Equitable Funding of Public Education

My friend and colleague Gamal Sherif teaches at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA.  We are both Teaching Ambassador Fellows for the US Department of Education (Gamal this year and me last year), and members of the Teacher Leader Network Forum, part of the Center for Teaching Quality.  We are both also union activists - I'm NEA and Gamal is AFT.  What I love about our friendship is the differences: I’m a rural elementary teacher and Gamal is an urban high school teacher, yet across these differences we share so much.  Gamal’s asked me to share his latest blog post and I urge people to follow his excellent blog ProgressEd.

Public education is underfunded because of:

1.       mis-management

2.       mis-use of our military in countries like Afghanistan

3.       warped emphasis on privatized wealth at the expense of the common good

Here are a few examples:

·         In 2001, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reported that the State of Pennsylvania had taken over the Philadelphia School District. How has that oversight helped students and teachers be more engaged? What stability or efficiencies has state oversight provided? Most importantly, what are examples of effective school district organization? How can we help teachers create effective working conditions so that they and their students can flourish?

·         In 2011, The Washington Post reported that "[t]he U.S. military is on track to spend $113 billion on its operations in Afghanistan this fiscal year, and it is seeking $107 billion for the next." Are there better uses for that money?

·         The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that the outgoing CEO of Sunoco is receiving about $37 million in compensation for liquidating assets. How can we create a sustainable economy that honors labor and fosters a commitment to the social good? Individual excellence is essential, but we are all more effective when we advance social equity along with individual liberty.

If the explanations for inequitable funding of public education are accurate (numbers 1, 2 and 3 above), then what are the solutions?  Below is my list -- what's yours?

Federal solutions:

·         Reauthorize a modified ESEA that acknowledges "college and career readiness" with an emphasis on systemic creation of "school readiness." All children should arrive at school safe, well-fed, well-rested, and curious.

·         Re-visit the 14th Amendment and the Brown v. Board of Ed. decision with consideration of funding inequities that create a "suspect class." All schools should be able to fund education at equal (if not equitable) levels.

State solutions:

·         Ensure teacher representation on state-wide panels that roll-out RTTT.

·         Ensure equitable funding of all school districts akin to NJ's Abbott decisions.

District solutions:

·         Create real equitable choice options so that students can attend schools of interest anywhere in the city -- or across District boundaries.

·         Develop and sustain teacher leadership so that teachers lead the integration of curriculum, instruction, assessment and policy that engages students and teachers.

Union solutions:

·         Integrate the labor frame with professional and social justice frames for a enriched unionism.

·         Cultivate cohorts of teacher leaders who are connected and can advocate for effective working conditions, participate in teacher-led research, and foster democratic learning environments .

Administrative solutions:

·         Provide operational flexibility for principals to build community partnerships, coach teachers, know students, and build the capacity of learning organizations.

·         Require extensive support for nurses, social workers, therapists and counselors so that all students with diverse needs are recognized and supported.

Teacher solutions:

·         View teachers as experts and support the professional development needed so that teachers can effectively lead schools.

·         Create professional learning communities within and between schools and the community so that teachers are facilitating and modeling the collaboration necessary to life-long learning.

 

Celebrating Labor-Management Collaboration: The Literature Grows

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

Initially, I did only web resources, and could find just seventeen.  It was a sparse literature.  Over the ensuing year I added several books, including classics 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 a small, but exciting explosion of publications on the subject. 

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

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

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

The NEA Today Summer 2011 issue had a cover story entitled “Change Agents: Union led collaboration is driving success in schools across America.”  The story profiles several locals which employed the traditional levers of unionism to benefit student learning.  I was particularly struck by the story about the Dayton local employing the grievance process to acquire textbooks for special needs students.  This aligns with John Wilson’s call for use of expanded scope bargaining to achieve social justice in his farewell speech at the 2011 RA in Chicago.

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

Brad Jupp’s “Rethinking Unions’ Roles in Ed Reform” takes on union reform from a systems perspective.  Jupp, who as Denver Classroom Teachers Association lead negotiator was one of the architects of Denver’s ground breaking ProComp strategic compensation system, tackles the issue of union reform from a systems perspective.  He writes, “If we are to see teacher union affiliates take a leading role in improving our schools, we must begin to ask some questions about how they are designed.”  He posits that unions are well designed to “get the results they are presently getting.”  Several pointed questions encourage repurposing unions to support the success of the overall educational enterprise: great student learning.

