Netroots Nation: Why am I here?

Attending Netroots Nation for the first time as a Democracy for America Scholar. What do I want to achieve?

In the last few years I've been deeply engaged in the nuts and bolts of progressive unionism and education policy.  After working all day teaching young children, then negotiating, serving on the VT-NEA Board, working for the US Dept of Education, etc., there is precious little time left for all of the other worthy progressive causes in the world.  But I believe that connecting across policy spheres is crucial to the success of progressive causes.  I am here to make that connection and learn about all the things I've been missing while actually doing the work.

One of the things I've noticed about the radical right is that there think tanks cross issues.  Look at Hoover - they have specialists in defense, economics, domestic policy education etc.  This enables them to develop a narrative across disciplinary boundaries.  The different policy areas become mutually reinforcing.

Contrast with the left.  Think tanks, such as they are, tend to work within silos.  The issue orientation leads the public to latch onto specific issues rather than a coherent and self-reinforcing narrative.  Teachers go, "LGBT, Native American? Those aren't my issues - I'm not gay, I'm not Native American."  Well dammit these are our issues.  Urban is a rural issue.  Rural is an urban issue.   

We are all in this together.

The great narrative battle is between private good and the public good.  The right believes there are very few public goods - maybe defense, but that the benefits of the society accrue to individuals, and therefore society can be atomized, privatized and government shrunk until it can be "drowned in a bathtub."

My view, one I hope we share, is that there are great public goods, things which are too profound and important to consign to the markets.  Drive a Ford or a Chevy, eat Rice Crispies or Cornflakes?  Private goods - that can be settled by markets.  But education, healthcare, marriage equality, civil rights public transit, the environment and, yes, defense, are great public goods, matters of profound social consequence in which we all have too big a stake to turn our back on the collective enterprise.  I refuse to turn my back on my neighbor.

We are our neighbors’ keepers.

I am hoping to connect with this bigger narrative here in Providence.  Wish me luck.

Follow the hashtag #NN12

One of the Last Best Places Anywhere

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."

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....

Innovation, Ideology and Compliance

As we say in the union: a supposal....

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?

My Garden Sprouts

How often does a book on education achieve both literary and visual artistry?  How often would you expect any book on education to be both practical and inspiring?  Had you asked me these questions a couple of weeks ago, I would answered seldom to the second question and never to the first.  Both questions together?  Impossible.  Then I encountered My Garden Sprouts by Sharla Steever, illustrated by Diana Magnuson.

My Garden Sprouts is an annotated journal for elementary classroom teachers.  Its 127 illustrated pages are filled with space for a teacher to make notes about his/her unfolding practice over a three year period.   Each journal page begins with wise and insightful prompts.  The quality of these prompts grows from Sheever’s deep experience as a mentor and teacher leader at her school.  Magnuson’s illustrations are gorgeous; her self-professed Allegorical Realism is the perfect foil to Steever’s use of metaphor.  They are  understated, supporting, but never overshadowing the professional intent of the book.

A 2011 Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the US Department of Education and a National Board Certified Teacher, Steever is a master teacher form South Dakota who teaches fourth grade.  Her video Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education, illustrating her profound knowledge of Native American education issues, was previously reviewed here on Education Worker.   Magnuson is a gifted illustrator from Michigan with a large portfiolio of illustrated children’s books. 

Steever is also an accomplished gardener.  She uses gardening as a literary metaphor for teaching.  The culture of individual vegetables and flowers illustrates the character of students and situations one encounters in school.   Pumpkins “take up a lot of space.”   With regard to pumpkin students, Sheever invites us to consider how we can build their boundary awareness.  Onions “are socially repellant” – how can we peel back the layers, getting past the hunger, poverty or abuse to hold these students to “compassionate high standards”?  At every step Steever challenges even jaded veterans to consider students in novel ways, and with humor and wit asks us to reconceive our classrooms and the way we see our students.

This journal should become a modern classic for the induction and mentoring of new elementary teachers.  I could see it being a graduation gift for new teachers, or a gift to new hires, especially in rural places.  I could see it being a standard text for Peer Assistance and Review programs, directed both to the new teachers and struggling veterans typically served by these programs.

As I read, however, it became clear to me that this journal is for anyone at any level of experience who simply wants to ramp it up to the next level in their practice.  Compassionate, wise and eminently practical – how often does that happen in an education book? 

One Mouth and Two Ears…

Sharla Steever is a fourth grade teacher from Hill City SD.  She is a National Board Certified Teacher, and a Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow for the United States Department of Education (I was a TAF in 2010-2011.)  Sharla is also a dear friend, with a powerful commitment to the Native American community.  Her guest blog here fits with the social justice orientation of Education Worker.

