The second United States Department of Education Labor
Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) is convening in Cincinnati this
week. The theme is harnessing the power
of labor management collaboration in the interest of student achievement. I attended the last
conference in Denver fifteen months ago as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching
Ambassador Fellows. In addition to
becoming steeped in the theory and practice of labor management collaboration,
I had the opportunity to network with several leaders from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service
(FMCS), which is an extraordinary organization that provides free technical
assistance to improve negotiations outcomes at the local level. That learning has proven very influential in
changing the tenor of our local negotiations during the last year.
There is an innovation of this year’s LMC that is critically
important: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and
participants. Three states, Delaware,
Kentucky and Massachusetts, are presenting.
These states will highlight work they have done to support districts in
collaborative work. Vermont is sending a
team of statewide leaders, which I find tremendously encouraging. We need structures and supports at the state
level to sustain and expand the good work in our state which is already
happening at the local level. I am
confident that our state leaders will find inspiration and practical ideas at
the conference to help us move forward.
Mere process reform, however is not enough. Sustainability of our work ultimately depends
on connecting to a greater goal: great student learning. Leaders at ED already get this; it is a theme
of both labor management conferences. In
Vermont, for us to take it to the next level, and to be able to deal creatively
and proactively with 21st century education policy challenges,
stakeholders need to refocus on this goal.
Thinking about collective bargaining agreements must shift away from
emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and
taxation. Our CBA’s must become
education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools. When I think of the tremendous civic
engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont, I see a gold
mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to our common enterprise
of great student learning. Our children
deserve no less.
Cross posting from a blog I wrote in October 2010 for Teach.gov. Happy Teacher Appreciation Week!
Vermont teachers who need to
return to the well for a drink of passion and commitment can do no better than
visit the Athenian Hall in Brownington, where they will find a magnificent four
story granite edifice high on a windswept plateau, with 360 degree views of the
northern Green Mountains and the vast agricultural plain of Quebec to the
north.
Alexander Twilight, preacher,
educator, politician, was the first African American to graduate from an
American college as well as the first to be elected to a state
legislature. His great stone school, the
first granite public building in Vermont, built with his own hands in the
1830's, is the living embodiment of his passion and commitment to education. One of two schools to serve the expanse of
Orleans County, it is now a museum. The
sister school, Craftsbury Academy, still serves students to this day.
The novelist Howard Frank Mosher,
in Vermont Life Magazine, Autumn, 1996, wrote:
"I like the way the Stone House still
looms up on that hilltop, where the wind blows all the time. There it sits,
unshaken and monolithic, as I write this sentence and as you read it, every bit
as astonishing today as the day it was completed. What a tribute to the faith
of its creator, the Reverend Alexander Twilight: scholar, husband, teacher,
preacher, legislator, father-away-from-home to nearly 3,000 boys and girls, an
African American and a Vermonter of great vision, whose remains today lie
buried in the church-yard just up the maple-lined dirt road from his granite
school, in what surely was, and still is, one of the last best places
anywhere."
As the first Teaching
Ambassador Fellow from Vermont, I had the privilege of accompanying John
White, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Rural Outreach, on his recent trip to
Vermont, my home state. On the second
day, just a few miles from Alexander Twilight’s great Athenian Hall, we visited
North
Country Union High School, a school which serves a sixty mile radius and is
virtually on the Canadian border. I felt
great pride in accompanying a Federal official to an outstanding school in my
state.
North Country serves an area in
great economic distress, with double digit unemployment and over fifty percent
free and reduced lunch. In Vermont free
and reduced lunch is not a true indicator of poverty, because stoic New
Englanders are often too proud to accept help.
We can surmise that the poverty of this region is greater than indicated
by the statistics.
What did we find at North
Country? Amazingly, given the remoteness
and the challenges, we found teachers full of innovation, passion, and
commitment. We found a state-of-the-art
Career Center dedicated to preparing students for careers in the trades,
business and industry. We found teachers
collaborating in unique ways to integrate high quality academic instruction in
the context of programs such as auto mechanics and woodworking in order to
prepare their students for life in the 21st century.
As a music teacher, I was pleased
to go into a woodworking class and find the students working on building
dulcimers. The teacher had connected
with one of the Vermont's finest luthiers for support. In the High School, we found a math teacher
having teams of students measure guitars and banjos to learn geometry, ratios,
percentages and understand the difference between accuracy and precision. When John asked why the students preferred this
type of real world embedded instruction, they replied "because it makes it
easier."
After John left for the airport I
trailed behind to visit the performing arts department. I met with Anne Hamilton, the chorus and
composition teacher who was my instructor when I was trained in the innovative
composition and assessment program, the Vermont
MIDI project. This program is a
national model for arts and technology.