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

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

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

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

What other publications should I add to this list or to my Union Reform Resources Page?

One More Thing Brill Got Wrong

On pages 35 and 36 of Class Warfare, Steven Brill analyzes teacher salary increases in New York City that resulted 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, “By 2007….the starting salary would be $45,530.00, or more than eight times 1962’s $5300.”  Evidently Brill wants to spark outrage that teacher unionism would lead to outrageous increases in starting salaries.  In taking this cheap shot, he missed a far more interesting story.  To uncover that story, we need to be able to compare salaries apples for apples.  To do this I used a CPI Inflation Calculator.  Adjusting for inflation, the numbers look like this:

Table 2 New York City teacher starting salaries in 2007 dollars

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 interesting story.  The first UFT contract in 1962 resulted in a starting salary 80% higher than Albert Shanker’s starting salary in 1953.  By 1969, the starting salary increased an additional 70%, representing increases averaging 12% each year.  But between 1969 and 2007 starting salaries actually declined 26% in real dollar terms.

At the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Conference last summer, Arne Duncan gave a speech in which he said:

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

The UFT had achieved those starting salaries in 1969.  I think the question of why a starting salary that would genuinely attract talent to the profession declined 26% over the next 38 years is a fascinating question, one worth pondering.  Rather than offer any glib speculations, I prefer to continue the story….

Starting salaries only tell part of the story when analyzing a single salary schedule.  I articulated my views on the single salary elsewhere on this blog.  Let’s turn to the top level salary and the ratios between top level and starting salaries for a fuller 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 level salaries increased 43%.  Because starting salaries rose 70% in the same time period, the ratio fell from 1.86 to 1.55.  In the ensuing 39 years top level salaries were virtually flat, but because starting salaries fell 26% the ratio increased radically to 2.2.

As a negotiator I was trained that an indexed salary schedule with a 2:1 ratio is ideal.  I do not think that a 2:1 ratio is a good thing 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 an IOU.

The ratio that Arne Duncan proposed in his speech is 2.5.  What this means is that the UFT achieved what the Secretary of Education is recommending for a starting salary way back in 1969, and they approached his recommended ratio in the 21^st century, but because this was achieved through reductions in starting salaries, they did not achieve these things at the same time.  I know this involves an anachronism, but bear with me.

If you’ve managed to follow me to this point, I congratulate you.  I’ve seized on 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, but one worth mulling.  If teachers are to be compensated like the professionals that they are, why was the most powerful local in the country, the UFT, unable to roll together a salary schedule combining both a livable wage for beginners and top level salaries commensurate with professionalism? 

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

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

We must ask and answer hard questions on topics that have been off limits in the past like staffing practices and school organization, benefits packages and job security—because the answers may give us more realistic ways to afford these new professional conditions.  If teachers are to be treated and compensated as the true professionals they are, the profession will need to shift away from an industrial-era blue-collar model of compensation to rewarding effectiveness and performance.

As a union leader and as a socialist I maintain a healthy skepticism here.  The devil is in the details.  The devil is also in the question of whether the practitioner’s voice will be decisive in these matters.  We can see from the gutting of regulations for for-profit colleges that in the current environment money dominates education policy in particular and politics in general.  But for that fact, I would be a lot more receptive to the secretary’s challenge.

If teachers and our unions can seize upon these matters of “topics that have been off limits in the past” and shape them in ways that work for students and workers, there may be a way forward here.  But it will take a constitutional amendment negating Citizens United to make it possible.

Just some things to ponder….

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

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

Before I became a board director in 2005, I had no idea what our Board of Directors was all about – “governance” was an unfamiliar term.  Sure, as a local leader I had become 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 our organization.  Speaking with some of my local members, it is clear that many of them share my former confusion on the role played by our board of directors as Vermont-NEA’s governance.  

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors is composed of our statewide officers – President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer and NEA Board Director – 16 regional directors from our seven uniserve districts, and our Executive Director.  Since they are members, the officers and regional directors have voting power; the Exec’s role is advisory.  The Board is our connection to the reason unions were formed.  Workers knew that it was other workers, themselves, who truly always had their best interests at heart.  These member-led unions are responsible for the compensation, benefits and working conditions – minimum-wage laws, health insurance, workplace safety rules, even  weekends - we often take for granted today.  But as time went on, the logistics and responsibilities of running a national, statewide, or even large local unions became too much for members needing to work full-time jobs to support their families.  Unions then began hiring employees to assist with the myriad responsibilities of operating large labor organizations.  