Please view the video Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education

The last few months I have spent a great deal of time travelling around the rural beauty of the state of SD to places even I, who have spent my entire life here, had never seen. I had the honor of holding a variety of teacher round tables and personal interviews with the educational leaders of our Native American Reservation schools and videoed every bit of it.

My goal? To bring the voices of this unique group of people, with their unique educational issues to ED in their own words.

These people are from places in our own backyard that are dealing with levels of poverty, alcoholism, and unemployment far exceeding national averages, but they are also some of the most self-determined, creative, beautiful people I have ever met in my life.

I began this project with a desire and hope to educate myself and others about issues in Native American education on our reservations. What I didn’t expect was the gift it would become to me. As I sat across from each person in this video and so many more, I was given the gift of story – some sad, some inspiring, some anger-filled, some so beautiful they moved me to tears. Through all of them I discovered something very important. If we truly want to impact change, we must first start by listening…not only to the words that are shared, but to the heart behind the words.

I learned a great deal about the issues facing our educators and students in these areas, but more than that I learned that there are amazing people doing incredible work day after day and year after year in areas of poverty that are far beyond most of our imaginations. If we want to help improve the situations these schools are facing, we must begin by working to understand them. How do we do that? We do it by listening to their stories. My hope is that this video provides a glimpse into these incredible stories and helps to inform those in positions to create change.

I hope you will enjoy and share, “Tokata: Moving Forward in Indian Education.”

VT-NEA’s Board of Directors: Of, By and For the Members

Brian Walsh served as vice president of VT-NEA.  A couple of years ago he wrote the following article – it is an eminently reasonable statement on governance, and a good introduction to board activities for rank and file members. 

Before I became a board director in 2005, I had no idea what our Board of Directors was all about – “governance” was an unfamiliar term.  Sure, as a local leader I had become acquainted with our state officers and several area directors.  But I really did not know what the board did, how often they met, or how important their positions are for our organization.  Speaking with some of my local members, it is clear that many of them share my former confusion on the role played by our board of directors as Vermont-NEA’s governance.  

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors is composed of our statewide officers – President, Vice President, Secretary-Treasurer and NEA Board Director – 16 regional directors from our seven uniserve districts, and our Executive Director.  Since they are members, the officers and regional directors have voting power; the Exec’s role is advisory.  The Board is our connection to the reason unions were formed.  Workers knew that it was other workers, themselves, who truly always had their best interests at heart.  These member-led unions are responsible for the compensation, benefits and working conditions – minimum-wage laws, health insurance, workplace safety rules, even  weekends - we often take for granted today.  But as time went on, the logistics and responsibilities of running a national, statewide, or even large local unions became too much for members needing to work full-time jobs to support their families.  Unions then began hiring employees to assist with the myriad responsibilities of operating large labor organizations.  

Vermont-NEA’s Board of Directors comprises its governance, or authority, for its operation.  According to the manual Governance as Leadership, the primary responsibilities of governance include fiduciary, strategic and generative functions.  Fiduciary responsibility refers to the management of an organization’s material assets.  These duties obviously need to be taken very seriously, and much care and attention is devoted to our fiduciary responsibility.  But the other two responsibilities are no less important; the most effective boards execute all three equally well.  

Strategic planning means setting long-term goals.  For these goals to be effective, they must be designed to fulfill our mission as both an educational association and as a labor organization.  Generative thinking addresses the opportunities created by the challenges an organization faces working to fulfill its mission.  This function obviously needs time to develop, but is vital if an organization is to develop its potential.  Organizations often employ staffs to assist with all three functions, but the ultimate responsibility is with the boards themselves.

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.

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

Which Way Forward for Teacher Unions?

I gave this speech April 4, 2011 in Burlington, VT as a participant on a panel "Which Way Forward for Unions?"

I love my union.  I believe that unions are a fundamental social good.  They are institutions that elevate not only the workers who are their members, but all workers in general by raising the bar of good employment practices and fair compensation.

I’m second third generation union.  My mother worked 34 years for the county jail and her union guaranteed that after a lifetime of toil and difficulties she retired in dignity and could fulfill her greatest wish – that in old age she could be independent and not a burden on her children. 

VT-NEA has helped guarantee a middle class existence and a dignified retirement for thousands of Vermont’s teachers.  For me personally, engagement with my union has given me tremendous opportunities to develop professional and leadership skills.  For this I am very grateful.

Part of caring deeply is to be critical and encourage improvement and greater efficacy in the union.  VT-NEA and all teachers unions are in a time of great flux.  The ability to change is key to our survival.  But we must do this in a way that honors and is built on the strengths that we have inherited from the hard work and sacrifice of those who have come before us.

