact finding can generatetens of thousands of dollars in legal bills for boards, and huge amounts ofwork for VT-NEA professional staff.

In worst cases, the two sides resort to their nuclear options; boardsimpose and unions strike.

And the result? Usually a handful of contract language tweaksand a little bit of new money on the salary schedule. These tweaksare often fraught with unintended consequences that then need to be fought overin subsequent negotiations. In my experiencepositional bargaining is an expensive and wasteful way to preserve the statusquo.

What does the alternative looklike? In Washington Central we contactedFMCS, who provided a team of skilled and experienced Federal mediators to trainthe board and the union together in the methods of Interest Based Bargaining . Our training took a full Saturday. A mediator attends each session to advise bothteams and keep the process on track. There is quite a learning curve, as the deeply ingrained habits of mindand practice of veteran negotiators have to be replaced by new, unfamiliar waysof doing business.

In a typical session now, usingIBB, the work looks like this: the sidesidentify an issue they want to talk about and define the problem to besolved. Then participants identify their underlyinginterests and determine which interests are shared by both teachers and board. So far, we have discovered that the two sidesshare most interests.

The next step is mutual brainstorming of options to resolve the issue. People are encouraged to contribute anything they think of at thisstage, without criticism. Sometimes anoption which at first glance looks impractical contains a kernel of somethinghelpful. Only when the collectivecreativity of the team is exhausted is the list of options judged by a set ofmutually agreed upon standards. Thereare a couple of ways to do this.

The way we chose is a three partfilter:

Is it feasible? For example an option which is illegal is not feasible. Therefore we do not apply the second test.
Is it beneficial? Does it help solve the problem? For example, a committee to further study the problem may not, in the absence of other action, be beneficial enough to become part of the contract. But if an option passes this test, we move to the third one.
Is it acceptable? This test asks whether the option under consideration violates any of the interests identified prior to the brainstorming of options.

An option which passes throughall three of these filters can become the basis of a tentative agreement. A pair of negotiators from each side wouldthen meet independently to draft contract language.

In many cases, the two sidessimply agree that the collective bargaining agreement is the wrong tool toresolve the issue. This is quite normal –in an adversarial proceeding each side can arrive with a list of 20 or morepositions, most of which never make it into the contract. Mutual agreement to exclude an issue is a farmore efficient and civilized way to get to the same result.

As I said before, this processhas been a revelation for the veteran negotiators in the room. One team member likened the old positionalbargaining to “the two sides shouting at each other through a spokesperson.” Our new process has a group of sensiblepeople from a variety of backgrounds working together to solve problems. The anger and rancor of the old process hasbeen replaced by mutual respect, and the discovery that boards and teachersshare most interests.

I am optimistic that theagreements that result from our IBB process will be superior to our traditionalprocess. After all, a proposal inpositional bargaining is simply an option attached to a set of interests. There is no guarantee that it is the bestpossible option, and positional bargaining provides very little space for theconsideration of alternatives. Acollective bargaining agreement is a means of creating local educationpolicy. A better process is in theinterest of great public policy.

Again, our process is in itsinfancy, and I write this with some trepidation. It may be that we reach a point, perhaps oneconomic issues, where positional bargaining is the correct tool, and we revertto that process. This would be normal,and itis the practice in many negotiations across the country. Nonetheless, I am confident that if we reachimpasse having given IBB our best shot, the scale of the remainingdisagreements will be greatly reduced, and the climate of our talks will allowa more civil result.

My other concern issustainability: will this process outlast this particular set of leaders andthis particular negotiation? The answerhere has three parts. The first is howsuccessful this particular group is in arriving at a new agreement. The more successful we are, the moresustainable the process.

The second is whether thisprocess then becomes a template for other supervisory unions, and spreadsacross Vermont. If IBB becomes a culturalnorm and an expectation in Vermont, sustainability becomes moot. This is part of the reason I am writing evenas the result hangs in the balance. Weneed to do more of this work. I amcommitted to this vision.

Finally, while we can count onthe continued support of the Federal government through the free services ofFMCS, what supports will our state leaders provide those of us trying to reformprocess for the sake of great student learning? Or will our state government get distracted in desultory anddestructive tinkering with collective bargaining laws, legalistic games that areirrelevant to grassroots reforms available to every community?

We do not need to changecollective bargaining laws to use IBB and the FMCS. What is required is that teachers and theirunions join with their communities, turn away from the mutually assured destructionof business-as-usual, and find reasons to do that business in new and better ways.

Education Worker Wordle

2012-01-19T23:00:00.000-05:00


Thanks Gamal for the idea!

VT Filmmaker’s Wisconsin Rising Needs Support

2012-01-18T19:24:00.000-05:00

Wisconsin Rising tells the story of how Wisconsin becamea testing ground for the nation in a political environment where corporationshave greater and greater clout and ordinary citizens are losing their abilityto obtain redress. At a time when millions of families are feeling the crush ofdebt and joblessness, and while large corporations are seeing record profits,Badger State residents are demonstrating the strength that comes from a sharedsense of identity and pride, and that these bonds can shake even the mostpowerful political machines.

This film will bea testimony to the value of people rising up in the face of injustice andcorporate greed. Burlington filmmaker needs your support now in order to getthe film fully financed, and she needs less than $4,000 by Saturday to do it. Click here to donate and learn more.

Stunned Silence

2012-01-11T21:51:00.000-05:00

Transforming Teaching….

This document makes radicaldemands. One can go through it and nod one's head and say OK, the unionneeds to do this, check, and ED has to do that, no problem....OMG they want meto do WHAT? That's where the stunned silence kicks in. It reads like apackage deal. True, the document can be "otherwise manipulated" or cherry picked so as to leave the "OMG" out. We'reall reformers as long as its the other guy doing the reforming.

For example a board member on thenegotiating team distrusts teachers' self evaluation. She thinks we'revery self serving. PARS? That would blow her mind - giving upcontrol. But she'd have no problem with the union giving up security inthe ways suggested by "Transforming Teaching."

There is a worry that some folksare planning to take what the CETT has put forward and claim it as their own. I'm not sure I see a problem here. I get mentoring from time to time by abrilliant Marxist labor organizer who always reminds me that it is the causethat matters in organizing, not my individual ego. This thing she taughtme allows me to be a lot more effective. So if one's ideas get stolen enmasse and actually implemented, I'd count it as a success - as long as they arenot too cherry picked or "otherwise manipulated."

The thing I worry about is thatall this stunned silence will make this initiative go the way of Bob Chase's"New Unionism." In a 1997 NEA Higher Education Journalinterview, Chase said:

"New Unionism means being as strongan advocate for the professional side of the education equation as we have beenfor the economic and social well-being of our membership, the other side of theequation.

I’m not saying that we should, inany way, back away from the moral responsibilities as a union to provide forthe economic well-being of our members. But I am saying that there is anotherwhole area of our members’ well-being—the professional side—that we must beinvolved in.

If we take the best fromtraditional industrial unionism and the best from traditional craft unionism,as well as the best from organizational management gurus, and meld all theseinto a philosophical underpinning for what our union should be, I think that wewould be stepping forward and moving in a direction that is absolutelyessential if we are to remain relevant.

This means that those of us whohave held beliefs that are more in line with traditional unionism must rethinksome of that and broaden our scope and vision about the work of the NEA.

This is tough work, and there’s noblueprint for how we go about doing this. But unless we can make inroadshere—whether it’s K-12 or higher education—our importance to the future ofeducation will be minimal, and the needs of our members, or potential members,will go unmet."

That was 15 years ago. Themore things change the more things remain the same. Well now there is ablueprint in a sense. The big question is will it make anydifference. The reason I keep writing about “Transforming Teaching” (likea damn fool) and trying to keep it alive is my hope that educators will emergefrom their stunned silence and start talking about this thing.

Why I Embrace "Transforming Teaching"

2012-01-09T22:31:00.000-05:00

When my son was about 14 he got involved with the Vermont Workers Center, which is astatewide consortium of labor and human rights groups. The director ofVWC put him on the statewide steering committee. Ben needed a ride to thesteering committee meetings. So I ended up on the steering committeetoo. There I sat with all these union activists, AFL-CIO/Teamsters/AFT(and yes NEA) leaders. I was just a rank and file NEA member. Ijust paid my dues and let others do the work. When a contract gotnegotiated I really didn't understand it. I'd just vote for it becausethe negotiator told me to.

Sitting with the VWC folks (whosegeneral Bernie-style socialist politics I shared) I came to feel I had nostreet cred with all these awesome leaders. So I volunteered to becomethe building rep for my school and started doing the trainings and all the nutsand bolts work of organizing, member servicing and negotiations. Negotiations were particularly formidable task, as the scenario in Vermont isvery complex and technical. The UD snookered me into trying to propose a"lift up and set down" of our single salary schedule. Inretrospect I was so ignorant that I made a fool of myself in failure, but Ilearned a ton about salary schedules (and adversarial industrial style patternbargaining.)

The rest is history. Whenthe local needed a president, I became the president. When the UpperValley needed an area director, I was appointed then elected to the VT-NEAboard.

My point in telling this story isthat my path to state level NEA leadership was from OUTSIDE the NEA. Icame to union work not because of self interest in salary and benefits, or thelegal protections ("insurance") it afforded, but because of a beliefthat unions themselves, both public and private sector, are a fundamentalpublic good - I'm 3rd generation union. They built the middle class in America. I got involvedin the scut work of teacher unionism out of conviction that I have aresponsibility to build my union as an expression of my political and socialvalues. I spent many years laboring in the vineyards so to speak.

Now, when I speak to other laborleaders, there is a camaraderie born of shared experience. I have streetcred. When I advocate on the board, or with professional staff forprofessional (which is the CETT frame) or social justice (which is my home)unionism, I do so with authority, because these people know that I am one ofthem by virtue of the hundreds and hundreds of hours of volunteer work that Ihave performed in solidarity with my brother and sister co-unionists, both inthe NEA and in the wider movement in general.

