Teacher Negotiation Reform: Beating Swords Into Ploughshares

This is a cross posting from my friend Patrick Ledesma's Leading from the Classroom on Ed Week Teacher Magazine.  He was kind enough to let me guest blog.  I'm putting it here for readers who normally read my stuff on Education Worker.

The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) convened in Cincinnati last month, with a theme of harnessing the power of collaboration to advance student achievement.  I attended the last conference in Denver as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows, and had the opportunity to network with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which promotes sound and stable labor-management relations.

Back in Vermont, in 2011 I was entering my fourth cycle as a negotiator and second as local president.  Our negotiations had always been protracted and contentious, requiring thousands of hours of teacher and school board member time.  The traditional process goes through a predictable sequence: bargaining, impasse, mediation, fact finding, crisis buildup, and, in rare instances, imposition and strike.  Mediation and fact finding employ private consultants costing thousands of dollars.  Boards often call on private attorneys to negotiate, the costs of which often exceed the amount needed to settle the economic issues.

This scenario is repeated dozens of times all over Vermont.  Each negotiation is for a small number of teachers by national standards, resulting in minor changes to “mature contracts.”  It is a time consuming and costly way to preserve the status quo.

Our previous negotiation had required at least 200 hours of each of the ten teachers on our team.  The board commitment was similar.  Rancor adds no value.  Unions, boards and administration should be partners in the cause of student learning, but are instead trapped in a ritualistic process.

I returned from Denver determined that our pending negotiation would be collaborative, and facilitated by FMCS.  It took months of persuasion – one board member could not believe that FMCS services were free.  Finally, a pair of skilled FMCS mediators trained both teams together in the techniques of Interest Based Bargaining. 

We invested in success. The results?

·         Zero dollars spent on a board attorney, mediators or fact finders

·         Settlement was achieved in 6 months rather than 18

·         Team members expending 60 hours rather than 200+

·         No rancorous crisis buildup

·         A labor-management committee to deal with issues as they emerge.

·         Respect between board and teachers, a result of “tough minded collaboration.”

Is this process reform sustainable? Can it become a template for our state?  An innovation of this year’s LMC is critically important in answering these questions: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants.  Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, presented.  Their teams highlighted work they have done to support local collaboration. 

Vermont sent a team of statewide leaders.  We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the collaborative work already happening at the local level.  I am confident that our state leaders found inspiration and practical ideas at the conference.

Process reform is not enough.  Sustainability depends on connecting to a greater goal: excellent student learning.  In Vermont, dealing proactively with contemporary policy challenges requires this focus.  Collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation, and become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools. 

The tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont is a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to the cause of great student learning.  Our children deserve no less.

A Real Teacher Appreciation Week

Teacher Appreciation Week is coming.  I suppose we’ll get some sort of luncheon.  Some parents will show up to take my recess duty, which I generally use to get caught up on some planning.  The media will report some lame accolades for teachers from various leaders, many of whom spend the rest of their time trying to make our lives worse.  Sometimes there’s a mug involved.  The whole thing generally blows over uneventfully.  It’s much more about the appreciators than the appreciatees.

What would real teacher appreciation look like?

Teachers are professional education experts.  If one week a year, teachers could make that expertise known in tangible ways in the places that education policy is made, that would be real teacher appreciation.

Much policy discussion happens during school hours.  The state legislature, and the state board of education meet while we are teaching children.  Our state board of education makes momentous decisions with real impact on our work, things like adoption of Common Core State Standards and application for an NCLB waiver while we are busy actually doing the work.  The legislature decides on issues like Fair Share and pension reform – during business hours

Yes, we have our union, and we have our paid lobbyists, and there are former teachers who represent us in these forums, but it is not the same as flooding these rooms with professionals whose situated expertise is essential to the implementation of successful policy.

The other night a colleague was noting the irony of a local board member testifying at the state house on a policy matter of interest to our union, and impossibility of our being there to counteract that testimony. 

