Administrative Success is a Union Issue

Reform is a loaded word.  When I speak of union reform, I am thinking of efforts to democratize unions and make them more responsive to membership.  Others however may be attaching union reform efforts to specific neo-liberal "reforms."  Some, such as Rick Hess, even suggest Labor Management Collaboration (LMC) as a way to get unions to participate in their own demise.  A good friend of mine on the labor left referred to the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), a group with which I’ve been active, as “astroturfy.”

We must separate LMC as a public good from specific policy prescriptions.  If a local or state affiliate decides for some unknown reason that merit pay, privatization, or exotic flavors of teacher evaluation is good for its members, I can’t speak for those people.  But there is no reason that LMC can’t lead boards, administrators and unions into deeper and more refined work on conventional collective bargaining agreements, featuring single salary schedules and considerable opportunities for teacher leadership and autonomy.

The term "Comprehensive Unionism" can better denote efforts to create a type of unionism responsive to the unique characteristics of education.  In TURN, we use Three Frames as a lens analyze and improve our work. 

• Industrial Unionism refers to the war fighting capability of the union, its capacity to use adversarial methods to promote bread and butter issues and enforce the collective bargaining agreement.  A robust capacity is the foundation for the other two frames.
• Professional Unionism speaks to our capacity to be the arbiters of quality in the profession, to improve instruction for the betterment of teachers and students.  
• Social Justice Unionism demands that we see the big picture: unions exist not just for the betterment of members, but for the betterment of all.  The recent Chicago Teachers Union strike was a shining example of Social Justice Unionism in action.

My work as a local president has focused on the Professional Unionism lens.  In my 20 year career, I’ve lived through 16 principals and 7 superintendents in 5 schools located in 3 different Vermont supervisory unions.  This experience has taught me that the quality of teachers’ (and therefore students’) lives on a day to day basis is profoundly affected by the quality of administrative work.

I have sat through endless union meetings that focus on administrative failure, where administrators and boards are trashed, where eyes roll and sarcasm abounds.  This culture encourages a type of defensive bargaining, where participants lead by asking, “What would happen if the worst administrator in the world got a hold of this contract language?”  And on the other side they lead by asking, “What would happen if the worst teacher in the world received this benefit?”

As teachers, we ought to know through our experience with students that if you treat people like idiots, you get….idiocy.

What if we flipped this and used collective bargaining as a tool to promote excellence rather than to eliminate incompetence?  What if we gave flexibility to administrators to administer schools with the expectation that along with this assistance comes a high bar.  And what if boards and administrators took a risk, and gave teachers autonomy and leadership opportunities, along with an expanded definition of what it is to be a professional educator, with the expectation that we would provide evidence of improved professional practice and student learning, evidence which could be readily seen by reasonable citizens?

In such a system incompetence would be noise.  When you have to hire millions of teachers and administrators a certain amount of noise is inevitable.  We should focus on the music, so that it drowns out the noise.

Professional success promotes the happiness of teachers.  When students are learning and growing, it improves the quality of educators’ lives through a profound sense of professional accomplishment.  In my world view, unions are great American institutions which exist to promote well-being.  See the connection?  Let's raise the bar.

I Wanna Vote For This Guy For Something

Van Jones gave an incredible speech at Netroots Nation.  I wanna vote for this guy for something.  He said many things that made a lot of sense to me.  Watch the video.

One was, reelect Obama, then hold him accountable.  You can’t elect a president, then say “Mission accomplished!” and go home.  That was the fundamental error of 2008.  You have to stay active and committed and push the guy to do the right thing.  It reminds me of what Saul Alinsky said:

It is not enough just to elect your candidates. You must keep the pressure on. Radicals should keep in mind Franklin D. Roosevelt's response to a reform delegation, “Okay, you've convinced me. Now go on out and bring pressure on me!” Action comes from keeping the heat on. No politician can sit on a hot issue if you make it hot enough.

The same lessons apply to unions.  Support your union.  Make it stronger.  Then hold it accountable. You can’t declare victory and leave.  The pressure has to be applied continuously.  Unions built the middle class. Everything Jones says about Obama applies to unions. 

Let’s take it down another order of magnitude.  Our local just reached tentative agreement with the school district.  We have controversial provisions.  Yes, you can get pissed off and walk away.  But Jones’ message resonates even here: ratify, then administer.  If you ratify, then go home for four years, you deserve what you get.