Where do we stand right now?  Here in Vermont, the system of teacher negotiations is broken.  We have an expensive, ritualistic political theatre of teacher negotiations, a divisive process which has become detached from the fundamental purpose of the educational enterprise: great student learning, and produces incremental language changes and pay raises below the rate of inflation

However, in one district I work in, I assisted in an interest based process that quickly arrived at a three year settlement including a lift up and set down of the salary schedule, which yielded new money in excess of 11% over three years.  The contrast was stark.

When I went to Washington last summer for my Fellowship, I was puzzling about this contrast.  I had a chance to sit down with one of the Department’s top experts on unions and after a half hour of analysis he looked at me and said “you guys have a mess.”

My take away from this conversation was that we needed bargaining reform in Vermont.  But as I continued to work with the department on labor management questions, it became apparent to me that bargaining reform could only exist in the context of comprehensive union reform.  What does this look like?

The model that speaks to me most strongly as a union leader is the Three Frames of Progressive Unionism, developed by the Mooney Institute for Teacher Union Leadership.  The Three Frames are Industrial Unionism, Professional Unionism, and Social Justice Unionism.

Industrial Unionism uses collective power to meet bread and butter needs of members and ensure fairness from management.  It is the bulk of what we think of when we consider teacher union work:  negotiations, grievances, and yes strikes, or near strikes.  It assumes an adversarial relationship with management. The Industrial Frame has elevated the profession, but presents some problems. 

First, industrial style labor relations were adopted from industry.  As schools evolve away from a factory model, the foundation of the industrial frame is shifting beneath us. 

Second, the political conditions sustaining this model are changing – think Wisconsin.  Not only are we facing a coordinated, well financed attack on our collective bargaining rights from the radical right, but the Democratic Party, to which teacher unions hitched their fortunes, is no longer a reliable ally or protector.

Third, the public, as well as rank and file, may be becoming impatient with the inefficiency of teacher negotiations, detached from the fundamental purpose of education: great student learning.

Professional Unionism seeks control of the profession to ensure quality.  In this frame, focus is on professional development and quality of teaching/learning.  The methods include collaboration with management.  I believe many teachers identify with this frame, because confrontation is not in our character.  The problem here is that it is naïve to think that teachers’ good intentions will make stupid or duplicitous behavior by bureaucrats, politicians and administrators go away.

Social Justice Unionism seeks equity for our students through active engagement in the community.  It wraps the unions’ arms around bigger social problems, problems that if they were solved would help make the curriculum accessible to even our most vulnerable students.  Social Justice Unionism represents the pinnacle of our work.  How do we get there, especially in the overt hostility of the current environment?

First, it is important to note that these three frames are symbiotic.  You don’t get to choose.  Living exclusively in one is perilous.  The three frames are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for the success of teachers’ unions.

Second, I used to believe that the three frames existed in equality.  Events in Wisconsin and other states this year have taught me that they actually exist in a hierarchy.  For all of the historical and political problems of an exclusive industrial unionism, a robust capacity to attend to the bread and butter issues of both members and unions themselves is the foundation for the existence of meaningful progress in the Professional and Social Justice Frames.  There will always remain the need for working people to confront power.  Anything else is wishful thinking.

The possibilities of Professional and Social Justice Unionism flow from the power of Industrial Unionism.  Professional Unionism unlocks the potential of collaborative labor management relations to improve educational outcomes, but is defended from foolishness by the shield of Industrial Unionism.  Social Justice Unionism extends the benefits of our work to stakeholders outside our membership, especially children, and creates a stable political base that cannot be provided by an exclusively industrial/adversarial approach.  Professional Unionism enjoys the enhanced capabilities of students and families whose basic needs are being met. 

Where does Wisconsin fit in this vision?  The political vandals like Scott Walker who are seeking to end teachers’ collective bargaining rights are essentially destroying the possibility of teachers unions becoming strong, responsible partners in creating great student learning.  Unions need excess capacity to operate in the Professional and Social Justice frames.  Attacking our sustainability by eliminating dues deductions, as in Alabama, or forcing us to hold certification elections each year, as in Wisconsin, compromises our ability to put our shoulder to the common challenge of a creating a great educational system.

I want to close with one last thought concerning Social Justice Unionism.  Before I became active with VT-NEA, I was active with the Vermont Worker’s Center.  I came away from that experience with an insight: how dangerous it is for my union to go it alone.  Solidarity with other workers is a keystone moving forward in the current hostile labor environment.  I foresaw that to the extent we failed to help others, it meant that we were failing to push problems away from ourselves proactively.  I predicted the present crisis; I am shocked at the scale and virulence of the assault.

Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated on this day in 1968 after coming to the support of striking Memphis sanitation workers.  He didn’t need to do this, but he did, because he fully grasped the necessity of workers’ struggle for justice.  I hope that tonight we are in some small way honoring the spirit of solidarity in which Dr. King gave his life.  Thank you.