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.

Policy and Antipolicy

Policy is ultimately concerned with building systems and institutions to support human well-being.  For decades, a basic premise of American civic life was that the success of our society rested on a foundation of government providing for the public good.  This consensus was expressed succinctly in the words of the Republican Dwight Eisenhower:

“Should any political party attempt to abolish social security unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group of course that believes you can do these things. Among them are a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

In 2012, their number is no longer negligible, and they are no longer considered stupid.  To varying degrees this perspective dominates both political parties such that working people really have no alternative which supports a concept of public good in electoral politics, except for the occasional outlier like Bernie Sanders.

Neoliberalism is the political and economic philosophy driving our politics in 2012.  Many people have never heard of it, or if they have, do not understand that the engine of our political life is the same one which motivated the criminal regime of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in the 70’s and 80’s.

The term itself is unfortunate.  I suspect many people have positive connotations when they consider the word liberal outside the political context: to be liberal minded, to be liberal with one’s friends (generous) etc.  The prefix neo is something we associate with pleasant styles which evoke nostalgia: neoclassical, neo-romantic, neo-gothic, etc.

Neoliberalism is neither pleasant nor liberal. 

According to Corpwatch, the main tenets of neo-liberalism include:

1. The rule of the market. Liberating "free" enterprise or private enterprise from any bonds imposed by the government (the state) no matter how much social damage this causes.
2. Cutting public expenditure for social services like education and health care. Reducing the safety-net for the poor, and even maintenance of roads, bridges, water supply.
3. Deregulation. Reduce government regulation of everything that could diminish profits, including protecting the environment and safety on the job.
4. Privatization. Sell state-owned enterprises, goods and services to private investors. This includes banks, key industries, railroads, toll highways, electricity, schools, hospitals and even fresh water.
5. Eliminating the concept of "the public good" or "community" and replacing it with "individual responsibility."

Rather than building up the institutions of public good, neoliberalism seeks only to tear them down.  Yet actions based on neoliberal thinking are still commonly referred to as policy!  In education, NCLB and Race to the Top are not policies in any traditional sense because they have the effect of diminishing public education, and weakening the bonds between citizens and their institutions.

These are not policies; they are antipolicies.

Antipolicies are being advocated by both political parties.  On the one hand we have Republicans who advocate decapitating our institutions swiftly.  On the other, Democrats advocate doing it slowly, the death of a thousand cuts.  Oh yes we’ll preserve our civic institutions they go, we’ll just make everything a little better by instituting a few market reforms here and there, give people some “choice,” make government “accountable” through the miracle of the invisible hand, encourage personal responsibility through welfare “reform,” etc.

Being a little bit neoliberal is like being a little bit pregnant.

Public policy is rooted in a robust concept of public good.  We need to stop dignifying actions divorced from a concept of public good with the word “policy”.  These are antipolicies.

We also need to stop dignifying the purveyors of antipolicies with the term neoliberal.  They are criminals.

Cooking the Books: Healthcare and Education

We count healthcare costs twice in policy discussions, once when talking about per capita health care costs and again when talking about any costs of government which have an employee health care component. A prime example is education funding: in calculations of per pupil spending there is a substantial component of healthcare costs for education workers and their dependents. By double dipping, and counting these costs once on the health care ledger, and again on the education ledger, we are inflating the costs of government and distorting the policy discussion.

This distortion plays into the radical right's push to "shrink government until it can be drown in the bathtub."  If we debate public policy on the basis of funny numbers, if we don't even acknowledge how the books have been cooked, we are not going to have decent outcomes.

How can we compare ourselves to countries like Finland, which pays for universal healthcare from a healthcare budget and universal education from an education budget?  Of course their per-pupil spending is going to be lower!  They don't use revenue raised for the purpose of educating children to pay for private health insurance for education workers and their dependents.  They don't use schools as a mechanism for keeping employees and their families healthy.  That makes so much sense.

As Pasi Sahlberg explains, you can't understand Finnish education outside of the context of their wraparound social democracy.  And a corollary must be that you can't understand American education and its successes and failures without taking into account our context.  This includes the growing momentum of the neo-liberal program which is systematically dismantling government and consigning public good to the for-profit sector.