Organizing and activism are a pain in the butt.  Too bad.  That’s the price we pay for democracy.

Common Core and Monkey Training

Wrote this before the RTT convening in Boston.  This is where I was - I will write more on this subject  with respect to the convening in the future.

I teach elementary music.  I’ll be touched more tangentially by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) than many teachers, but I do have wide experience thinking about and writing curriculum with reference to standards in both my endorsement areas, music and technology integration.  I don’t have to implement CCSS in my classroom at this point, but as an educator, I'm fascinated. 

The problem with grappling with the details of implementation is that it is important to be able to articulate the big picture, the broad principles which form the basis of the CCSS.  The big picture is helpful both to educators and administrators trying to get a purchase on how to begin the work of CCSS, and to parents and other stakeholders trying to understand the implications for students. 

Standards represent our aspirations for students, which then need to be interpreted through a rich matrix of curricula, increasingly fine grained plans for the delivery of instruction.  There many different types of curricula, such as the political curriculum, the district/building curriculum, the classroom curriculum, the shelf curriculum, the taught curriculum and the learned curriculum, all of which look very different.

I've come to the conclusion that the most important curriculum is the one that the teacher has internalized, enabling minute to minute decisions in work with actual students.  All of those other types just prepare the one that lives in the teacher's head.  In the heat of the moment we can't pull a binder off the shelf to make decisions; we need an internalized plan to guide appropriate instruction.

Hence the significance of the broad outline or principles.

·         The CCSS calls for fewer things taught in greater depth.

·         The CCSS puts greater emphasis on informational texts, which is a type of reading we use in real life.

·         CCSS calls for more persuasive writing and less personal narrative, again what we do in real life.

·         CCSS calls for an emphasis on higher order thinking skills, requiring new assessments that can actually capture them.

·         In math, CCSS calls for the ability to reason quantitatively, not just the ability to perform procedures.

·         CCSS aspires to have students be able to anticipate the next steps in their learning, and therefore be educational actors rather than passive recipients.

·         CCSS calls for higher order thinking skills (HOTS).

I'm interested in the potential applicability of broad principles of this sort in my discipline, music.  My Orff Schulwerk level III movement teacher Brian Burnett talks about how we make kids in into "trained monkeys" in music classes.  By the same token, math students who perform the steps of a procedure but can't ascertain whether their answer is within an order of magnitude of reality are also victims of monkey training.  I ask myself what a Common Core for music might look like.

I'm fond of giving carefully scaffolded composition/improvisation tasks to students as a means of assessment.  A couple of years ago I had a fourth grade class improvise pitches to the rhythm of a poem using their recorders.  The parameters I set were a Do pentatonic scale on G, using G as the home tone.  One of the students asked me if he could use an F.  I replied, "Convince me."  He proceeded to improvise a lovely piece in the Dorian mode, dutifully ending it on G, per the requirements of the assignment.  When he shared with the class, I asked him if there was a note that would be more suitable for the ending than G.  He paused and thought about it, listening inside his head, and replied "D".  I looked at him and said, "You understand the home tone."

Martin deployed judgment in his answer.  My only regret was that in the design of the task I had not provided easier avenues of deploying judgment - I guess we call that reflection.  In fact the other day I gave this same task to students again, but this time invited them to choose their own home tone from given pitch set, which most did quite effectively. 

Could this story be illustrative of how the broad principles of our Common Core aspirations could be appropriately deployed in non-tested subjects?  A rising sea lifting all boats....

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.

Rethinking Administration Part II: Solutions

It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks rather than as individual persons.  These tasks can then be distributed within the system, either to make administration do-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building level administrator entirely.  Improving education means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the way of the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.

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

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

Likewise, recruiting from outside the profession means you will recruit people with a subset of skills needed for successful administration, but certain skills, like evaluation, curriculum and assessment, are so deeply rooted in classroom practice that an educational leader from outside would be rendered dependent on others, or risk failure in these key categories.