In my ideal world every teacher would have a paid floating Teacher Appreciation Week which they could use for leadership and advocacy at the local, state or national level.  It could be used for policy or political work, but must be used for the purpose of bringing the professional voice of teachers to the broad decision making process.

There are those that would characterize this idea as just another benefit.  But if one week of access, and the broad leadership development it could foster in the profession, makes the other 170+ student contact days more effective because of a combination of grounded policy and superior implementation, it seems to me to be a very small, but wise investment.

Driving leadership and policy work into after hours, when we are exhausted, when we are taking care of families and ourselves (and yes, planning and grading….) is a formula mass for detachment.  Empowering people means creating the time and space for meaningful democratic engagement.

Unless you don’t believe in democracy…..

Creating the conditions for democratic engagement by education professionals – that would be real teacher appreciation.

More on Vermont Teachers Negotiations

I appeared on CCTV on October 28 with Avery Book and local VT-NEA leader Amy Lester, who is vice president of the Vermont Workers Center.  Just discovered it was online.  I was incorrectly identified as an executive board member - in fact I am a member of the VTNEA board of directors.  This broadcast speaks to the reasons that we need to reform teacher negotiations, and to the reality that we need 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 of you in a hurry.  The program happened over three months ago, but all the issues are still valid.

Relate this back to Reforming Vermont Teacher Negotiations.

Reforming Vermont Teacher Negotiations

There are better alternatives. Recent proposals in Vermont concerning changes to collective bargaining in Vermont are both unnecessary and counterproductive.  Defanging participants by prohibiting union strikes and board impositions is patently absurd because it strips the collective bargaining process of any means to force the two sides towards each other.  Replacing strikes and impositions with binding interest arbitration certainly has the potential to turn down the temperature, and it provides a means of bringing the sides together, but doesn’t get at the systems problem underlying the issue: the collective bargaining process we have in education was never designed for education.

I worry that legislative energy spent on tinkering around the edges of collective bargaining will be wasted.  It has the potential to create tremendous controversy without any payoff in terms of improved public policy. 

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

The real next step in moving Vermont education forward via collective bargaining is reforming the process itself, reform that cannot be performed by legislative fiat.  Even as government leaders consider legalistic solutions to the chronic problem of strikes and near strikes in education, local leaders in Vermont are creating real solutions based on decades of research in alternative conflict management, using proven practices that can save districts and union tens of thousands of dollars, improve school climate, and make collective bargaining agreements into education improvement plans.

The main tool in this effort is Interest Based Bargaining (IBB.)  IBB is the term used for methods developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project in the 1980’s.  The classic formulation is found in the well known book Getting to Yes by William Ury.  IBB needs to be adapted for education, and those adaptations are well represented in the practice of leaders who gather in the Teacher Union Reform Network.

Best of all, Vermont districts and unions do not have to go it alone.  The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) provides free support and training to teams of local leaders who want to create a negotiation process that speaks to the benefit of students.  In the Washington Central Supervisory Union we are using FMCS mediators to reform our process.  While the work is in its infancy, the early results have been a revelation to participants.

In a traditional adversarial negotiation, the two sides exchange proposals.  They take positions and use whatever power or persuasion they can muster to win for their position.  The result is massively time consuming and ritualistic, burning up thousands of hours of time of teachers, school board members and administrators, time which would be better spent thinking about students.  The process inevitably wends itself to impasse, when the two sides admit that they can’t get any further.  With extremely rare exceptions, it then proceeds to mediation and fact finding.  Generally, private mediators are used at this phase, at a cost of thousands of dollars both to the board and the union.  In addition, mediation and fact finding can generate tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills for boards, and huge amounts of work for VT-NEA professional staff. 