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors comprises its governance, or authority, for its operation.  According to the manual Governance as Leadership, the primary responsibilities of governance include fiduciary, strategic and generative functions.  Fiduciary responsibility refers to the management of an organization’s material assets.  These duties obviously need to be taken very seriously, and much care and attention is devoted to our fiduciary responsibility.  But the other two responsibilities are no less important; the most effective boards execute all three equally well.  

Strategic planning means setting long-term goals.  For these goals to be effective, they must be designed to fulfill our mission as both an educational association and as a labor organization.  Generative thinking addresses the opportunities created by the challenges an organization faces working to fulfill its mission.  This function obviously needs time to develop, but is vital if an organization is to develop its potential.  Organizations often employ staffs to assist with all three functions, but the ultimate responsibility is with the boards themselves.

Which Way Forward for Teacher Unions?

I gave this speech April 4, 2011 in Burlington, VT as a participant on a panel "Which Way Forward for Unions?"

I love my union.  I believe that unions are a fundamental social good.  They are institutions that elevate not only the workers who are their members, but all workers in general by raising the bar of good employment practices and fair compensation.

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

VT-NEA has helped guarantee a middle class existence and a dignified retirement for thousands of Vermont’s teachers.  For me personally, engagement with my union has given me tremendous opportunities to develop professional and leadership skills.  For this I am very grateful.

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

Where do we stand right now?  Here in Vermont, the system of teacher negotiations is broken.  We have an expensive, ritualistic political theatre of teacher negotiations, a divisive process which has become detached from the fundamental purpose of the educational enterprise: great student learning, and produces incremental language changes and pay raises below the rate of inflation

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

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

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

The model that speaks to me most strongly as a union leader is the Three Frames of Progressive Unionism, developed by the Mooney Institute for Teacher Union Leadership.  The Three Frames are Industrial Unionism, Professional Unionism, and Social Justice Unionism.

Industrial Unionism uses collective power to meet bread and butter needs of members and ensure fairness from management.  It is the bulk of what we think of when we consider teacher union work:  negotiations, grievances, and yes strikes, or near strikes.  It assumes an adversarial relationship with management. The Industrial Frame has elevated the profession, but presents some problems. 

First, industrial style labor relations were adopted from industry.  As schools evolve away from a factory model, the foundation of the industrial frame is shifting beneath us. 

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

Third, the public, as well as rank and file, may be becoming impatient with the inefficiency of teacher negotiations, detached from the fundamental purpose of education: great student learning.

Professional Unionism seeks control of the profession to ensure quality.  In this frame, focus is on professional development and quality of teaching/learning.  The methods include collaboration with management.  I believe many teachers identify with this frame, because confrontation is not in our character.  The problem here is that it is naïve to think that teachers’ good intentions will make stupid or duplicitous behavior by bureaucrats, politicians and administrators go away.

Social Justice Unionism seeks equity for our students through active engagement in the community.  It wraps the unions’ arms around bigger social problems, problems that if they were solved would help make the curriculum accessible to even our most vulnerable students.  Social Justice Unionism represents the pinnacle of our work.  How do we get there, especially in the overt hostility of the current environment?

First, it is important to note that these three frames are symbiotic.  You don’t get to choose.  Living exclusively in one is perilous.  The three frames are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the success of teachers’ unions.

Second, I used to believe that the three frames existed in equality.  Events in Wisconsin and other states this year have taught me that they actually exist in a hierarchy.  For all of the historical and political problems of an exclusive industrial unionism, a robust capacity to attend to the bread and butter issues of both members and unions themselves is the foundation for the existence of meaningful progress in the Professional and Social Justice Frames.  There will always remain the need for working people to confront power.  Anything else is wishful thinking.

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

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

I want to close with one last thought concerning Social Justice Unionism.  Before I became active with VT-NEA, I was active with the Vermont Worker’s Center.  I came away from that experience with an insight: how dangerous it is for my union to go it alone.  Solidarity with other workers is a keystone moving forward in the current hostile labor environment.  I foresaw that to the extent we failed to help others, it meant that we were failing to push problems away from ourselves proactively.  I predicted the present crisis; I am shocked at the scale and virulence of the assault.

Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on this day in 1968 after coming to the support of striking Memphis sanitation workers.  He didn’t need to do this, but he did, because he fully grasped the necessity of workers’ struggle for justice.  I hope that tonight we are in some small way honoring the spirit of solidarity in which Dr. King gave his life.  Thank you.