So when I advocate for thecomplex of ideas that we call "guilds" at the Center for Teaching Quality, and wecall “professional unionism” in the TeacherUnion Reform Network, I am not just blowing smoke. I actually have myhands on some of the levers that can move these ideas, and I am yanking onthese levers with all my might.

The thing that motivates me isthat having done all this work, and having had a lot of opportunities to learnboth within NEA and the wider labor movement, I understand both the strengthsand the weaknesses of my union. There are corrupting structural forces inNEA and they represent a real and present threat to both my union and all otherunions. Union reform means to me not that my union is bad and needs to be"reformed" in the "reform school" sense (i.e. punished),but that by embracing the very best thinking and practice the NEA can reach itspotential. Mark Simon, former president of the Montgomery Co. MD NEAaffiliate, expressed this beautifully: "Teacher Unions have aresponsibility to advocate not just in the narrow self-interest of their duespaying members, but in the public interest, from a teacher’s perspective.”

There's an irony here. Inmy experience, the path to moving beyond the bread and butter issues ofindustrial frame unionism to a broader and more powerful unionism that actsconsistently in the public interest runs through deep engagement in the tasksof industrial frame unionism. We can't eschew these tasks - we have toembrace them, understand them, and use them to build our power forchange. I worry a great deal that in embracing any aspect of industrialunionism I am reinforcing the stodginess and structural corruption of the verything I value as fundamental public good. But doing so gives me theaccess I need to promote a change agenda.

So to me it’s not an either/orthing; it's both/and. It's not unions or guilds, its unions AND guilds,or as I prefer to think, industrial, professional AND social justiceunionism. It is an infinitely more powerful union capable of"advocating in the public interest from a teacher's perspective."

The NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching report TransformingTeaching is a tool that can help move this forward. There is apowerful message embedded in the report: accomplished teachers need to step upto union leadership on both the local and national level. We have to bewilling to get our hands dirty in the messy business of labor organizing sothat we can get those dirty hands on the levers of power to move the unionreform agenda forward.

I worry that already thisdocument is being studiously ignored. It is being ignored because itcalls on the leadership of the union to change, and because it demands thataccomplished teachers stop throwing darts at their unions from the outside, rollup their sleeves and get involved. It makes demands on people. There are plenty of reasons for the forces of comfortable complacency to walkaway from these recommendations. It is incumbent on those of us who valueour unions, and the greater aspirations of working people that they couldrepresent, to demand that people pay attention.

Why Did I Create a Page for The Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

2012-01-01T13:47:00.002-05:00

Freedom From Want - Norman Rockwell

My friend, colleague, and fellow Teaching Ambassador Elaine Romero posted her resolution on Facebook this morning: “2012 is here! I am going to learn more aboutthe UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and tie them to my work. (They keep crossing mypath)!”

They crossed my path, too. On December 10, I wrote “HowThings Have Changed in Two Years.” The occasion was the Vermont Human Rights Day Conference. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted on December 10, 1948. For this reason people throughout the world have chosen to celebrate this date as Human Rights Day. There were several referencesat the conference to the UDHR. I made amental note to check it out someday. This morning, thanks to Elaine, I did. Doing so deepened my understanding and appreciation of the conference,and I resolve to begin framing issues with reference to this document.

Some highlights for me:

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to freechoice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and toprotection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, hasthe right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just andfavourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthyof human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of socialprotection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to jointrade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24.

Everyone has the right torest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodicholidays with pay.

Don’t these go togetherwell? Article 23 (4) provides themechanism for the realization of the vision – and is the reason this blogexists. Since (and before) 1947 theUnited States has thrown up all manner of creative roadblocks to thwart workers’rights “to form and to join tradeunions.” We’ve recently seen some newand clever iterations in Wisconsin, Ohio, Alabama, and other states.

Article 25.

(1) Everyone has the right to a standard ofliving adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family,including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary socialservices, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness,disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstancesbeyond his control.

Economic rights are addressed byArticle 25. A belief in “freedomfrom want” drives us in the Health Care is a Human Right campaign, the effort to make Vermont the first state inthe nation to adopt a single payer system for health care.

Article 26.

(1) Everyone has the right to education.Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages.Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional educationshall be made generally available and higher education shall be equallyaccessible to all on the basis of merit.

(2) Education shall be directed to the fulldevelopment of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect forhuman rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding,tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, andshall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance ofpeace.

26(2) is particularly interestingwith regard to the current wave of education reform (some say “deform”) in theUnited States. It sets forth a broadvision for education and its purpose – a purpose that cannot be measured bytests, but only by the quality of action that is undertaken by a nation’scitizens. Success in education can bemeasured by the degree a nation respects the human rights set forth in the UDHR. How does the US measure up?

The UDHR was drafted in 1947 by theUN Commission on Human Rights chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. Two major treaties emerged, the"International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights" and the"International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights." Together with the UDHR these are consideredthe “International Bill of Rights.”

I wanted to find out how the USdealt with the “International Bill of Rights.” I consulted the Franklin andEleanor Roosevelt Institute's web site and discovered the following:

"....President Carter has signed the "International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights" for the U.S., but the U.S. government and the people of the United States have not yet generated the political will necessary to ratify this Covenant
.....the U.S. has consistently attached reservations to the human rights treaties that it has ratified. These reservations have evoked criticism from many non-governmental organizations that argue they limit the legal impact of the treaties in the United States
....every country in the world -- except the U.S. and Somalia -- has ratified the 'Convention on the Rights of the Child.'"

Evidently the United Statesappreciates political rights, especially when they can be used to bashopponents in propaganda contests - and we like it even better when those rights are toothless concerning American behavior. Economic rights? Not so much. Somalia? What sort of company is that for us to keep?

This to me is far more of an indictmentof our education system and our nation than any test can measure. If you don’t get the fundamental purpose ofeducation right to begin with, if you make it exclusively about readin’ ritin’and ‘rithmetic, about what sort of job you can get, about the suitability ofgraduates for employment, etc. you’ve lost your soul before leaving the gate.

A nation that fails to teach its people tocare….has it taught them anything at all?

Occupy Christmas

2011-12-27T06:15:00.000-05:00

Jeremy Vaughn is a gifted artist and radical from Montpelier, VT. This is his Christmas card for 2011. It speaks for itself. I loved this image so much that I asked his permission to share it online. Happy holidays and enjoy!

Teacher Professionalism and Leadership

2011-12-22T19:49:00.000-05:00

My friend and colleague GamalSherif teaches at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. We are both TeachingAmbassador Fellows for the US Department of Education (Gamal this year andme last year), and members of the TeacherLeader Network Forum, part of the Centerfor Teaching Quality. We are bothalso union activists - I'm NEA and Gamal is AFT. What I love about our friendship is the differences: I’m a rural elementaryteacher and Gamal is an urban high school teacher, yet across these differenceswe share so much. I asked Gamal’spermission to share his latest blog post and I urge people to follow his excellentblog ProgressEd.

In a recent USA Today article,Wendy Kopp (CEO of Teach for America) and Dennis Van Roekel (President of theNational Education Association), recommend “3 steps improve the USA’steachers.”

Of course everyone wants toimprove, but it would be helpful to determine what the specific problems arebefore we create policy guidelines. Oncethe problems are identified, teachers should be directly involved in creating,implementing and evaluating the solutions.

Specifically, Kopp and Van Roekelsuggest that we:

· Use data to improve teacher preparation.

· Bring new talent to the teaching profession.

· Give teachers opportunities for continuousprofessional development.

Of course teachers are life-longlearners and we are, therefore, interested in continuous improvement. However, when it comes to student learning,the focus on teachers is incomplete. Weshould also consider the students' readiness to learn when they arrive atschool.

In order to learn, students needto be well-rested, well-fed, safe, and curious when they arrive at school. If that's not the case, then we need to lookto the social and economic context in which the children live outside ofschool. And yes, teachers do have someperspective on that context.

An over-emphasis on teacherquality is a distraction from what truly ails us: students' and teachers'diminished ability to make informed (and careful) decisions about theirlearning.

Over-emphasis on teacher qualityas the "...single biggest factor in student success..." implies thatif students are not succeeding, or learning, then teachers should be heldaccountable. Yet research has shown thatteachers are less effective when they have poor working conditions.

The onus is on teachers toadvocate for effective working conditions, among other things. Teachers should be involved in the design andimplementation of curriculum, instruction, assessment AND policy -- all aspectsof our working conditions. This emphasis on teacher leadership ties in verywell with the US Department of Education's Blueprint for Reform that emphasizesteacher professionalism.

Within the article, it is notclear if Kopp and Van Roekel are referring to worthwhile assessments of"student learning" -- or simple measurements of "studentsuccess." Poorly-designedstandardized tests CANNOT be used to correlate the quality of teacher trainingprograms.

Why use bad data to createwishy-washy (or worse) policy?

Celebrating Labor-Management Collaboration: The Literature Grows

2011-12-13T20:48:00.000-05:00

A year ago, I began abibliography of every web and print resource I could find on the subject oflabor-management collaboration. I was worried that heading into the U.S. Department of Education’s Labor –Management Conferencein Denver, participants would lack the background and context todeal with the ideas and practices they would encounter.

Initially, I did only webresources, and could find just seventeen. It was a sparseliterature. Over the ensuing year I added several books, includingclassics like United Mindworkers and Getting to Yes. I added the research we performed for the Denver LMC. It still looked pretty sparse to me.

Suddenly, there has been asmall, but exciting explosion of publications on the subject.