Like the Career Center, the MIDI Project draws in professional
practitioners. They provide feedback to
young composers across Vermont and the nation through technology and the
internet. We walked downstairs to the
auditorium and watched the dance teacher, a former Vermont Teacher of the Year,
coach dozens of students through an amazing piece choreographed by the students
themselves.
I found the underlying philosophy
of connecting school with community pervaded the entire school. Alexander Twilight's vision lives in the work
of the dedicated teachers of North Country Union High School and Career Center,
where they labor against all odds with joy and passion to keep this remote
corner of Vermont "one of the last best places anywhere."
How often does a book on education
achieve both literary and visual artistry?
How often would you expect any book on education to be both practical
and inspiring? Had you asked me these
questions a couple of weeks ago, I would answered seldom to the second question
and never to the first. Both questions
together? Impossible. Then I encountered My Garden Sprouts
by Sharla
Steever, illustrated by Diana
Magnuson.
My Garden Sprouts is an
annotated journal for elementary classroom teachers. Its 127
illustrated pages are filled with space for a teacher to make notes about
his/her unfolding practice over a three year period. Each
journal page begins with wise and insightful prompts. The quality of these prompts grows from
Sheever’s deep experience as a mentor and teacher leader at her school. Magnuson’s illustrations are gorgeous; her self-professed Allegorical
Realism is the perfect foil to Steever’s use of metaphor. They are understated,
supporting, but never overshadowing the professional intent of the book.
Steever is also an accomplished
gardener. She uses gardening as a
literary metaphor for teaching. The culture
of individual vegetables and flowers illustrates the character of students and
situations one encounters in school. Pumpkins “take up a lot of space.” With regard to pumpkin students, Sheever
invites us to consider how we can build their boundary awareness. Onions “are socially repellant” – how can we
peel back the layers, getting past the hunger, poverty or abuse to hold these
students to “compassionate high standards”?
At every step Steever challenges even jaded veterans to consider
students in novel ways, and with humor and wit asks us to reconceive our
classrooms and the way we see our students.
This journal should become a
modern classic for the induction and mentoring of new elementary teachers. I could see it being a graduation gift for
new teachers, or a gift to new hires, especially in rural places. I could see it being a standard text for Peer
Assistance and Review programs, directed both to the new teachers and
struggling veterans typically served by these programs.
As I read, however, it became
clear to me that this journal is for anyone at any level of experience who
simply wants to ramp it up to the next level in their practice. Compassionate, wise and eminently practical –
how often does that happen in an education book?
Sharla
Steever is a fourth grade teacher from Hill City SD. She is a National Board Certified Teacher,
and a Classroom Teaching
Ambassador Fellow for the United States Department of Education (I was a
TAF in 2010-2011.) Sharla is also a dear
friend, with a powerful commitment to the Native American community. Her guest blog here fits with the social
justice orientation of Education
Worker.
The last few months I have spent
a great deal of time travelling around the rural beauty of the state of SD to
places even I, who have spent my entire life here, had never seen. I had the
honor of holding a variety of teacher round tables and personal interviews with
the educational leaders of our Native American Reservation schools and videoed
every bit of it.
My goal? To bring the voices of
this unique group of people, with their unique educational issues to ED in
their own words.
These people are from places in
our own backyard that are dealing with levels of poverty, alcoholism, and
unemployment far exceeding national averages, but they are also some of the
most self-determined, creative, beautiful people I have ever met in my life.
I began this project with a
desire and hope to educate myself and others about issues in Native American
education on our reservations. What I didn’t expect was the gift it would
become 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 discovered
something very important. If we truly want to impact change, we must first
start by listening…not only to the words that are shared, but to the heart
behind the words.
I learned a great deal about the
issues facing our educators and students in these areas, but more than that I
learned that there are amazing people doing incredible work day after day and
year after year in areas of poverty that are far beyond most of our
imaginations. If we want to help improve the situations these schools are
facing, we must begin by working to understand them. How do we do that? We do
it by listening to their stories. My hope is that this video provides a glimpse
into these incredible stories and helps to inform those in positions to create
change.
The following post is from an interview with Brad Jupp by James
Liou, a 2008 Teaching Ambassador
Fellow from Boston.James’ excellent
blog The Teaching Pulse gives unofficial
voice to the aspirations of members of the Boston Teachers Union.I selected excerpts which follow the broad
themes of Education Worker, and urge
readers to check out the
original interview, which is much longer - a rich and profound essay on the
contemporary education policy scene.
Brad Jupp is Senior Program Advisor
for Teacher Quality Initiatives in the U.S.