There is another subtler distortion.  When you have a childhood poverty level approaching 25% (which no other advanced nation tolerates) the effectiveness of every dollar spent on education is diminished.  When children arrive at school suffering health, food, transportation, or housing insecurity, or when they arrive from families stressed by the threat of those things, they are not going to be as ready and able to learn.  Families under economic stress lack the capacity to effectively support children as learners.

A nation which heaps the inefficiencies of its own injustice onto its education system is going to have to pay a lot more for any type of educational outcome.  It doesn't mean that education has failed, just that we are asking unreasonable things.  You have to use the right tool on the right job.  You don't plow fields with a family sedan.  You don't cut boards with a hammer.  Yes, we need great public schools.  But we also need to provide those schools with comprehensive institutional supports so that children arrive ready to learn.

That would require acceptance of a concept of public good.  It would require us to accept that the health, education, transportation, nutrition and housing of individuals in our society is not just a matter of private interest to them, but also a matter of great public interest, because societal failure is the sum of vast numbers of personal tragedies.  JFK put it in positive terms: "A rising sea lifts all boats."

One More Thing Brill Got Wrong

On pages 35 and 36 of Class Warfare, Steven Brill analyzes teacher salary increases in New York City that resulted from Albert Shanker’s leadership of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT).  His numbers look like this:

Table 1 New York City teacher stating salaries 1953-2007

Year	salary
1953	$    2,600
1962	$    5,300
1969	$  10,950
2007	$  45,530

From this, Brill concludes, “By 2007….the starting salary would be $45,530.00, or more than eight times 1962’s $5300.”  Evidently Brill wants to spark outrage that teacher unionism would lead to outrageous increases in starting salaries.  In taking this cheap shot, he missed a far more interesting story.  To uncover that story, we need to be able to compare salaries apples for apples.  To do this I used a CPI Inflation Calculator.  Adjusting for inflation, the numbers look like this:

Table 2 New York City teacher starting salaries in 2007 dollars

Year	salary	2007 dollars	change
1953	$    2,600.00	$      20,190.61
1962	$    5,300.00	$      36,387.83	80%
1969	$  10,950.00	$      61,863.62	70%
2007	$  45,530.00	$      45,530.00	-26%

This is an interesting story.  The first UFT contract in 1962 resulted in a starting salary 80% higher than Albert Shanker’s starting salary in 1953.  By 1969, the starting salary increased an additional 70%, representing increases averaging 12% each year.  But between 1969 and 2007 starting salaries actually declined 26% in real dollar terms.

At the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards Conference last summer, Arne Duncan gave a speech in which he said:

Last year, McKinsey did a study comparing the U.S. to other countries and recommending—among other things—that we change the economics of the profession, pointing out that entry-level salary in the high 30's and an average ceiling in the high 60's will never attract and retain the top talent. We must think radically differently.  We should also be asking how the teaching profession might change if salaries started at $60,000 and rose to $150,000. 

The UFT had achieved those starting salaries in 1969.  I think the question of why a starting salary that would genuinely attract talent to the profession declined 26% over the next 38 years is a fascinating question, one worth pondering.  Rather than offer any glib speculations, I prefer to continue the story….

Starting salaries only tell part of the story when analyzing a single salary schedule.  I articulated my views on the single salary elsewhere on this blog.  Let’s turn to the top level salary and the ratios between top level and starting salaries for a fuller picture.

Table 3 Top level NYC salaries in 2008 dollars

Year	Top level (T)	% Increase	Starting (S)	Ratio (T:S)
1962	$69,411		$37,330	1.86
1969	$99,438	43%	$64,238	1.55
2008	$100,049	1%	$45,530	2.20

  

From 1962 to 1969 top level salaries increased 43%.  Because starting salaries rose 70% in the same time period, the ratio fell from 1.86 to 1.55.  In the ensuing 39 years top level salaries were virtually flat, but because starting salaries fell 26% the ratio increased radically to 2.2.

