This is a cross posting from my friend Patrick Ledesma's Leading from the Classroom on Ed Week Teacher Magazine. He was kind enough to let me guest blog. I'm putting it here for readers who normally read my stuff on Education Worker.
Back in Vermont, in 2011 I was entering my fourth cycle as a negotiator and second as local president. Our negotiations had always been protracted and contentious, requiring thousands of hours of teacher and school board member time. The traditional process goes through a predictable sequence: bargaining, impasse, mediation, fact finding, crisis buildup, and, in rare instances, imposition and strike. Mediation and fact finding employ private consultants costing thousands of dollars. Boards often call on private attorneys to negotiate, the costs of which often exceed the amount needed to settle the economic issues.
This scenario is repeated dozens of times all over Vermont. Each negotiation is for a small number of teachers by national standards, resulting in minor changes to “mature contracts.” It is a time consuming and costly way to preserve the status quo.
Our previous negotiation had required at least 200 hours of each of the ten teachers on our team. The board commitment was similar. Rancor adds no value. Unions, boards and administration should be partners in the cause of student learning, but are instead trapped in a ritualistic process.
I returned from Denver determined that our pending negotiation would be collaborative, and facilitated by FMCS. It took months of persuasion – one board member could not believe that FMCS services were free. Finally, a pair of skilled FMCS mediators trained both teams together in the techniques of Interest Based Bargaining.
We invested in success. The results?
·Zero dollars spent on a board attorney, mediators or fact finders
·Settlement was achieved in 6 months rather than 18
·Respect between board and teachers, a result of “tough minded collaboration.”
Is this process reform sustainable? Can it become a template for our state? An innovation of this year’s LMC is critically important in answering these questions: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants. Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, presented. Their teams highlighted work they have done to support local collaboration.
Vermont sent a team of statewide leaders. We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the collaborative work already happening at the local level. I am confident that our state leaders found inspiration and practical ideas at the conference.
Process reform is not enough. Sustainability depends on connecting to a greater goal: excellent student learning. In Vermont, dealing proactively with contemporary policy challenges requires this focus. Collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation, and become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools.
The tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont is a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to the cause of great student learning. Our children deserve no less.
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."
Let’s set aside for a moment the
heated arguments about the course of federal education policy. Let’s give the United States Department of Education (ED) the
benefit of the doubt, impute good intentions, and take at face value their
claim that they are trying to use federal policy to change the conversation
about teacher quality from sorting and firing, to elevating the profession and
improving teaching practice. We can
always revert to the noisy argument, but stepping back to a quieter place for a
moment may illuminate avenues for better
policy.
Race to the Top and NCLB waivers
are among an alphabet soup of ED initiatives intended to spur change and
innovation at a state level. Certainly
there is guidance from ED as to what that change might look like, and that is
legitimately a subject for political debate.
Let’s consider the possibility that to some significant extent these
programs are intended less to be prescriptive, and more to be platforms for innovation.
There is a dangerous assumption
embedded in policy of this sort: that states have the same capacity for
creativity and innovation as the people who created the policy in the first
place. There may be states
where capacity exists, but in many places this policy ship is dashed on
the twin rocks of ideology and compliance.
Ideology is expressed in astroturf
teacher bashing, and in policy and legislation that assume that bad teachers
and the unions that protect them are the problem. This is the “fire your way to the top”
approach, which has the added advantage allowing politicians to evade the tough
task of raising the revenue necessary to create a great education system. From the left it consists of a cynical view
that everything ED does is astroturf in disguise. Ideology offers its proponents relief from
the necessity of thinking.
When it comes to trying to elevate
the teaching profession to advance the cause of great student learning in our
schools, ideology is a noisy, destructive distraction from that task. Federal programs designed to encourage
creativity and innovation cannot succeed in states where this type of toxic
thinking predominates.
There is a second, more insidious
impediment to the success of current federal policy: a compliance
mentality. State and district level
bureaucrats often live in a culture of compliance. Rather than using a program as an opportunity
to create something progressive, they ask “What is the minimum we have to do to
get the money/waiver/whatever?” This
mentality collides with the intent of the people who created the Federal policy. That policy is designed to disrupt and change
the status quo. Compliance is about
maintaining a comfortable status quo for adults, regardless of the impact that
has on the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.
There are places that have
managed to keep the ideologues tamped down while responding with some
creativity to federal initiatives.
Massachusetts is one such place.
The Massachusetts Teachers Association took a proactive approach to the
RTT requirement to incorporate student achievement data in the new teacher
evaluation system. The MTA plan, which the
Association characterizes as a “Triangulated Standards-based Evaluation
Framework,” uses student achievement as one data point among several.
The universities and think tanks
in Massachusetts have the ability to help by providing a theoretical framework
to support the work in strategic partnerships with other stakeholders. Few states boast such capacity - certainly
not my state, Vermont.
There is a pathway for more
effective Federal policy. Presuming good
intentions here, if it is the intent to promote innovation rather than ideology
or compliance, ED has to consider ways of building capacity in places where it
does not currently exist, ways of getting colleges and universities to step up
to the plate, of helping unions get past a circle the wagons mentality, of
reaching people of good will and helping them to understand the issues at hand,
not just in states that are the recipients of federal largess, but everywhere.
People who are numbed by the
noise of worthless ideology, or deadened by the dull drone of bureaucratic compliance,
cannot be the engines of innovation, cannot be equals and partners in a program
of educational improvement.
How can we move past the
ideological noise of both the right and the left, and emerge from the
suffocation of compliance in order to create great public policy? How can we learn to govern ourselves again?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I
choose to be responsible rather than accountable. The reason is in the very etymology of the
words. Accountable is built around the
verb “to count” and ascribes reality to abstract numbers, that which can be counted (and
is therefore what “counts.”) Responsibility
is built around the verb “to respond.” The ability to respond is critical in human
contexts like education, and is what really counts.
There is a fundamental
conflict here: the imposition of accountability results in less
collective responsibility. The fate of De
La Cruz Middle School in Chicago illustrates the conflict, where emphasis
on numbers destroyed a learning community where people took collective responsibility
for student success:
Anyone who visited us commented on what a
wonderful place it was. Unfortunately, the only person from CPS to come visit
us was the numbers guy, whose job it was to calculate "space utilization….When
the numbers guy completed his report, he said we were at 61% utilization. His
calculations, 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 things
we were doing did not matter to CPS. Our student improvement didn’t matter to
CPS. Our organic “longer day” that we had didn’t matter to CPS. Our students
and community didn’t matter to CPS.
This occurred in a context of
privatization and neo-liberal “reforms” which have been going on in Chicago for
twenty years. I live in Vermont, and I
believe that this extreme case is instructive for us in our rural context. People
matter, and we need to fight against any trend towards dehumanizing our
educational institutions, because in so doing we hurt our communities. Responsibility is built on the
belief that we can be better than we are.
Ironically, while a misplaced emphasis on accountability diminishes responsibility, increased collective responsibility creates greater
achievement as a byproduct. At De La Cruz
Student achievement had been on the rise for
years; we ran one of the first true middle school programs in the city, where
our students would switch classes to be taught by subject area experts and in
the process they gained valuable experience for high school. Through a lot of
hard work by students and staff alike, we gained certification for the AVID
program. We passed the ISBE Special Education Audit, and the auditor told us
that 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 Sharon
Elementary School, where there is a powerful sense of shared responsibility among
staff, parents, students, and the community.
Suffice to say that this school is among the 28% of Vermont schools that
made AYP this year - not the essence of the matter, but a useful byproduct.
In order to clarify my own
thinking, 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 our
best 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.
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. 