Recently, Education Weekpublished a special report on labor-management collaboration entitled “Joining Forces: Moving district-union negotiations beyondbread-and-butter issues”. With this report, labor managementcollaboration has gone mainstream. But leading up to this breakthrough,there have been several other publications of note that have significantlyexpanded the literature.

“ImprovingStudent Learning Through Collective Bargaining” By Adam Urbanski(Harvard Education Letter May/June 2011) Urbanski, the brilliant localpresident of the Rochester, NY NYSUT affiliate, and cofounder of theTeacher Union Reform Network (TURN) writes of the use of continuous andexpanded scope bargaining to promote student learning.

SRI International and J. Koppich& Associates published “Peer Review: Getting Serious About Teacher Support andEvaluation” This paper reaches three important conclusionsbased on in-depth analysis of two established Peer Assistance and Review (PAR)programs in California: 1) Peer support and evaluation can and shouldcoexist. 2) PAR is a rigorous alternative to traditional forms of teacherevaluation and development. 3) PAR leads to better collaboration betweendistricts and unions.

The NEA TodaySummer 2011 issue had a cover story entitled “Change Agents: Union ledcollaboration is driving success in schools across America.” The storyprofiles several locals which employed the traditional levers of unionism tobenefit student learning. I was particularly struck by the story aboutthe Dayton local employing the grievance process to acquire textbooks forspecial needs students. This aligns with John Wilson’s call for use ofexpanded scope bargaining to achieve social justice in his farewell speech atthe 2011 RA in Chicago.

Richard Elmore’s I Used to Think….and Now I Think is abrilliant meditation on policy by 20 leading education reformers. Amongthe many wise and provocative essays two stand out with regard to the subjectat hand:

Brad Jupp’s “Rethinking Unions’ Roles in EdReform” takes on union reform from a systems perspective. Jupp, who asDenver Classroom Teachers Association lead negotiator was one of the architectsof Denver’s ground breaking ProComp strategic compensation system, tacklesthe issue of union reform from a systems perspective. He writes, “If weare to see teacher union affiliates take a leading role in improving ourschools, we must begin to ask some questions about how they aredesigned.” He posits that unions are well designed to “get the resultsthey are presently getting.” Several pointed questions encouragerepurposing unions to support the success of the overall educationalenterprise: great student learning.

Mark Simon, former president ofthe Montgomery County MD NEA affiliate, and a TURN leader, contributed “HighStakes Progressive Teacher Unionism.” He writes, “Teacher Unions have aresponsibility to advocate not just in the narrow self-interest of their duespaying members, but in the public interest, from a teacher’s perspective.”

But Joining Forces really excited me when I saw itthis month. Here is a national education policy newspaper highlightingthe difficult work successfully pursued by unions and districts across thecountry. From New Haven to Memphis to Los Angeles and Lucia Mar ,CA, the articles highlight unions and board as they grapple with the art andscience of collaboration, wrapped around tough issues like Value Added Methods,the Teacher Advancement Program, and new forms of compensation. Includedis a great introduction/overview and a timeline. This is a must read toget the history and flavor of Labor-Management Collaboration.

Oh yes - hot off the presses: Transforming Teaching: ConnectingProfessional Responsibility with Student Learning - 2011Report. The NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT) justpublished their report chock full of union reform recommendations. Moreon that later.

Last February at the Denver LMCArne Duncan spoke of igniting a movement that would make labor-managementcollaboration the norm. Speaking as a union leader, on the subject oflabor-management collaboration I support the Department of Education - and theCETT. The current wave of significant research and publicationleads me to believe the vision is getting traction.

What other publications shouldI add to this list or to my Union Reform ResourcesPage?

One More Thing Brill Got Wrong

2011-12-11T11:39:00.001-05:00

On pages 35 and 36 of Class Warfare, Steven Brill analyzes teacher salary increases in New York City thatresulted from Albert Shanker’s leadership of the United Federation of Teachers(UFT). His numbers look like this:

Table 1 New York City teacher stating salaries 1953-2007

Year	salary
1953	$ 2,600
1962	$ 5,300
1969	$ 10,950
2007	$ 45,530

From this, Brill concludes, “By2007….the starting salary would be $45,530.00, or more than eight times1962’s $5300.” Evidently Brill wants tospark outrage that teacher unionism would lead to outrageous increases instarting salaries. In taking this cheapshot, he missed a far more interesting story. To uncover that story, we need to be able to compare salaries apples forapples. To do this I used a CPI Inflation Calculator. Adjusting for inflation, the numbers looklike this:

Table 2 New York City teacher starting salaries in 2007dollars

Year	salary	2007 dollars	change
1953	$ 2,600.00	$ 20,190.61
1962	$ 5,300.00	$ 36,387.83	80%
1969	$ 10,950.00	$ 61,863.62	70%
2007	$ 45,530.00	$ 45,530.00	-26%

This is an interestingstory. The first UFT contract in 1962resulted in a starting salary 80% higher than Albert Shanker’s starting salary in1953. By 1969, the starting salaryincreased an additional 70%, representing increases averaging 12% eachyear. But between 1969 and 2007 startingsalaries actually declined 26% in real dollar terms.

At the National Board for ProfessionalTeaching Standards Conference last summer, ArneDuncan gave a speech in which he said:

Last year, McKinsey did a study comparingthe U.S. to other countries and recommending—among other things—that we changethe economics of the profession, pointing out that entry-level salary in thehigh 30's and an average ceiling in the high 60's will never attract and retainthe top talent. We must think radically differently. We should also be asking how the teachingprofession might change if salaries started at $60,000 and rose to $150,000.

The UFT had achieved thosestarting salaries in 1969. I think thequestion of why a starting salary that would genuinely attract talent to theprofession declined 26% over the next 38 years is a fascinating question, oneworth pondering. Rather than offer any glibspeculations, I prefer to continue the story….

Starting salaries only tell partof the story when analyzing a single salary schedule. I articulated my views on the single salary elsewhereon this blog. Let’s turn to the toplevel salary and the ratios between top level and starting salaries for afuller picture.

Table 3 Top level NYC salaries in 2008 dollars

Year	Top level (T)	% Increase	Starting (S)	Ratio (T:S)
1962	$69,411		$37,330	1.86
1969	$99,438	43%	$64,238	1.55
2008	$100,049	1%	$45,530	2.20

From 1962 to 1969 top levelsalaries increased 43%. Because startingsalaries rose 70% in the same time period, the ratio fell from 1.86 to 1.55. In the ensuing 39 years top level salarieswere virtually flat, but because starting salaries fell 26% the ratio increasedradically to 2.2.

As a negotiator I was trainedthat an indexed salary schedule with a 2:1 ratio is ideal. I do not think that a 2:1 ratio is a goodthing if it means that starting salaries are cut. Why? Because a dollar you receive today,especially in the current political environment is worth a lot more than anIOU.

The ratio that Arne Duncanproposed in his speech is 2.5. What thismeans is that the UFT achieved what the Secretary of Education is recommending fora starting salary way back in 1969, and they approached his recommended ratioin the 21^st century, but because this was achieved throughreductions in starting salaries, they did not achieve these things at the same time. I know this involves an anachronism, but bearwith me.

If you’ve managed to follow me tothis point, I congratulate you. I’ve seizedon a very minute piece of Brill’s story, but I’ve been pondering it for months. I freely admit that it’s an arcane point, butone worth mulling. If teachers are to becompensated like the professionals that they are, why was the most powerfullocal in the country, the UFT, unable to roll together a salary schedule combiningboth a livable wage for beginners and top level salaries commensurate withprofessionalism?

I think this is a fascinating historical question, the consideration ofwhich may be illuminating for union leaders going forward.

The next lines of Duncan’s speechare interesting to consider in light of this question

We must ask and answer hard questions ontopics that have been off limits in the past like staffing practices and schoolorganization, benefits packages and job security—because the answers may giveus more realistic ways to afford these new professional conditions. If teachers are to be treated and compensatedas the true professionals they are, the profession will need to shift away froman industrial-era blue-collar model of compensation to rewarding effectivenessand performance.

As a union leader and as asocialist I maintain a healthy skepticism here. The devil is in the details. Thedevil is also in the question of whether the practitioner’s voice will bedecisive in these matters. We can seefrom the guttingof regulations for for-profit colleges that in the current environment money dominateseducation policy in particular and politics in general. But for that fact, I would be a lot morereceptive to the secretary’s challenge.

If teachers and our unions canseize upon these matters of “topics that have been off limits in the past” andshape them in ways that work for students and workers, there may be a way forwardhere. But it will take a constitutional amendmentnegating Citizens United to make it possible.

Just some things to ponder….

How Things Have Changed in Two Years....

2011-12-10T06:53:00.001-05:00

In November 2009 a statewidelabor conference convened at the Davis Center at the University of Vermontunder the auspices of the Vermont Workers Center. The big news at the time was a contract thatthe Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) was considering, a contractwhich was cutting state employees compensation almost 7%. A group of us at the conference agreed tobegin a statewide letter writing campaign to urge state employees to voteagainst ratification.

The letter writing campaign wasnot very successful. Even though a dozenof us were writing to literally every statewide and regional newspaper, only acouple the letters were published. Itwas an object lesson for me in the control exercised over the conventionalmedia by conventional ideas. My letterended up being published on the SocialistWorker website. I wrote:

As a teacher, I foresee reduction inservices that will reduce the effectiveness of schools, as stressed familiesare less able to support their children's education. The negative effects ofthe proposed VSEA contract will be felt in schools in the form of behaviorproblems, hunger, abuse and neglect, with less backup from state agencies. Thebad public policy represented by this contract will diminish the value of ourcommunities' education investment.

Working people everywhere will be draggeddown by this contract. Whether public sector or private sector, union ornon-union, the task of achieving fair settlements and livable wages will bemore difficult with the example of this bad contract hanging over us.