As a negotiator I was trained that an indexed salary schedule with a 2:1 ratio is ideal.  I do not think that a 2:1 ratio is a good thing if it means that starting salaries are cut.  Why? Because a dollar you receive today, especially in the current political environment is worth a lot more than an IOU.

The ratio that Arne Duncan proposed in his speech is 2.5.  What this means is that the UFT achieved what the Secretary of Education is recommending for a starting salary way back in 1969, and they approached his recommended ratio in the 21^st century, but because this was achieved through reductions in starting salaries, they did not achieve these things at the same time.  I know this involves an anachronism, but bear with me.

If you’ve managed to follow me to this point, I congratulate you.  I’ve seized on a very minute piece of Brill’s story, but I’ve been pondering it for months.  I freely admit that it’s an arcane point, but one worth mulling.  If teachers are to be compensated like the professionals that they are, why was the most powerful local in the country, the UFT, unable to roll together a salary schedule combining both a livable wage for beginners and top level salaries commensurate with professionalism? 

I think this is a fascinating historical question, the consideration of which may be illuminating for union leaders going forward.

The next lines of Duncan’s speech are interesting to consider in light of this question

We must ask and answer hard questions on topics that have been off limits in the past like staffing practices and school organization, benefits packages and job security—because the answers may give us more realistic ways to afford these new professional conditions.  If teachers are to be treated and compensated as the true professionals they are, the profession will need to shift away from an industrial-era blue-collar model of compensation to rewarding effectiveness and performance.

As a union leader and as a socialist I maintain a healthy skepticism here.  The devil is in the details.  The devil is also in the question of whether the practitioner’s voice will be decisive in these matters.  We can see from the gutting of regulations for for-profit colleges that in the current environment money dominates education policy in particular and politics in general.  But for that fact, I would be a lot more receptive to the secretary’s challenge.

If teachers and our unions can seize upon these matters of “topics that have been off limits in the past” and shape them in ways that work for students and workers, there may be a way forward here.  But it will take a constitutional amendment negating Citizens United to make it possible.

Just some things to ponder….

Responsibility Versus Accountability

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.

We are people, not numbers.

A Modest Proposal

After years of toiling for unions that protect lazy teachers and allow them to harm innocent children, I’ve finally come to my senses and bought into the neo-liberal agenda.  Privatization, choice, competition and markets….think of this as my reverse Diane Ravitch moment.  If you can’t beat’em, join’em.    This is my ticket to the gravy train and I want to share some great ideas I’ve come up with.

We have a problem.  As taxes on the wealthy approach zero, foundations are no longer going to be necessary to shelter the wealth of the rich from taxation.  Revenues will decline as the middle class (the people who get taxed) shrinks.  How are we going to fund our schools with neither revenue, nor foundations?

The answer lies in the financial markets.  Wall Street has the talent and the capacity to develop innovative investment instruments that can save our schools.  Why did this never occur to me before?  There are so many smart people on Wall Street – I know this is true because they have more money than I do.  If we unlock the genius of Wall Street everything will be OK.

There are a couple of key innovations that make this financial miracle possible.  First of all, thanks to standardized tests, education has become a commodity.  It can be traded just like pork bellies or Brent crude.  Second, when a product becomes a commodity, the efficiency of the market allows the producer to be paid below the rate needed to sustain life, meaning that education costs cannot only be controlled, but radically cut.  The commoditization of education provides a way to quantify costs per unit output (test scores.)

I propose that investors be able to make direct investments schools – in essence, buy shares.  The value of the investment will fluctuate according to the value of the school, which will be a function of test scores and per pupil spending.  Like any good commodities business, schools that can squeeze higher test scores at lower unit costs will be more valuable.  When this occurs, the value of the security will rise.

This market could be part of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  Investors will be able to use put and call options so they can bet either for or against student learning.  In addition, a futures market would allow accurate predictions of test scores at individual schools through the price fluctuations of these securities.  With securities pricing information in hand, management could bring resources to bear on problems pro-actively.  The miracle of the invisible hand will improve schools even as everyone gets rich – and all with no messy revenues to raise!

