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.

Whose Voice is it Anyway?

Just back from a convening of some 20 "teacher voice" groups, I was struck by the extent to which teachers so crave the opportunity to make a larger impact that they will donate their expertise to these groups for, at best, the price of a plane ticket and a hotel room.  Those teachers, as Nancy Flanagan might say are "on the make," so to speak, and are creating artifacts of great value for all sorts of organizations up to and including the national unions, and not receiving value for their expertise.

However the people who run these organizations - often non-educators, or "former teachers" whose shelf life expired long ago, don't do it for free - and are often compensated handsomely.  They inhabit a shadowy revolving door world of government, academia and consulting which can be quite lucrative by teacher standards.  There is a built in soft corruption in this enterprise.

Two problems: first, "teacher voice" groups have so little skin in the game that it becomes easy to discard or marginalize dissenting opinion, especially when that opinion might jeopardize the status of the group in the competition with similarly constituted groups.  There are few costs to groups to behave this way, since there is little investment in the human capital, and it so cheap and easy to cultivate a new "teacher voice" to replace the troublesome one.

Second, it is fine for these groups to use teachers to further institutional aims, but when teachers begin to figure it out and begin to use these entities to further their strategic goals (as opposed to their careers) the landscape shifts.

I witnessed a teacher who was beginning to think strategically about her policy goals and surf on top of this world.  Suddenly she found herself getting the cold shoulder from one such group.  What we need is a lot of people willing to behave this way (and I believe there are a fair number out there) but the personal cost in terms of stress and lost income can be high.

When one begins to use these groups instead of being used, the worry is that the perks (such as they are) and access can be jeopardized.  Perhaps the only tool we have to combat this tendency is our integrity.

The real question before teacher leaders is this: what does one want, a career or fantastic public policy which speaks to real professional aspirations?  And why does one have to choose?

Twelve Leadership Takeaways from Representative Assembly

Experiences at the 2012 NEA Representative Assembly left me with a lot to think about.  As I began to reflect on lessons learned from working on 3 different New Business Items (4, 5, and 82), I discovered a growing list.  Here are twelve takeaways from the experience:

Hmmm - can you imagine this being issued in 2012?

1. Use the “we” voice.  Leading in an organization means you are no longer on your own.  “We” is both more accurate and more powerful.  Thank you Mary McDonald for the reminder!
2. Have metrics for success.  That way you win no matter what.  You have to have a metric to measure success if your initiative happens, and you have to have a metric for success if your initiative doesn’t happen.  The latter was certainly the case for NBI #4.  But this happened by default – being intentional about it takes it to the next level.  Planning for success is valuable both in leadership and teaching.
3. Conviction matters.  Genuinely caring about the organization and outcomes trumps a lot of bad stuff.  Conviction confuses the self-interested.  They don’t understand your motivations.
4. Relationship means knowing what people are good at.  Jo Anderson of the US Department of Education told me, “Relationship is everything.”  I never truly understood what this meant until this RA.  Knowing the strengths of others, and understanding how they operate, is critical to trust.
5. Teamwork, teamwork, teamwork.  As a rural leader, I’m used to being chief cook and bottle washer.  As a team coalesced around NBI #4 in the TURN caucus and around NBI #82 more generally, I was amazed to watch high capacity leaders quickly deploy their strengths and figure out their roles on the fly.  It was a real eye opener.
6. Break off pieces of a problem.  Doing something specific and actionable is better than doing something diffuse and rhetorical.  This is the theory and practice of being bold.  Actually saying something inspires meaningful debate, which is a fundamental political good.
7. Avoid factionalism.  Rural vs. Urban, NEA vs. AFT.  Sometimes one has to let go of little things in order to get at the big issues.  Factions are about power.  The antidote to factionalism is inclusiveness.  When people actually talk to each other, we discover other folks care as much as we do, and don’t have horns and a tail.
8.  People don’t like being forced to do things.  They don’t even like the smell of it.  All the pro-NBI #4 speakers tried to be clear that this would not force anybody to do anything.  The anti-NBI #4 speakers painted it as a top-down initiative that would compel people to do things they might not want to do.  That rhetoric swayed the assembly.  We’re going to need to think about the implications very carefully in the future.
9. Language matters.  With 5000 wordsmiths in the room you have to get the language right.  Leveraging the talents of some of those wordsmiths is a valuable thing to do.
10. Power and position are just platforms to get things done. It is a terrible mistake to value these things for their own sake.  Using power and position to strengthen the organization is correct; using these things for self-aggrandizement diminishes everyone.
11. Developing leadership capacity means having experiences.  Nobody can tell you how to do leadership work.  You have to thrust yourself into the maelstrom.  As the old adage says, “Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you really want.”  This is an example of #2 above, succeeding either way.  Nobody can teach you how to speak in front of 9000 people, how to file a New Business Item for optimal effect, or how to lobby Congress.  You just have to do it and take your lumps.  If you value engagement as a fundamental good, you have to encourage others to have these experiences as well – whether or not you agree with them.
12. Reflection is as valuable in leadership as it is in teaching.  I’m a National Board Certified Teacher.  It doesn’t mean I’m better than you; it just means I’ve enhanced my capacity for reflection and improvement.  Reflection is priceless for improving classroom practice.  It is equally valuable in leadership.

So here’s hoping I don’t repeat too many mistakes, and that my future mistakes are novel and exciting….

What are your leadership takeaways from RA?