Fast forward two years. Yesterdaya tentative agreement was reached between the state and VSEA. According to VTDigger

Shumlin administration officials and thestate employees union announced on Friday afternoon that they have come to anagreement on a two-year contract that includes the restoration of the 3 percentpay cut that was instituted two and a half years ago and a 2 percent payincrease in July 2012 plus a 2 percent increase in July 2013.

This sounds promising, but I’mwithholding judgment until I have a chance to talk today with other laborleaders. But here’s another importantchange of attitude:

Jeb Spaulding, secretary of the Agency ofAdministration, said “I think it’s a fair deal for the taxpayer and a fair dealfor state employees, and the fact we can do it without an acrimonious process …is a benefit for everyone, and I hope a morale booster for state employees.”

The agreement marks the first time the threebargaining units – Corrections, Supervisory and Non-Management Units — and thestate have not had to resort to mediation or fact finding as part of thenegotiation process.

Spaulding said the administration projectedahead of time what it would cost to go through the longer, more typical,adversarial process and determined that if they spent months of wrangling withfact finding and legislative lobbying the result would have been the same. “Wespent quite a bit of time trying to project where we would be with the acrimoniousroute,” Spaulding said.

“We don’t have time for that kind of a gamethat ends up using state employees as pawns, and it’s not the most courageousor productive way to go,” Spaulding said.

This is the Jeb Spaulding of theinfamous Spaulding Commission that two years ago tried to destroy publicpensions in Vermont. How things havechanged in two years.

I hope school boards everywhere are listening….

Today the Vermont Workers Centerand Students Stand Up! is again convening a statewide conference entitled “Human Rights for the 99%” In a couple of hours I’ll again be climbinginto my battered Corolla for the trek to the Davis Center, this time for a muchlarger conference which already boasts over 550 registrants.

How things have changed in twoyears…..

A VSEA contract that on the surface appears to be reasonable
An administration that appears to get some of the basics of labor-management collaboration
A statewide online publication, VT Digger, which is dedicated to balanced journalism and understands that a dialogue of diverse voices is essential to great public policy
A reinvigorated labor movement, energized by Occupy, rolling back the assaults in Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, now rallying not just dozens, but hundreds at a statewide Human Rights conference

I look forward to joining with myfellow workers in solidarity to celebrate progress and plan next steps. As a labor leader, I give up a lot ofweekends for the cause. But without myunion, and without the wider labor movement I would not have those weekends todo this work. It is a great privilege tobe able to do so.

VT-NEA’s Board of Directors: Of, By and For the Members

2011-12-09T20:35:00.001-05:00

Brian Walsh served as vice president of VT-NEA. A couple of years ago he wrote the followingarticle – it is an eminently reasonable statement on governance, and a goodintroduction to board activities for rank and file members.

Before I became a board director in 2005, I had no idea whatour Board of Directors was all about – “governance” was an unfamiliarterm. Sure, as a local leader I hadbecome acquainted with our state officers and several area directors. But I really did not know what the board did,how often they met, or how important their positions are for ourorganization. Speaking with some of mylocal members, it is clear that many of them share my former confusion on therole played by our board of directors as Vermont-NEA’s governance.

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors is composed of ourstatewide officers – President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer and NEABoard Director – 16 regional directors from our seven uniserve districts, andour Executive Director. Since they aremembers, the officers and regional directors have voting power; the Exec’s roleis advisory. The Board is our connectionto the reason unions were formed. Workers knew that it was other workers, themselves, who truly always hadtheir best interests at heart. Thesemember-led unions are responsible for the compensation, benefits and workingconditions – minimum-wage laws, health insurance, workplace safety rules,even weekends - we often take forgranted today. But as time went on, the logisticsand responsibilities of running a national, statewide, or even large localunions became too much for members needing to work full-time jobs to supporttheir families. Unions then began hiringemployees to assist with the myriad responsibilities of operating large labororganizations.

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors comprises its governance,or authority, for its operation. According to the manual Governance as Leadership, the primaryresponsibilities of governance include fiduciary, strategic and generativefunctions. Fiduciary responsibilityrefers to the management of an organization’s material assets. These duties obviously need to be taken veryseriously, and much care and attention is devoted to our fiduciaryresponsibility. But the other tworesponsibilities are no less important; the most effective boards execute allthree equally well.

Strategic planning means setting long-term goals. For these goals to be effective, they must bedesigned to fulfill our mission as both an educational association and as alabor organization. Generative thinkingaddresses the opportunities created by the challenges an organization facesworking to fulfill its mission. Thisfunction obviously needs time to develop, but is vital if an organization is todevelop its potential. Organizationsoften employ staffs to assist with all three functions, but the ultimateresponsibility is with the boards themselves.

Responsibility Versus Accountability

2011-12-05T07:34:00.001-05:00

Ichoose to be responsible rather than accountable. The reason is in the very etymology of thewords. Accountable is built around theverb “to count” and ascribes reality to abstract numbers, that which can be counted (andis therefore what “counts.”) Responsibilityis built around the verb “to respond.” The ability to respond is critical in humancontexts like education, and is what really counts.

There is a fundamentalconflict here: the imposition of accountability results in lesscollective responsibility. The fate of DeLa Cruz Middle School in Chicago illustrates the conflict, where emphasison numbers destroyed a learning community where people took collective responsibilityfor student success:

Anyone who visited us commented on what awonderful place it was. Unfortunately, the only person from CPS to come visitus was the numbers guy, whose job it was to calculate "space utilization….Whenthe numbers guy completed his report, he said we were at 61% utilization. Hiscalculations, he admitted later, were incorrect and we were actually near 70%utilization, but that is a different story for a different time.

Long story short, all those wonderful thingswe were doing did not matter to CPS. Our student improvement didn’t matter toCPS. Our organic “longer day” that we had didn’t matter to CPS. Our studentsand community didn’t matter to CPS.

This occurred in a context ofprivatization and neo-liberal “reforms” which have been going on in Chicago fortwenty years. I live in Vermont, and Ibelieve that this extreme case is instructive for us in our rural context. Peoplematter, and we need to fight against any trend towards dehumanizing oureducational institutions, because in so doing we hurt our communities. Responsibility is built on thebelief that we can be better than we are.

Ironically, while a misplaced emphasis on accountability diminishes responsibility, increased collective responsibility creates greaterachievement as a byproduct. At De La Cruz

Student achievement had been on the rise foryears; we ran one of the first true middle school programs in the city, whereour students would switch classes to be taught by subject area experts and inthe process they gained valuable experience for high school. Through a lot ofhard work by students and staff alike, we gained certification for the AVIDprogram. We passed the ISBE Special Education Audit, and the auditor told usthat we had one of the “best special education programs she had seen.”

Isn’t this the very picture of(good) accountability as well as responsibility? Here in Vermont, I have the privilege of working at the SharonElementary School, where there is a powerful sense of shared responsibility amongstaff, parents, students, and the community. Suffice to say that this school is among the 28% of Vermont schools thatmade AYP this year - not the essence of the matter, but a useful byproduct.

In order to clarify my ownthinking, I made up a chart comparing responsibility and accountability.

Responsibility – all are jointly and severally responsible for the success of the endeavor	Accountability – one is accountable to “higher ups”, taxpayers, whatever
Deductive – starts with principles and aspirations of the community and builds out from that, standards driven	Inductive – constructs reality like a numerical jigsaw puzzle, data driven
Qualifies – seeks and accepts a broad range of evidence for great student learning. Looks for connections between the evidence	Quantifies – what counts are the things you can count
Collaborative – interest based	Adversarial – positional/distributive
Intrinsic motivators	Extrinsic motivators “carrots and sticks”
Facilitation – seeks levers to amplify intrinsic motivation	Supervision – manages the carrots and sticks
Flat structures – lots of collateral circulation	Hierarchical – decisions flow down from the top
Sharing of information	Control of information
Dewey	Thorndike
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts	Zero sum – if you win, I lose
Influence over collectively shared aspirations	Power over people
The buck stops here	The buck stops someplace else
Holistic	Atomistic

Responsibility represents ourbest aspirations for our schools, our communities and our children. Why is it so hard to achieve? Responsibility is cognitively demanding - it requires intelligence. To those who are unable to grasp the nuances of education, accountability is the easier choice. It doesn’t follow that it is the best choice.

We are people, not numbers.

Let’s Flip That

2011-11-28T19:20:00.001-05:00

A current argument in the education policy worldis 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 toemphasize the quality of outputs (i.e. reformers). Here is mytongue-in-cheek argument that this discussion is itself specious. I amnot attacking religion, just trying to demonstrate the absurdity of applying afactory model in an inappropriate context. It gets ugly fast.

All this input/output business just underscoresthe paradigm that organizes our schools: the factory. In a factory, thequality of the inputs matter, as do the quality of the outputs. I workedin 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 whiteoak, I'd get a different outcome (I won't mention the injury factor this wouldentail.) They'd probably muddle through and call me an idiot, but they'dget some sort of decent door done. Do this for enough years and it woulddegrade the craftsmanship, as workers become demoralized. I could go"make better doors or you're fired." Workers could organize aunion and push back. Yadda yadda yadda.

Let's apply the factory paradigm to a differentcontext, say church. So the inputs are the babies that we baptize, batchprocess 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 howmany years souls spent in purgatory with, say, their eyelids sewn shut withbarbed wire (see Dante.)

This would enableus to calculate value added scores for priests and nuns, who we could thenhire, fire, promote to bishop or otherwise "differentiallycompensate" as we deem fit.

But wait - some ofthe priests object, "our churches are filled with alcoholics, prostitutes,beggars, and criminals. That's why our numbers are down!" Toobad! Improve your technique - demographics is not destiny! Weshould close failing churches, fire the priest and half the nuns, or turn thechurch over to the management of televangelists. We could even have anun's union run by bad nuns (and excommunicate the nuns who dared to strike.)