One difficulty this poses for the wealthy investor is exposure to conditions in individual schools.  For example an outbreak of flu, or an inconvenient school shooting during testing could cause an investor to lose money.  Plus, statisticians have warned us of the instability of VAM when applied to the relatively small student populations of individual schools and teachers’ classrooms – what rational investor would want to be exposed to this sort of risk?

Luckily, we can use derivatives to hedge against these risks.  Individual school securities can be sliced up and bundled with other schools with similar characteristics.  These derivatives could be sliced and bundled a second time to allow creative money managers to customize investment portfolios for the risk profiles of their wealthy investors.  Investors would be able to hedge their risks and bet for and against student learning simultaneously, while continuing to make money.  These derivatives could become so divorced from the underlying value of student test scores that they increase in value indefinitely.  This will encourage the wealthy to pour their money into schools, now guaranteed money makers.

I believe that similar mechanisms can be employed on other public goods.  A prime example is infant mortality rates – a candidate for commoditization if there ever was one.  We have a statistic which can float up and down, and a measurable unit cost.  The use of derivatives in this case would create an efficient market that would allow infant mortality rates in a community like East St. Louis to settle to an economically sustainable level.

The miracle of the market is that by removing irrational considerations, like ethics, that distort the economic system and lead to inefficiencies, like doctors and hospitals, we can achieve the best possible rates of infant mortality at the lowest cost.  Self interest flows naturally to the public good, with no sacrifices. 

I am so glad to have discovered the power of unregulated markets.  I’d like to pitch this idea to Goldman Sachs, and the Gates Foundation.  I don’t think I’ll bother with the US Government, since there won’t be much of it left in a few years. 

A College Student Speaks Out

My daughter Liz Beatty-Owens gave this speech at a labor rally at Johnson State College in October.  Liz is 20, and is already a skilled organizer, with a deep understanding of the political and educational issues we face.  She and I work together when we can on behalf of the Vermont Workers Center.  Liz spent last weekend at Zuccotti Park in New York City participating in Occupy Wall Street (that's Liz serenading Mayor Bloomberg)

I am standing here today because- I am a student- half way done with my college career and I am already $20,000 in debt. And yes- in terms of debt I am one of the lucky ones.

I am here today because I am a student with a 15-credit work load, working 2 part time jobs, thousands of dollars in debt and I still cannot regularly afford to live comfortably - and I know I am not the only one.

I am here today because I have followed the rules.  I graduated from high school and I went to college - the path laid out for us by our society - yet it has not been made a sustainable path.

I can’t help but feel discouraged when each semester I have multiple peers drop out of college for financial reasons- going off to minimum wage jobs or, in two cases, the military, with semesters of debt looming behind them.

I don’t know about you but I want to live in an educated society where a college degree is not considered a privilege but recognized as a social good.

I have had the opportunity these last two semesters through numerous political science classes to speak to many of our Vermont political leaders and active community members. And more often than not the question is asked of me in this situation- why aren’t more young adults involved with politics- more active and driven in this field?

And as this question resonates with me I can’t help but turn to them and say: How can we expect the majority of students to support the government when students are not being looked out for by our government.  We are underfunded and consequently unsupported.  It’s a give and take deal.

That said, it has become clear to me this semester that the student population at Johnson is no longer willing to stand idly by.  We have groups forming such as Students for a Democratic Society (Wednesday nights at 7:00) and an ambitious group of students named Johnson to Wall Street (Tuesdays at 7:00).

And lastly, I would like to see the creation of a student union to represent our voice and our expectations at a state wide level- initially here at Johnson but then becoming VSC wide.  There is power in numbers- and we have the intelligence, the energy and the drive to create change right here, right now.

I would like to invite every Johnson student to sign up for the Student Union.  Our table is right over there….

With a unified voice we can stand up for students and create change at a localized level.

Let’s ask Vermont to once again set an example for the rest of the country- we’ve done it before with health care and same sex marriage- let’s do it again! Let’s support our students, fund our colleges and create social justice!