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

And the result?  Usually a handful of contract language tweaks and a little bit of new money on the salary schedule.   These tweaks are often fraught with unintended consequences that then need to be fought over in subsequent negotiations.  In my experience positional bargaining is an expensive and wasteful way to preserve the status quo.

What does the alternative look like?  In Washington Central we contacted FMCS, who provided a team of skilled and experienced Federal mediators to train the 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 both teams and keep the process on track.  There is quite a learning curve, as the deeply ingrained habits of mind and practice of veteran negotiators have to be replaced by new, unfamiliar ways of doing business.

In a typical session now, using IBB, the work looks like this:  the sides identify an issue they want to talk about and define the problem to be solved.   Then participants identify their underlying interests and determine which interests are shared by both teachers and board.  So far, we have discovered that the two sides share most interests.

The next step is mutual brain storming of options to resolve the issue.  People are encouraged to contribute anything they think of at this stage, without criticism.  Sometimes an option which at first glance looks impractical contains a kernel of something helpful.  Only when the collective creativity of the team is exhausted is the list of options judged by a set of mutually agreed upon standards.  There are a couple of ways to do this.

The way we chose is a three part filter:

• 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 through all three of these filters can become the basis of a tentative agreement.  A pair of negotiators from each side would then meet independently to draft contract language.

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

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

I am optimistic that the agreements that result from our IBB process will be superior to our traditional process.  After all, a proposal in positional bargaining is simply an option attached to a set of interests.  There is no guarantee that it is the best possible option, and positional bargaining provides very little space for the consideration of alternatives.  A collective bargaining agreement is a means of creating local education policy.  A better process is in the interest of great public policy.

Again, our process is in its infancy, and I write this with some trepidation.  It may be that we reach a point, perhaps on economic issues, where positional bargaining is the correct tool, and we revert to that process.  This would be normal, and it is the practice in many negotiations across the country.  Nonetheless, I am confident that if we reach impasse having given IBB our best shot, the scale of the remaining disagreements will be greatly reduced, and the climate of our talks will allow a more civil result.

My other concern is sustainability: will this process outlast this particular set of leaders and this particular negotiation?  The answer here has three parts.  The first is how successful this particular group is in arriving at a new agreement.  The more successful we are, the more sustainable the process.

The second is whether this process then becomes a template for other supervisory unions, and spreads across Vermont.  If IBB becomes a cultural norm and an expectation in Vermont, sustainability becomes moot.  This is part of the reason I am writing even as the result hangs in the balance.  We need to do more of this work.   I am committed to this vision.

Finally, while we can count on the continued support of the Federal government through the free services of FMCS, what supports will our state leaders provide those of us trying to reform process for the sake of great student learning?  Or will our state government get distracted in desultory and destructive tinkering with collective bargaining laws, legalistic games that are irrelevant to grassroots reforms available to every community?

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

How Things Have Changed in Two Years....

In November 2009 a statewide labor conference convened at the Davis Center at the University of Vermont under the auspices of the Vermont Workers Center.  The big news at the time was a contract that the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) was considering, a contract which was cutting state employees compensation almost 7%.  A group of us at the conference agreed to begin a statewide letter writing campaign to urge state employees to vote against ratification.

The letter writing campaign was not very successful.  Even though a dozen of us were writing to literally every statewide and regional newspaper, only a couple the letters were published.  It was an object lesson for me in the control exercised over the conventional media by conventional ideas.  My letter ended up being published on the Socialist Worker website.  I wrote:

As a teacher, I foresee reduction in services that will reduce the effectiveness of schools, as stressed families are less able to support their children's education. The negative effects of the proposed VSEA contract will be felt in schools in the form of behavior problems, hunger, abuse and neglect, with less backup from state agencies. The bad public policy represented by this contract will diminish the value of our communities' education investment.