What if instead of applying the factory paradigmto churches (amusing, but getting tiresome) we applied a church paradigm toschools? Schools as temples of learning. Just as churches (at theirbest) can be incubators of human spirituality, schools could be incubators ofthe human intellect.

Of course if we transfer the Romanmilitary/ecclesiastical hierarchy along with the paradigm (schools are alreadyorganized along these lines), we'll end up right where we are now with nochanges. And I'll personally skip the celibacy thing thank you very much!

Or maybe there's a better paradigm for theorganization of schools - but it sure ain't the factory!

Rethinking Administration Part II: Solutions

2011-11-28T18:57:00.001-05:00

It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks ratherthan as individual persons. These taskscan then be distributed within the system, either to make administrationdo-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building leveladministrator entirely. Improvingeducation means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the wayof the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.

Many would say that we need to doa better job of recruiting, training and inducting administrators. There are also those that would say that weshould look for administrative talent outside the ranks of educators, andrecruit administrators from the ranks of business and industry.

Neither of these solutions hasmuch promise. If improved recruitment,training and induction of administrators were a solution, we’d already be doingit. At best, it can produce a handful ofsuperstars, when what we need is systems to elevate the practice of the averageadministrator. Those systems are doomedto failure because the job is itself unreasonable – you have to be “superman”(or woman) to perform it. Systems that speakto the average are an inefficient way to create the exceptional.

Likewise, recruiting from outsidethe profession means you will recruit people with a subset of skills needed forsuccessful administration, but certain skills, like evaluation, curriculum andassessment, are so deeply rooted in classroom practice that an educationalleader from outside would be rendered dependent on others, or risk failure inthese key categories.

This points to a simplersolution: why not re-conceive administration as tasks rather than individuals,and then distribute these tasks within the organization to people with theskills and talent to perform individual tasks well? Then a range of administrative solutionsbecome 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.

Anexpansive Wallace Foundation study devoted to examining the traits ofeffective school principals has found that high student achievement is linkedto “collective leadership”: the combined influence of educators, parents, andothers 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.

Allowingteachers, through their unions, to take charge of quality in the profession,has been shownin the research to elevate practice. When a consensus in the teaching community develops around practice, theunion supports removal of non-performing individuals because teachersparticipated in the decision and the fairness of that decision cannot beimpugned.

The conceptualdifficulty for boards will be paying teachers for work that is not directinstruction of students.

In my Vermont experience,evaluation is the piece of administration which gets short shrift. Administrators, even when they have the skillset to do the job, do not have the time because of the myriad demands of the principalship. Administrators also often lack knowledge tobe genuinely helpful when evaluating teachers in specialized contentareas.

Breaking off this one piece andhanding it to teachers and their unions seems to me a first step towardsestablishing a model of building and district administration that can actuallybe accomplished by the real flesh and blood people to whom we entrust the task. But just a first step – ultimately resolvingthe issue of rural administration may well require more radical solutions.

Rethinking Administration Part I: The Problem

2011-11-27T07:54:00.001-05:00

In my twenty plus years ofteaching/working in Vermont public schools, I’ve worked under fourteenprincipals and six superintendents. Ihave to temper this assertion by pointing out that, as a rural elementaryschool music teacher, I’ve always worked in two schools simultaneously. I’ve been twenty years at one of thoseschools, where I have experienced six of those principals and four of thesuperintendents, an average tenure of a little over three years for theprincipals. The five year average forsuperintendents actually exceeds the national average by about two years,mostly due to our current superintendent having served almost thirteen years

This collection of administratorshas been a mixed bag. As a group, theylurch from the incompetent, the criminal, and the incoherent, to a handful whocould actually perform enough of the grab bag of tasks that constitute administrationto be considered competent. Proficiencyin administration seems to be less a function of mastery of the craft and morea question of mere longevity: two of the more ostensibly successfuladministrators I’ve served under achieved whatever success largely due tooutlasting their faculties long enough to implement some changes.

Longevity is a pretty lowbar. The task of school administrationitself, however, is impossible. One mustdemonstrate skills in curriculum, teacher evaluation, budgeting, scheduling,contract administration, education law, special education, management of thephysical plant, politics, discipline, transportation, communication, negotiationand personnel management (not to mention leadership…) I have yet to see thecomplete package in any one individual, not because there is anything wrongwith the people themselves, but because the job is itself unreasonable. Proficiency or even distinction in any smallset of these tasks may not be enough to overcome failure in any one area.

Furthermore, administrators arepromoted from the classroom. Thequalities that make one a skilled and effective classroom teacher are notnecessarily the skills that make one an effective administrator - but backgroundin 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 prospectiveadministrators.

Anyone that has sat on an administrative search committee in a small town can speak of the thinness of the talent pool. Oneoften experiences a motley collection of retreads and unproven first timers. In Vermont, the real dance of the lemonshappens not in the teaching force, which tends to be stable and competent, butin the ranks of administration. Theplethora of small community schools in our state means we have a demand for alarge number of administrators relative to the student population. Then we spend a lot of money hiring people todo 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 anindictment of every administrator. Ihave worked with some excellent administrators; the problem is that they arethe exception rather than the rule. The rest? Good, well-meaning people plying a 1950's role cursed with 21st century expectations.

Tomorrow Part II: Solutions

A Modest Proposal

2011-11-22T23:46:00.001-05:00

After years of toiling forunions 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 reverseDiane 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’vecome up with.

We have a problem. Astaxes on the wealthy approach zero, foundations are no longer going to benecessary to shelter the wealth of the rich from taxation. Revenues willdecline as the middle class (the people who get taxed) shrinks. How arewe going to fund our schools with neither revenue, nor foundations?

The answer lies in thefinancial markets. Wall Street has the talent and the capacity to developinnovative investment instruments that can save our schools. Why did thisnever 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 unlockthe genius of Wall Street everything will be OK.

There are a couple of keyinnovations that make this financial miracle possible. First of all,thanks to standardized tests, education has become a commodity. It can betraded just like pork bellies or Brent crude. Second, when a productbecomes a commodity, the efficiency of the market allows the producer to bepaid below the rate needed to sustain life, meaning that education costs cannotonly be controlled, but radically cut. The commoditization of education providesa way to quantify costs per unit output (test scores.)

I propose that investors beable to make direct investments schools – in essence, buy shares. Thevalue 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 anygood commodities business, schools that can squeeze higher test scores at lowerunit costs will be more valuable. When this occurs, the value of thesecurity will rise.

This market could be part ofthe Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Investors will be able to use put andcall options so they can bet either for or against student learning. Inaddition, a futures market would allow accurate predictions of test scores atindividual schools through the price fluctuations of these securities. With securities pricing information in hand, management could bring resourcesto bear on problems pro-actively. The miracle of the invisible hand willimprove schools even as everyone gets rich – and all with no messy revenues toraise!

One difficulty this poses forthe wealthy investor is exposure to conditions in individual schools. Forexample an outbreak of flu, or an inconvenient school shooting during testingcould cause an investor to lose money. Plus, statisticians have warned usof the instability of VAM when applied to the relatively small student populationsof individual schools and teachers’ classrooms – what rational investor wouldwant to be exposed to this sort of risk?

Luckily, we can use derivativesto hedge against these risks. Individual school securities can be slicedup and bundled with other schools with similar characteristics. Thesederivatives could be sliced and bundled a second time to allow creative moneymanagers to customize investment portfolios for the risk profiles of theirwealthy investors. Investors would be able to hedge their risks and betfor and against student learning simultaneously, while continuing to makemoney. These derivatives could become so divorced from the underlying valueof student test scores that they increase in value indefinitely. Thiswill encourage the wealthy to pour their money into schools, now guaranteedmoney makers.

I believe that similarmechanisms can be employed on other public goods. A prime example isinfant mortality rates – a candidate for commoditization if there ever wasone. We have a statistic which can float up and down, and a measurableunit cost. The use of derivatives in this case would create an efficientmarket 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 isthat by removing irrational considerations, like ethics, that distort theeconomic system and lead to inefficiencies, like doctors and hospitals, we canachieve 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 discoveredthe power of unregulated markets. I’d like to pitch this idea to GoldmanSachs, and the Gates Foundation. I don’t think I’ll bother with the USGovernment, since there won’t be much of it left in a few years.

A College Student Speaks Out

2011-11-21T17:59:00.001-05:00

My daughter Liz Beatty-Owens gave this speech at a labor rally atJohnson State College in October. Liz is20, and is already a skilled organizer, with a deep understanding of thepolitical 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 inNew 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 $20,000in debt. And yes- in terms of debt I am one of the lucky ones.

I am here today because I am astudent with a 15-credit work load, working 2 part time jobs, thousands ofdollars in debt and I still cannot regularly afford to live comfortably - and Iknow I am not the only one.

I am here today because I havefollowed the rules. I graduated fromhigh 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 discouragedwhen each semester I have multiple peers drop out of college for financialreasons- going off to minimum wage jobs or, in two cases, the military, withsemesters of debt looming behind them.

I don’t know about you but I want to live in an educated society wherea college degree is not considered a privilege but recognized as a social good.

I have had the opportunity theselast two semesters through numerous political science classes to speak to manyof our Vermont political leaders and active community members. And more oftenthan not the question is asked of me in this situation- why aren’t more youngadults involved with politics- more active and driven in this field?

And as this question resonateswith me I can’t help but turn to them and say: How can we expect the majorityof students to support the government when students are not being looked outfor by our government. We areunderfunded and consequently unsupported. It’s a give and take deal.

That said, it has become clear tome this semester that the student population at Johnson is no longer willing tostand idly by. We have groups formingsuch as Students for a DemocraticSociety (Wednesday nights at 7:00) and an ambitious group of students namedJohnson to Wall Street (Tuesdays at7:00).