Occupy Negotiations

Working people have to stop fighting against each other and start fighting for each other.  Peering through the lens of the Occupy movement, it’s obvious that the people I sit with in the negotiations room here in Vermont, both board and teachers, are part of the 99%.  I seriously doubt anyone in the room has an annual income in excess of $516,000.  When we distract ourselves with labor-management fratricide, we work for our oppressors, for truly we have far more in common with each other than with David Koch, Rupert Murdoch, the Walton family, or Bill Gates.  Solidarity means not just circling the union wagons, but identifying with and actively promoting the legitimate aspirations of our communities.

The adversarial culture that persists in our negotiation process here in Vermont thwarts those aspirations and plays into the interests of the 1%.  This culture is self inflicted.  Both boards and teachers have choices about how they do business.  If we make better choices, we can free political energy for the fight for social justice.

Let me emphasize, I do not believe that collective bargaining is itself inherently adversarial.  Too many times, however, the parties choose to be adversarial.  Collective bargaining is a fundamental public good.  It is incumbent on participants to improve the process so that this public good can truly achieve its potential in terms of promoting great educational outcomes and social justice.

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

In addition, the board spends tens of thousands of dollars on a labor attorney, and both sides spend thousands more on private mediators and fact finders.  All this time and treasure has the net effect of preserving a degraded status quo.  Teachers experience gradual erosion of pay and working conditions; board and administration gain nothing in terms of the sort of flexibility that would enable 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 the political theater of an adversarial negotiations culture, the true costs of systemic dysfunction occur when the poisonous dispositions of labor-management conflict filter 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, at the supervisory union level, ultimately at the state and federal level.

For example, teachers who do not trust their administrators cannot benefit from evaluation, no matter how well designed or intentioned.  Collaboration at all levels is the foundation for improved teaching practice.  And who are the victims of the status quo?  Students.

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

There is a growing body of research and practice on labor-management collaboration.   Contemporary conflict management techniques go back over thirty years.  In addition to the positional or adversarial bargaining that dominates our landscape, it includes at least three other tools:

• Interest based bargaining, which strives to create solutions by drilling down through the positions that animate traditional adversarial bargaining, to the underlying interests in order to create novel solutions which address the true aspirations of the participants.
• Expanded scope bargaining, which strives to assimilate the expertise of the practitioner into the public policy process and uses the negotiation process as the gateway.
• Continuous bargaining, in which parties take up problems as they arise, devise solutions, and roll them into the contract.  This reduces the sheer quantity of items saved up for the formal negotiations process, and simplifies the task of reaching agreement.  Problems do not fester.

This enhanced conflict management tool set provides means of effectively resolving a wider range of problems.  We in Vermont suffer from the “rule of the tool”: when the only tool in your kit is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  But not every problem in teacher negotiations is a distributive problem, a problem of carving up a finite pie.  Many problems of working conditions are not finite, and allow for a broad range of creative solutions.  Using positional bargaining techniques on these problems drains the creativity out of the process, and denies our children the benefits of the best possible teaching.

Negotiations reform, however necessary, is not sufficient to drive progress.  For that we need to look at the literature on ground breaking districts nationally, districts which have achieved deep and sustained collaborative relationships which have driven systemic change and education reform. One such study is Collaborative School Reform: Creating Partnerships To Improve School Systems From Within by Saul Rubinstein, and John McCarthy, which was published by Rutgers University in October, 2010.  This ground breaking study looks at six districts which have achieved a deep and abiding collaborative 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 States Department of Education published Local Labor Management Relationships as a Vehicle to Advance Reform: Findings from the U.S. Department of Education’s Labor Management Conference by Jonathan Eckert et al.  I was part of the research team.  This study highlighted the work of twelve districts nationwide which had achieved a high level of labor-management collaboration, including four from the Rutgers study. 

A salient feature of this study is the diversity of the districts that had reformed their labor-management relations.  There were districts like Winston-Salem Forsythe (NC) from a southern right to work state, and the Green Dot Charter chain, as well as districts enjoying the benefits of strong pro-labor laws, like Plattsburgh (NY) and ABC Unified (CA).

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

Here in Vermont it is time for bold and visionary leaders to sit together in order to remake our relationship.  The way forward is by following the example 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 take time and resources.  Those of us genuinely interested in benefitting students and communities should be taking on the tough problems rather than persisting in behavior which only serves the interests of the 1% who would squeeze our communities dry.