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

Fast forward two years.  Yesterday a tentative agreement was reached between the state and VSEA.  According to VT Digger

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

This sounds promising, but I’m withholding judgment until I have a chance to talk today with other labor leaders.  But here’s another important change of attitude:

Jeb Spaulding, secretary of the Agency of Administration, said “I think it’s a fair deal for the taxpayer and a fair deal for 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 three bargaining units – Corrections, Supervisory and Non-Management Units — and the state have not had to resort to mediation or fact finding as part of the negotiation process.

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

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

This is the Jeb Spaulding of the infamous Spaulding Commission that two years ago tried to destroy public pensions in Vermont.  How things have changed in two years.

I hope school boards everywhere are listening….

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

How things have changed in two years…..

• 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 my fellow workers in solidarity to celebrate progress and plan next steps.  As a labor leader, I give up a lot of weekends for the cause.  But without my union, and without the wider labor movement I would not have those weekends to do this work.  It is a great privilege to be able to do so.

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.

Let’s Flip That

A current argument in the education policy world is between those who argue that the quality of inputs to system matter (i.e. resources, poverty in communities, etc.) and those who argue that we need to emphasize the quality of outputs (i.e. reformers).  Here is my tongue-in-cheek argument that this discussion is itself specious.  I am not attacking religion, just trying to demonstrate the absurdity of applying a factory model in an inappropriate context.  It gets ugly fast. 

All this input/output business just underscores the paradigm that organizes our schools: the factory.  In a factory, the quality of the inputs matter, as do the quality of the outputs.  I worked in a factory.  We manufactured architectural millwork.  Now if I sent #2 pine to the door shop as opposed to FAS mahogany or rift and quartered white oak, I'd get a different outcome (I won't mention the injury factor this would entail.)  They'd probably muddle through and call me an idiot, but they'd get some sort of decent door done.  Do this for enough years and it would degrade the craftsmanship, as workers become demoralized.  I could go "make better doors or you're fired."  Workers could organize a union and push back.  Yadda yadda yadda.

Let's apply the factory paradigm to a different context, say church.  So the inputs are the babies that we baptize, batch process in Sunday school, confirm, marry - the whole 7 sacraments thing.  We send the finished product out the other end feet first in a pine box.  Then we quantify - how many souls went to heaven, how many went to hell?  As our statistical methods become more sophisticated, we could calculate how many years souls spent in purgatory with, say, their eyelids sewn shut with barbed wire (see Dante.) 

This would enable us to calculate value added scores for priests and nuns, who we could then hire, fire, promote to bishop or otherwise "differentially compensate" as we deem fit.

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

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

Of course if we transfer the Roman military/ecclesiastical hierarchy along with the paradigm (schools are already organized along these lines), we'll end up right where we are now with no changes.  And I'll personally skip the celibacy thing thank you very much!

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

SB5 Repeal: Ohio Injustice Averted

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

If there were teacher unions in any state that didn't deserve SB5 it was those of Ohio.  Ohio is the home of the Toledo Plan, the ground breaking Peer Assistance and Review System (PARS) which has been a national model of teacher taking control of professionalism for decades.  According to new research, deployment of a PARS system leads to more collaborative labor management relations.

Another example: The Dayton local was recently highlighted in NEA Today for using the grievance procedure to acquire textbooks for special needs students.

But I discovered the most significant example of the progressive work of Ohio's teacher unions in Denver, at the US Department of Education's Labor Management Conference.  At a reception, I spent considerable time talking with several representatives of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, a federal agency charged with improving relations between labor and management.  At one point I was talking with an FMCS mediator from Ohio, who turned to a colleague and asked, "What percentage of teacher negotiations we do in Ohio do you think are interest based?"  The colleague thought about it for a moment, and replied, "Eighty percent."

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

Ohio's unions did not deserve this assault.  They were punished for doing some of the most progressive, collaborative and innovative work in the country.  I am incredibly relieved that the citizens of Ohio recognized the treasure they have in these great civic institutions, public sector unions, by not just repealing SB5, but repudiating their governor by an almost two to one margin.