And lastly, I would like to seethe creation of a student union to represent our voice and our expectations ata state wide level- initially here at Johnson but then becoming VSC wide. There is power in numbers- and we have theintelligence, the energy and the drive to create change right here, right now.

I would like to invite everyJohnson student to sign up for the Student Union. Our table is right over there….

With a unified voice we can standup for students and create change at a localized level.

Let’s ask Vermont to once againset an example for the rest of the country- we’ve done it before with healthcare and same sex marriage- let’s do it again! Let’s support our students, fundour colleges and create social justice!

Which Way Forward for Teacher Unions?

2011-11-15T22:55:00.001-05:00

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 fundamentalsocial good. They are institutions thatelevate not only the workers who are their members, but all workers in generalby raising the bar of good employment practices and fair compensation.

I’m ~~second~~ third generation union. My mother worked 34 years for the county jailand her union guaranteed that after a lifetime of toil and difficulties sheretired in dignity and could fulfill her greatest wish – that in old age shecould be independent and not a burden on her children.

VT-NEA has helped guarantee amiddle class existence and a dignified retirement for thousands of Vermont’steachers. For me personally, engagementwith my union has given me tremendous opportunities to develop professional andleadership skills. For this I am verygrateful.

Part of caring deeply is to becritical and encourage improvement and greater efficacy in the union. VT-NEA and all teachers unions are in a timeof great flux. The ability to change iskey to our survival. But we must do thisin a way that honors and is built on the strengths that we have inherited fromthe hard work and sacrifice of those who have come before us.

Where do we stand right now? Here in Vermont, the system of teachernegotiations is broken. We have anexpensive, ritualistic political theatre of teacher negotiations, a divisiveprocess which has become detached from the fundamental purpose of theeducational enterprise: great student learning, and produces incrementallanguage changes and pay raises below the rate of inflation

However, in one district I workin, I assisted in an interest based process that quickly arrived at a threeyear settlement including a lift up and set down of the salary schedule, whichyielded new money in excess of 11% over three years. The contrast was stark.

When I went to Washington lastsummer for my Fellowship, I was puzzling about this contrast. I had a chance to sit down with one of the Department’stop experts on unions and after a half hour of analysis he looked at me andsaid “you guys have a mess.”

My take away from thisconversation was that we needed bargaining reform in Vermont. But as I continued to work with thedepartment on labor management questions, it became apparent to me thatbargaining reform could only exist in the context of comprehensive unionreform. What does this look like?

The model that speaks to me moststrongly as a union leader is the ThreeFrames of Progressive Unionism, developed by the Mooney Institute for Teacher UnionLeadership. The Three Frames areIndustrial Unionism, Professional Unionism, and Social Justice Unionism.

Industrial Unionism usescollective power to meet bread and butter needs of members and ensure fairnessfrom management. It is the bulk of whatwe think of when we consider teacher union work: negotiations, grievances, and yes strikes, ornear strikes. It assumes an adversarial relationshipwith management. The Industrial Frame has elevated the profession, but presentssome problems.

First, industrial style laborrelations were adopted from industry. Asschools evolve away from a factory model, the foundation of the industrialframe is shifting beneath us.

Second, the political conditions sustainingthis model are changing – think Wisconsin. Not only are we facing a coordinated, well financed attack on ourcollective bargaining rights from the radical right, but the Democratic Party,to which teacher unions hitched their fortunes, is no longer a reliable ally orprotector.

Third, the public, as well asrank and file, may be becoming impatient with the inefficiency of teachernegotiations, detached from the fundamental purpose of education: great studentlearning.

Professional Unionism seekscontrol of the profession to ensure quality. In this frame, focus is on professional development and quality ofteaching/learning. The methods includecollaboration with management. I believemany teachers identify with this frame, because confrontation is not in ourcharacter. The problem here is that itis naïve to think that teachers’ good intentions will make stupid orduplicitous behavior by bureaucrats, politicians and administrators go away.

Social Justice Unionism seeksequity for our students through active engagement in the community. It wraps the unions’ arms around biggersocial problems, problems that if they were solved would help make thecurriculum accessible to even our most vulnerable students. Social Justice Unionism represents thepinnacle of our work. How do we getthere, especially in the overt hostility of the current environment?

First, it is important to notethat these three frames are symbiotic. You don’t get to choose. Livingexclusively in one is perilous. Thethree frames are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions forthe success of teachers’ unions.

Second, I used to believe thatthe three frames existed in equality. Events in Wisconsin and other states this year have taught me that theyactually exist in a hierarchy. For allof the historical and political problems of an exclusive industrial unionism, arobust capacity to attend to the bread and butter issues of both members andunions themselves is the foundation for the existence of meaningful progress inthe Professional and Social Justice Frames. There will always remain the need for working people to confrontpower. Anything else is wishfulthinking.

The possibilities of Professionaland Social Justice Unionism flow from the power of Industrial Unionism. Professional Unionism unlocks the potentialof collaborative labor management relations to improve educational outcomes,but is defended from foolishness by the shield of Industrial Unionism. Social Justice Unionism extends the benefitsof our work to stakeholders outside our membership, especially children, andcreates a stable political base that cannot be provided by an exclusivelyindustrial/adversarial approach. Professional Unionism enjoys the enhanced capabilities of students andfamilies whose basic needs are being met.

Where does Wisconsin fit in thisvision? The political vandals like ScottWalker who are seeking to end teachers’ collective bargaining rights areessentially destroying the possibility of teachers unions becoming strong,responsible partners in creating great student learning. Unions need excess capacity to operate in theProfessional and Social Justice frames. Attacking our sustainability by eliminating dues deductions, as inAlabama, or forcing us to hold certification elections each year, as inWisconsin, compromises our ability to put our shoulder to the common challengeof a creating a great educational system.

I want to close with one lastthought concerning Social Justice Unionism. Before I became active with VT-NEA, I was active with the VermontWorker’s Center. I came away from that experiencewith an insight: how dangerous it is for my union to go it alone. Solidarity with other workers is a keystonemoving forward in the current hostile labor environment. I foresaw that to the extent we failed tohelp others, it meant that we were failing to push problems away from ourselvesproactively. I predicted the presentcrisis; I am shocked at the scale and virulence of the assault.

Dr. Martin Luther King wasassassinated on this day in 1968 after coming to the support of strikingMemphis sanitation workers. He didn’tneed to do this, but he did, because he fully grasped the necessity of workers’struggle for justice. I hope thattonight we are in some small way honoring the spirit of solidarity in which Dr.King gave his life. Thank you.

SB5 Repeal: Ohio Injustice Averted

2011-11-09T07:26:00.001-05:00

How you spell relief? I spell it SB5. Finally the tide has turned in the corporateanti-labor assault on public sector unions.

If there were teacher unions inany state that didn't deserve SB5 it was those of Ohio. Ohio is the home of the Toledo Plan, theground breaking Peer Assistance and Review System (PARS) which has been anational model of teacher taking control of professionalism for decades. According to newresearch, deployment of a PARS system leads to more collaborative labormanagement relations.

Another example: The Dayton localwas recently highlighted in NEA Today for using the grievance procedure toacquire textbooks for special needs students.

But I discovered the mostsignificant example of the progressive work of Ohio's teacher unions in Denver,at the US Department of Education's Labor ManagementConference. At a reception, I spentconsiderable time talking with several representatives of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,a federal agency charged with improving relations between labor andmanagement. At one point I was talkingwith 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 interestbased?" The colleague thoughtabout it for a moment, and replied, "Eighty percent."

Eighty percent. As a VT-NEA local leader, I've been workingto encourage the use of interest based bargaining (IBB) in two Vermontsupervisory unions, a state where the labor-management relations often have an adversarialcharacter because they rely on distributive tools. We are just taking our first baby steps toachieve what has been achieved in Ohio. And Ohio, where FMCS deploys this tool 80% of the time, which has beenusing contemporary conflict management tools for decades, where unions joinwith their communities to create great student results, experiences SB5. I was shocked, saddened and angered.

Ohio's unions did not deservethis assault. They were punished fordoing some of the most progressive, collaborative and innovative work in thecountry. I am incredibly relieved thatthe citizens of Ohio recognized the treasure they have in these great civicinstitutions, public sector unions, by not just repealing SB5, but repudiatingtheir governor by an almost two to one margin.

Occupy Negotiations

2011-10-30T16:32:00.000-04:00

Working people have to stop fighting against each other and start fighting for each other. Peering throughthe lens of the Occupy movement, it’s obvious that the people I sit with in thenegotiations room here in Vermont, both board and teachers, are part of the99%. I seriously doubt anyone in theroom has an annual income in excess of $516,000. When we distract ourselves with labor-managementfratricide, we work for our oppressors, for truly we have far more in commonwith each other than with David Koch, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, orBill Gates. Solidarity means not justcircling the union wagons, but identifying with and actively promoting thelegitimate aspirations of our communities.

Theadversarial culture that persists in our negotiation process here in Vermont thwarts thoseaspirations and plays into the interests of the 1%. This culture is self inflicted. Both boards and teachers have choices abouthow they do business. If we make betterchoices, we can free political energy for the fight for social justice.

Let meemphasize, I do not believe that collective bargaining is itself inherently adversarial. Too many times, however, the parties chooseto be adversarial. Collective bargainingis a fundamental public good. It isincumbent on participants to improve the process so that this public good cantruly achieve its potential in terms of promoting great educational outcomesand social justice.

As a veteran negotiator, I can attest to the human costs ofan exclusively adversarial process. Inmy supervisory union, which has gone to the brink of crisis build-up threeconsecutive times, teams of teachers put in excess of 2000 hours of time into aprocess which in the final analysis produces minimal new money and a fewincremental changes in contract language. I am sure a similar commitment is made by the board team.