This points to a simpler solution: why not re-conceive administration as tasks rather than individuals, and then distribute these tasks within the organization to people with the skills and talent to perform individual tasks well?  Then a range of administrative solutions become possible:

• Elimination of the building administrator: The more radical solution is found in a handful of teacher led schools around the country.  At the Math Science Leadership Academy, an elementary school organized by union leaders in Denver, administrative tasks are distributed among a team of teacher leaders.  The existence of a strategic compensation model, ProComp, encourages leadership work engagement among teachers.  But to succeed, communities have to let go of traditional paradigms of the classroom and school: one teacher full time in the classroom (leadership work requires release time within the student day), and the single “go to” administrator as the ombudsman for every issue.
• Reconceptualizing administration as traffic control: This model is found in the Plattsburgh NY City School District where superintendent Jake Short believes in cultivating and “driving down” decision making capacity in the system to the level of implementation, where the information to make good decisions actually exists.  Short monitors the resulting decisions for quality, and legality, and to make sure that the necessary decisions are in fact made and implemented.  When interviewing Short, I pressed him on how he would behave if he disagreed with one of the resulting decisions.  In matters pertaining to the legality of the decision, he is obligated to intervene, but otherwise it becomes a persuasion task; he avoids overruling the decisions of the people to whom he has delegated in the interest of nurturing a system with a distributed capacity for excellent decision making.
  
  An expansive Wallace Foundation study devoted to examining the traits of effective school principals has found that high student achievement is linked to “collective leadership”: the combined influence of educators, parents, and others on school decisions.

• Distributing certain tasks or functions within the organization: This third possibility, breaking off discrete tasks in the interest of making administration a more reasonable job, is exemplified in the many districts nationally who have implemented Peer Assistance and Review Systems.  The first such system was the Toledo Plan, which dates back thirty years.  Evaluation and support of novice teachers as well as struggling veterans, is turned over to teachers and their union.  Involving teachers in the evaluation of peers works because teachers are affected by the presence of ineffective colleagues.
  
  Allowing teachers, through their unions, to take charge of quality in the profession, has been shown in the research to elevate practice.  When a consensus in the teaching community develops around practice, the union supports removal of non-performing individuals because teachers participated in the decision and the fairness of that decision cannot be impugned.
  
  The conceptual difficulty for boards will be paying teachers for work that is not direct instruction of students.

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

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

Rethinking Administration Part I: The Problem

It’s time to re-conceive school administration as a set of tasks rather than as individual persons.  These tasks can then be distributed within the system, either to make administration do-able, or, more radically, to eliminate the traditional building level administrator entirely.  Improving education means reconsidering traditional ideas when those ideas get in the way of the end goal of the educational enterprise: great student learning.

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

This collection of administrators has been a mixed bag.  As a group, they lurch from the incompetent, the criminal, and the incoherent, to a handful who could actually perform enough of the grab bag of tasks that constitute administration to be considered competent.  Proficiency in administration seems to be less a function of mastery of the craft and more a question of mere longevity: two of the more ostensibly successful administrators I’ve served under achieved whatever success largely due to outlasting their faculties long enough to implement some changes.

Longevity is a pretty low bar.  The task of school administration itself, however, is impossible.  One must demonstrate skills in curriculum, teacher evaluation, budgeting, scheduling, contract administration, education law, special education, management of the physical plant, politics, discipline, transportation, communication, negotiation and personnel management (not to mention leadership…) I have yet to see the complete package in any one individual, not because there is anything wrong with the people themselves, but because the job is itself unreasonable.  Proficiency or even distinction in any small set of these tasks may not be enough to overcome failure in any one area.

Furthermore, administrators are promoted from the classroom.  The qualities that make one a skilled and effective classroom teacher are not necessarily the skills that make one an effective administrator - but background in the classroom is essential to having the “street cred” to run a school.  This problem is exacerbated by the lack of assistant principalships in the Vermont to train prospective administrators.

Anyone that has sat on an administrative search committee in a small town can speak of the thinness of the talent pool.  One often experiences a motley collection of retreads and unproven first timers.  In Vermont, the real dance of the lemons happens not in the teaching force, which tends to be stable and competent, but in the ranks of administration.  The plethora of small community schools in our state means we have a demand for a large number of administrators relative to the student population.  Then we spend a lot of money hiring people to do impossible work.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and School Improvement Grants (SIG) have exacerbated the talent pool problem by creating job instability for principals - who in their right mind would want a job where you face being fired for reasons not under your direct control?  Every one of the four turnaround models involve firing the principal, and absent a sensible re-authorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) - or a waiver - 100% of schools face being identified as failing and therefore on the path to firing their principal by 2014.  This year 72% of Vermont schools failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP.)

Please don’t interpret this post as an indictment of every administrator.  I have worked with some excellent administrators; the problem is that they are the exception rather than the rule.  The rest?  Good, well-meaning people plying a 1950's role cursed with 21st century expectations.

Tomorrow Part II: Solutions