Department of Education. He has the ear of Secretary of Education
Arne Duncan and has considerable, if not central, influence on any federal
policies that relate to teacher quality and effectiveness.
As a former middle school English
teacher and union activist in the Denver public schools, he is most known for
his role in the development of Denver’s
ProComp teacher compensation system—one which ties teacher incentives to
both school and student performance and growth.
JL: How has being an accomplished
unionist affected how you do your work now?
BJ: I think what I bring from my
background as a union leader, first and foremost, is the sentiment that working
people want first and foremost, good, fruitful jobs; not the political struggle
that they often find themselves in. And then second, I bring a really three-dimensional
understanding of the psychology that [often] occurs in the relationship between
unions and school districts, [and between] unions and state legislatures…
Frankly, I’ve been on all sides of the table. And I have an insight into
what’s in people’s heads on all sides of the table at this point. And
that’s because [like I mentioned earlier], I pay attention to [connecting
evidence to shifts in understanding with] whomever I’m working. Over the
years, [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 a
superintendent or thinking like a governor’s education policy aide.
So the union experience is
double. I understand the aspirations of the people that unions represent
and I also understand the motivations and sentiments of people who represent
large numbers of teachers.
JL: Can you think of some practical
ways and avenues that you might suggest for teachers to understand, influence
and implement policies….in our school districts at the local level? How
do we make policy less abstract and how do we understand it, influence it and
implement it?
BJ: Be a building rep for your union,
be on your building faculty senate or building committee, partner with people
in the central office so that you are a practitioner [figuring out] the
difficult problems of execution with administrators, because just like teachers
don’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 policy
implementation arguments done to them. And we should assume that no one
wants to be part of that kind of loud argument.
And don’t hesitate to use those
opportunities to be building reps and union leaders and district leaders as
vehicles for career advancement. The ambitions of teachers to be
successful and efficacious are the things that actually animate the best things
about their career. And we should always be encouraging teachers to act
on those aspirations.
JL: What can we do, as teachers and as
members of our teachers union, to make this happen more often in general?
BJ: In a sentence, navigate towards
your best hopes and away from your worst fears.
Too much of the adversarial discourse
in public education is discourse buttressed by worst fears. ‘What if the
worst principal in the world were in charge of that school?’ We need a
rule to protect all teachers against the possibility of the worst principal in
the world.
It’s the wrong way to be
organized. [We] should be organizing instead on ‘how do we get the best
principal in the world in as many schools as we’ve got? That means that
we’re going to need really great incentive packages for principals, and by
golly they might need to be paid more than teachers and as maybe as a teacher
union leader, I need to advocate that we accelerate the pay for high school
principals so that the working conditions in my high schools get better.
It’s a simple example, but if you
begin to think like that, then you can begin to proliferate other examples.
JL: So is it up to the individual
teachers in our buildings as building reps, as partners with district
officials, to talk and frame the conversation in that way? Because
sometimes a lot of the rhetoric out there is very negative, as you’re probably
already aware….how do we break through that?
BJ: We didn’t say, when we negotiated
ProComp, ‘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 by
embracing [the] reasonable and consistent and credible.’ We never said
anything about getting it all right. We always said though, we want to
keep our antennae up and avoid treating people badly. And what’s more, we
made a commitment to use data as a way to inform our future decisions so that
we were not being arbitrary and capricious.
The United States Department of
Education has opened the application process for Teaching
Ambassador Fellows (TAFs) for 2012-2013.
In 2010, I was a Classroom Fellow for the Department. I urge any teacher with an interest in
education policy to consider the Fellowship.
The path of every Fellow is
unique. We are urged to pursue our
policy passions, which in my case was labor-management collaboration. I had applied for the Fellowship in part on
the basis of my work as an NEA leader on the local level. As a veteran of
several negotiation cycles, I was frustrated by the disparity between processes
I saw in my two districts.
The Fellowship program looks for
teachers with a record of leadership and existing networks to help facilitate conversations
with practitioners. What I did not dream
of was that participation in the Fellowship would lead to the exponential
growth 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 Gillian
Cohen-Boyer is fond of saying, “Once a Fellow, always a Fellow.” In fact, on the website it says that “For
Fellows, the program adds greater knowledge of educational policy and
leadership to their toolkits to contribute to solutions at all levels for long
intractable challenges in education.” I
hope I was of service to the department during my official Fellowship year, but
I know they trained and prepared me to be far more effective than I ever
dreamed going forward in what Mark Simon calls “advocating in the public interest
from a teacher’s perspective.”
Every Teaching Ambassador
Fellow’s journey is unique. The diversity of the group and the diversity of the
leadership work of past and present TAFs is astonishing … but it’s also only a
beginning.