In addition, theboard spends tens of thousands of dollars on a labor attorney, and both sidesspend thousands more on private mediators and fact finders. All this time and treasure has the net effectof preserving a degraded status quo. Teachers experience gradual erosion of pay and working conditions; boardand administration gain nothing in terms of the sort of flexibility that wouldenable them to manage for better student learning. Taxes rise to pay for this state of affairs. So do union dues.

But above and beyond the wasteful stalemate produced by thepolitical theater of an adversarial negotiations culture, the true costs of systemicdysfunction occur when the poisonous dispositions of labor-management conflictfilter down to schools and classrooms. Classrooms at their best are deeply collaborative learning environments;they need to be supported by collaborative processes at the building level, atthe supervisory union level, ultimately at the state and federal level.

For example, teachers who do not trust their administratorscannot benefit from evaluation, no matter how well designed orintentioned. Collaboration at all levelsis the foundation for improved teaching practice. And who are the victims of the statusquo? Students.

How can we advance the cause of collaboration? Part of the answer lies in reform of thenegotiation process.

There is a growing body of research and practice onlabor-management collaboration. Contemporary conflict management techniques go back over thirtyyears. In addition to the positional oradversarial bargaining that dominates our landscape, it includes at least threeother tools:

Interest based bargaining, which strives tocreate solutions by drilling down through the positions that animatetraditional adversarial bargaining, to the underlying interests in order tocreate novel solutions which address the true aspirations of the participants.
Expanded scope bargaining, which strives toassimilate the expertise of the practitioner into the public policy process anduses the negotiation process as the gateway.
Continuous bargaining, in which parties take upproblems as they arise, devise solutions, and roll them into the contract. This reduces the sheer quantity of itemssaved up for the formal negotiations process, and simplifies the task ofreaching agreement. Problems do not fester.

This enhanced conflict managementtool set provides means of effectively resolving a wider range ofproblems. We in Vermont suffer from the“rule of the tool”: when the only tool in your kit is a hammer, every problemlooks like a nail. But not every problemin teacher negotiations is a distributive problem, a problem of carving up afinite pie. Many problems of workingconditions are not finite, and allow for a broad range of creativesolutions. Using positional bargainingtechniques on these problems drains the creativity out of the process, anddenies our children the benefits of the best possible teaching.

Negotiations reform, howevernecessary, is not sufficient to drive progress. For that we need to look at the literature on ground breaking districtsnationally, districts which have achieved deep and sustained collaborativerelationships which have driven systemic change and education reform. One suchstudy is Collaborative SchoolReform: Creating Partnerships To Improve School Systems From Within bySaul Rubinstein, and John McCarthy, which was published by Rutgers Universityin October, 2010. This ground breakingstudy looks at six districts which have achieved a deep and abidingcollaborative labor-management relationship, from the giant Hillsborough (FL)school district, a famous Gates deep-dive district with over 200,000 students,to tiny Plattsburgh (NY), with less than 2000.

In May 2011 the United StatesDepartment of Education published LocalLabor Management Relationships as a Vehicle to Advance Reform: Findings fromthe U.S. Department of Education’s Labor Management Conference byJonathan Eckert et al. I was part of theresearch team. This study highlightedthe work of twelve districts nationwide which had achieved a high level oflabor-management collaboration, including four from the Rutgers study.

A salient feature of this studyis the diversity of the districts that had reformed their labor-managementrelations. There were districts likeWinston-Salem Forsythe (NC) from a southern right to work state, and the GreenDot Charter chain, as well as districts enjoying the benefits of strongpro-labor laws, like Plattsburgh (NY) and ABC Unified (CA).

What distinguishes thesedistricts is the willingness of leaders to take a risk, and put the end goal ofthe enterprise first: great student learning. Students truly represent the aspirations of communities.

Here in Vermont it is time forbold and visionary leaders to sit together in order to remake our relationship. The way forward is by following theexample of best practice nationally.

Specifically, we need to:

Be humble enough to step back from deeply ingrained habits of thought and practice, and use contemporary conflict management techniques.
Draw on the resources that exist nationally to help us solve our problems. In particular, the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service is available at no cost to facilitate our moving forward.
Build policy expertise in labor management collaboration through study of the extant literature and through contact with successful models.
People need to start talking WITH each other about the possibilities for change rather than talking AT each other by positional/adversarial habit.

This is hard work, and will taketime and resources. Those of usgenuinely interested in benefitting students and communities should be takingon the tough problems rather than persisting in behavior which only serves theinterests of the 1% who would squeeze our communities dry.

Messaging vs. Communication

2011-10-14T07:32:00.000-04:00

Media professionals often use theterm messaging to indicate a small number of talking points that are repeatedincessantly. I call this propaganda. To the so-called media professional staying “onmessage” is a virtue. Joseph Goebbels said,“The point of a political speech is to persuade people of what we think right.” Messaging falls squarely within thistradition. Goebbels was the first masterof old media. Old media is aboutcontrol, and about one way communication, which, when you think about it,really isn’t communication at all.

Communication is dialogue. When a union is truly communicating with itsconstituency, the democratically engaged members are simultaneously therecipients and the shapers of the message. Democratic engagement is the antithesis of control.

Web 2.0 technologies break downthe control exercised by the petty propagandists of American media. Social media, blogs and wikis are among thetechnologies that allow the people to talk back. These technologies represent a threat to old-media professionals.

What if a member rode off therails? What if he or she went offmessage? What would happen to themonolithic talking points that the union hammers at relentlessly? What if it was revealed that there wasdiversity of opinion within the organization on a topic? What if, god forbid, the dissenting point ofview became….popular within the organization?

The answer is simple – we wouldhave to do business differently. Andthat would mean professional staff would have to do business differently. So it’s easier to control the message, becausedoing business differently is a threat to those who are the masters ofyesterday’s world (and are well compensated for their trouble....)

In the battle between control anddemocratic engagement, the ongoing ascendance of the forces of control weakensthe union. The only way forward isthrough democratic engagement. Messaging– propaganda – fatally weakens engagement. Could it destroy our union?

And to think I finance messaging with my duesdollars….

The Meaning of Collaboration II: Professional Conversations

2011-10-09T07:27:00.000-04:00

Let’s break down this question ofLabor-management collaboration and see what it looks like in the school andclassroom.

At the school/classroom level, thebiggest impediment to collaboration is a lack of capacity for professionalconversations. Ultimately, at the schoollevel, collaboration “looks like” the ability to fearlessly and accurately evaluateyour own work, and to seek the assistance of others to both push out thepositives to the wider community AND fix the areas in need of improvement.

Binary systems for evaluationreduce our capacity for professional conversations. When satisfactory evaluations are the norm,and unsatisfactory evaluations put us on the long torturous path totermination, any remark that is vaguely critical becomes a threat. The inability to criticize one’s self and toaccept criticism from others cripples professional growth. In a true collaborative environment,criticism is safe, and it is appreciated, because it is the one thing thatenables teachers to get better at what they do.

The simple statement that someaspect of your practice could be better is not the end of the world, providedthat it is accompanied by resources that enable you to grow. The importance of this fact is illustrated bywhat our students do in the classroom. This underscores what I said in my previous post: that “there needs to be symmetry ofexpectations up and down the hierarchical food chain.”

I’m a music teacher. I recently developed a simple assessment to helpmy beginning recorder students learn. Itis essentially a checklist of four things that make for great technique: warm, gentle air, tonguing (whisper “duh”when starting notes), left hand on top, and covering holes completely withfingers. If the student does all fourthings, their sound should match the model I provide. First I had students self assess with fingerson the chest, and peer assess. I wassurprised at the number of “4’s” I saw even when this was not supported by thesimplest observation (a 4 would more or less sound like the model.) This is not rocket science.

The kicker is that thisassessment is intended kindly, to give the individual a clear and simple pathto improvement.

Self assessment is, of course,notorious for unreliability. With thepeer assessment, I can only conclude that kids were being “nice” so as to nothurt feelings. But I find the impliedthinking strange. How is it nice toallow another person to be unsuccessful, unless one agrees with the Dodo, “Atlast the Dodo said, ‘everybody has won, and allmust have prizes.’”

These were the compliant childrenbehaving this way. In a subsequentlesson, I provided the assessment myself, on a slip of paper. As each child echoed my model, I quicklychecked off the things they had successfully performed. The slips gave feedback essential toimprovement. Fix the missing checkmarkand voila! My compliant children werenot a problem.

Billy, my noncompliant student,freaked out. He got a 2, due to righthand on top and not completely covering holes. He rolled on the floor, “I suck!” he wailed. No patient explanation would bring himback. He was truly the canary in ourcollaborative mine. He is not the onlychild in this school unable to accept constructive feedback. Nor the only human being.

I was talking to a teacher. We have a Danielson style evaluation systemwith a four point rubric, really just a more sophisticated version of my littlefour point checklist for recorder, one ostensibly designed to point us towardsways of improving our craft. Thisteacher said something like this, “The principal evaluated me. In the past I always got exemplary ratings (4’s)on everything. He must have it in forme. I didn’t get top scores oneverything this time. Oh well, I’m justgoing to ignore it and move on.”

Is this reaction substantiallydifferent than Billy’s? By reacting thisway, this person was turning our Danielson style rubric into a de facto binaryevaluation system: satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Under these conditions, it is impossible to move forward into improvedpractice.

Correlation is not causation, butI cannot help but be struck by symmetry of the adult behaviors in this buildingand the way the children behave. Thechildren unwittingly mimic the errors of the adults. I work in two schools. At my other school, fifty miles away, where Ibelieve there is a true collaborative environment, I taught the same lesson tothe third grade. Children who had receiveda 2 or a 3 were happy to have a second chance. By the end of the period every single child had achieved the model andreceived a four. In a profoundlydifferent and meaningful way all were in fact winners and all did receive aprize: evidence of their own competence and mastery. And a beautiful sound singly and collectivelyon their musical instrument.

For collaboration to work in themodern labor-management relationship there must be trust, and there must be theability to give and receive constructive criticism along with meaningfulresources to respond to that criticism and grow from it: the professionalconversation. The success of newevaluation models, and of strategic compensation schemes, depends on it. Trust could be enhanced by separating theissue of evaluation for professional learning from the issue of evaluation forthe termination of poorly performing teachers- but that’s for another blog.

There is a way forward onprofessional conversation. I am an NBCT. That was a humbling experience. Through a process that pushed me to comparemyself to an extremely high standard I learned that I am not God’s gift toteaching, that I have shortcomings. Ican deal with those shortcomings, and I can build on my strengths. In short, I received the capacity to thinkcritically about my practice. There wasa Gestalt shift in my thinking about teaching away from limited dualistic categoriestowards a more nuanced thinking that encourages professional growth. It doesn’t mean I’m the best teacher in theworld; it simply means I have a greatly enhanced capacity for improvement.

It is incumbent on districts,especially districts like mine which have achieved a critical mass of NBCTs, totake advantage of this Gestalt shift, to move us away from either/or attitudesabout effectiveness and into those more nuanced conversations about practice. This will require trust, and a willingness to provide the resources people need to grow.

It is also incumbent uponteachers to take advantage of opportunities like the National Board process, tobuild their individual capacity for the critical, professionalconversation. It is only through the twosides moving towards one another that modern reform practices become sustainableand not just an exotic flavor of business as usual.

I believe this is what the greatcollaborative enterprise looks like at the school and classroom level. If adults achieve this, I think we will seethe change reflected in the behavior and dispositions of our students. If we believe, in a profound sense, that wecan grow, our students will believe the same about themselves.

The Meaning of Collaboration: Power, Security and Control

2011-10-01T08:01:00.000-04:00

Sixty five years ago collaboration was a dirty word. Collaborators were traitors, like the Vichy French or Vidkum Quisling, who materially assisted the Nazi repression. Suddenly in the 21st century collaboration is all the rage in labor-management relations. How can union leaders avoid becoming little quislings and selling the rank and file down the road?

In a word, expectations. A willingness to collaborate with management doesn’t mean we are lowering our standards. In fact, it means we are raising them. In the modern collaborative labor management relationship, the end goals of the mutual enterprise must be placed first by all parties.

In education, this means fantastic student learning is the most important outcome. Any adult interest that does not in some small way promote this outcome is excluded from the conversation. Student learning becomes a gateway to the discussion. In a broad sense, the adults trade their power for influence over student learning.

In a more fine grained sense, the equation looks like this: labor gives up security, management gives up control. In exchange, teachers gain control of their professional lives, and administration gains the flexibility to manage for maximum student benefit.

To understand why this is important, we need to bring it down to the classroom level. Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham speaks of the conundrum that while progressive teaching techniques are universally regarded in the profession as the best way to educate, some 90% of the time educators actually use lectures, worksheets, etc – techniques that are the diametric opposite of the things we supposedly value.

Willingham attributes this to the fact that educators, like all human beings, have cognitive limits. This doesn’t mean we’re stupid, it simply means we can’t know everything. Cooperative group work, Responsive Classroom, project based learning, service learning, and similar techniques are cognitively demanding – in short, exhausting.

This is an interesting argument, but I believe there is another reason that teachers eschew progressive techniques in the classroom. These techniques are deeply collaborative in nature; they rely on rich and delicate social relations. There is this expectation that teachers will create these deeply collaborative classroom environments, because this is considered the best way to teach.

How can such classroom environments thrive in school systems which are hierarchical, in which top-down decision making is the rule, and in which adversarial labor-management relationships are the norm? These are systems in which administrators micromanage classroom practice from afar, yet lack the information to make grounded decisions. Teachers become subject to arbitrary and nonsensical administrative fiat, which dis-empowers them, abrogates their professional judgment, and demoralizes them. How can people working under the thumb of these quasi-military command hierarchies reasonably be expected to educate students in progressive ways?

That teachers manage this feat at all in the face of systems designed to defeat them is a testament to the collective excellence of the profession.

In order to guarantee the best possible educational experience and outcomes for students, there needs to be symmetry of expectations up and down the hierarchical food chain. If you want collaboration at the classroom level, it has to be present throughout the system. This is where a collaborative labor management relationship can turbocharge education.

In a true collaborative relationship, administrators drive down the decision making to level of implementation, where the information actually exists to make decent decisions. In so doing they build the overall decision making capacity of the organization. They are facilitators of the professional work and strive to empower the professionals in their care. This is giving up control.

Peer assistance and review systems (PARS) are often found where collaboration has taken root. PARS is designed to take the arbitrariness out of personnel decisions by creating a professional consensus in the community. When the consensus leads to non-renewal of non-performing individuals, the process is expedited. This is giving up security.

Contrast this with the current cat and mouse scenario in so many places where adversarial relations rule. Labor and management play a game of chicken, each side playing legalistic levers to see what it can get away with. Adversarial relationships add no value to the student experience – in fact they degrade it.

Collaboration in 2011 means something considerably different than it did in 1946. It means much higher expectations for all: a democratically empowered workforce willing to take a chance on its own professionalism facilitated by an enlightened administration willing to trade desultory power games for influence over student learning. All of this paid for by political leaders with a genuine interest in excellent policy.

But that’s another blog.

What examples can you imagine, of teachers giving up security and administration giving up control, which would promote excellent student learning?

A Right to Work Nightmare

2011-09-10T07:22:00.000-04:00

On a flight last summer I sat next to a person who told a tale far more harrowing than anything emerging from Wisconsin or Ohio. In those places, there is a tradition of organizing, of working people joining together to level the playing field with management. This is a tale of the consequences of radical, systemic disempowerment of education workers. In Wisconsin and Ohio, workers lost some legal rights, but they did not lose their culture of resistance. This story is a portrait of the consequences if that culture were to disappear, or was never allowed to develop in the first place.

"Barbara" is a grade school teacher from a suburban community. She has a special needs son named "Tom." Her son has an excellent IEP, a plan that realistically addresses his educational needs, and speaks to the skills he will need to be functional as an adult. That plan is in conflict with the state's high stakes testing law.

Tom's main deficit is in math. He can't add 4+4 and is entering 4th grade. If you can't do simple addition, you can't do area problems, yet the third grade standardized tests require students to solve area problems. Barbara sees the disconnect between Tom’s homework and what her son can actually do. Rather than follow the IEP, and address Tom's real life needs, he has been subjected to a continuous diet of test prep. Somehow, a child who can't add managed to make the cut score on a test that requires area problems.

I wonder if there were an unusual number of erasures on Tom's answer sheet....

But it gets worse.

Evidently principals in this town routinely refer to the "retards". Administrators’ jobs depend on test scores there. The high stakes nature of that state’s testing leads professional educators to revile the very children they are supposed to be serving.

But it gets worse.

In Barbara's school there is a principal with two daughters. He manipulates class lists so that his daughters get the "good" teachers, and keeps the special ed kids and kids with behavioral issues out of those classes. This principal uses a position of authority for personal benefit. He can get away with it because of the power he wields over workers. It is corruption plain and simple.

I wonder what benefit he will have derived when his daughters grow up to be morally debased, self absorbed monsters. The apple don't fall far from the tree as they say.

How can this be?

Barbara works in a "right to work" state. In truth, she works in a "right to get fired" state. She is afraid for her job. Her need to make a living is in conflict with her obligation as a parent to advocate for her child. She fears that if she demanded what is right for Tom, she would be fired. She even moved to a different school to be in a better position to advocate, but the school is still in the same district. Without tenure, without robust due process, she is exposed to the winds of a systemic corruption.

She is afraid to ask questions. Her son's teacher is afraid to follow Tom's IEP because she will get fired if she doesn't follow the test prep regimen. Barbara was told that state testing laws supersede federal special education laws. I gently suggested to her that this might not be the truth, but it was so outside of her cultural experience to question authority that she could barely process this suggestion.

I mentioned that there is an NEA affiliate in her state, that there are parent advocacy resources like PIRC, and that by organizing with other people she could possibly achieve that which she cannot achieve as an individual. Again this was so outside her experience....

Fish school in part to confuse predators. As an individual, Barbara would paint a big fat bulls eye on herself were she to become the parent her son so desperately needs. In a sea of thousands or millions of similar parents and teachers she would be far safer. The organization itself would become the target.

I described my advocacy work for educators. Speaking out to authority seemed so alien to Barbara. I gave her my card and encouraged her to contact me so I could connect her with some organizations.

I never heard from her.

Right to work: an authoritarian culture run amok, where educators learn to hate children, parents knuckle under to the abuse of their own children, and authorities manipulate for personal advantage. No checks, no balances.

A nightmare.

Labor Day Reflections

2011-09-05T22:08:00.000-04:00

I am third generation union:

· Grandfather: United Brushworkers, AFL

· Grandmother: Amalgamated Clothing Workers

· Mother: CWA

· Father: NTEU

· Brother: AFT

· Me: NEA

I am the first in the family to assume a leadership position. I value the relationships I have with the local leaders in other unions. It is not enough that Dennis Van Roekel talks with Weingarten or Hoffa. Local leaders need to know each other and understand each other’s organizing cultures in order to build the solidarity that will rebuild the middle class. I call this collateral circulation.

I started out in the Vermont Worker’s Center, then realized I needed to be an activist in my own local to have street cred. Since my activism originated outside NEA I have always been curious about other unions and value what they have to teach me. Among things I have learned:

· AFL-CIO has ways of reconciling the interests of employees and employers in the same union.

· So-called collective bargaining “rights” are actually a means of controlling our behavior.

· Labor solidarity is a multiplier for our efforts.

· You are a worker if you cannot survive more than a few weeks without a paycheck.

Happy Labor Day! Solidarity!