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?

Reflections on Teacher Leadership

At the 2011 National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) conference I had the privilege of serving on a panel with Patrick Ledesma, Nancy Flanagan, and Jenay Leach.  The topic under discussion was how teachers can influence policy.  Amy Dominello blogged about our panel on "SmartBlog on Leadership" and her post was picked up by Accomplished Teacher SmartBrief.  What follows are edited excerpts from the prepared text of my remarks, which I stand by a year later:

The role of teacher leader is fraught with challenges.  In my union work, it became apparent to me that there are at least two different mutually exclusive definitions.  First, is the definition some superintendents have: a teacher leader is a sort of non-commissioned officer in the chain of command of a district, with a role of carrying out policies determined by higher-ups.  This traditional role includes roles like department chair, and service on district committees, the latter because in a top-down hierarchy administrators merely use committees for cover, so they can lend a sort of pretend legitimacy to their decisions.

The second definition is exciting and cutting edge: teachers having an actual voice in making local, state or national policy.  This idea might seem self evident to those of us who are practitioners, but in reality it is quite alien to the policy process in many places.

The traditional venue for this role, and the one in which I cut my teeth, is the union.  Negotiating and administering a collective bargaining agreement gives one a voice in local policy.  Joining with others in state and national organizations which lobby for wider policy and legislation creates a collective voice.  In the current environment, with public sector unions under serious and sustained attack, union activism is fluid and challenging.

One thing which school districts and unions share is that they are hierarchical organizations.  The bureaucrats who live farther up the hierarchical food chain have a significant advantage when it comes to policy: they can spend all their time working on it.  Those of us with classrooms live with the joy and challenge that the best hours of our day are spent with students.  Any time or thought that we have for policy or politics comes out of our hides or out of the hides of our families and relationships.  I can say this from personal experience – my union work is unpaid.  Each cycle of negotiations comes at a personal cost of 200-300 hours of my personal, unpaid time.  That doesn’t count grievances, trainings, rep and executive council meetings, Regional Bargaining Councils (I have 3 to attend), meetings with the superintendent, or, now, my work on the VT-NEA Board of directors, which requires a Saturday each month.

I’m not saying this so that anybody feels sorry for me – I love the challenge of this work.  But it does give me a clear eyed view of the very real impediments to the development of effective teacher leadership in the best sense.  People go into teaching because they want to work with kids.  This we all know is an all -consuming passion.  On top of this teachers, legitimately, need to tend to families and relationships.  We are human, and we cannot sustain ourselves without love from friends and family.

When I challenge a colleague to step up to a leadership role in our local, I do this with trepidation because no one knows better than me the human cost of what I am asking them to do.  On the other hand no one knows better than me the absolute necessity of accomplished practitioners taking a role in the governance of the educational enterprise.  As a leader, I am stuck between human empathy for my colleagues, and the enormous peril of my own empathy.

And this brings me to another thing that I learned:  the three meanings of leadership.  So far I’ve spoken in detail of just one: the ability to influence followers, the rank and file of an organization.  Influencing their behavior, inspiring them to try some little bit of activism – this is encapsulated by the term organizing.  I think this is what most people think of when they consider the word leadership.  But there are two other equally important aspects of leadership: influencing peer leaders, and influencing those leaders above you in the hierarchy of an organization or government.  These two aspects require different skill sets than organizing

Influencing peer leaders is the sort of thing I’ve done on the VT-NEA board, in regional bargaining councils, and in our discussions on the Teacher Leader Network Forum.  It was the bulk of the work in our debates on the New Business Items and resolutions at NEA Representative Assembly.  In a friendly environment like this it is about developing consensus around the best course of action, and it involves building relationships, and ability to be persuasive.

It takes place in adversarial contexts as well, such as negotiations and grievance hearings.  Insofar as a local president is the peer of the superintendent, there is an art here of refusal, of parrying, and of persuasion, each of which one deploys according to the problem.

Finally there is influencing top level leaders in an organization, those “above you” so to speak.  While a premium is placed on the “elevator speech”, I think top leaders are bombarded with these and probably have filters.  My own approach is two fold.  First I like to identify the people who advise the leader in question and seek to influence those people.  Second, I like to identify those places I agree with the approach and send a positive message, in part by working for and actively supporting initiatives.

This second point is very important in my estimation.  In the present environment, the messages tend to be negative – opposed to what various policy makers are doing.  I believe however, that the policy landscape is subtler than that, and that people need to hear what they are doing right as well as what they are doing wrong.  Without positive feedback when they get it right, policy makers are flying on instruments.

As a Teaching Ambassador Fellow, and a Bernie Sanders style socialist, it was a challenge for me to find a point of contact with the Department where I could support their efforts with freedom and integrity.    Yet I did find one:  The Department under the current administration works to build the capacity of teachers to lead in the best sense of the word.  An example of concrete action that support teachers as real leaders was the Denver Labor-Management Conference, a high profile event designed to help teachers and their unions deal creatively and pro-actively with the current political and policy environment.  Unfortunately this event was over-shadowed by events in Wisconsin.

I would be the last to say that  efforts of this sort are perfect, or that the outcomes are satisfactory to all parties.  But I take it as evidence of positive disposition towards teacher leaders, and a willingness to build the capacity of teachers to participate in the policy conversation.  Encouraging engagement is in the spirit of democracy and helps to overcome the very real impediments to teacher engagement that I outlined earlier.

In my work, I’ve done my best to encourage the Department to build the capacity of teacher leaders and unions.  I think many people want immediate results, an impatience which is the result of the uncertainty of the political cycle.  Taking a longer view, an empowered and policy savvy teaching profession is the best route to better education policy, because policy will be rooted in the wisdom that is the product of actual practice.

That said, I tend to be shocked and saddened by the dearth of our most accomplished teachers in union leadership.  I was shocked at the antipathy of NEA delegates to NBCTs at the recent NEA Representative Assembly in Chicago.  I was saddened that of 124 NBCTs in the State of Vermont, only three of us were at VT-NEA Representative Assembly in March.  Taken together, these indicate to me that most union members have not experienced NBCTs as people who use their achievement as a tool to help others.  I find this very disappointing.

Those of us who are high achieving and have excess capacity have an obligation to our colleagues as well as to our students and families to lighten their burden.  At the same time, the rank and file of the profession needs to see that policy and engagement is simply far too critical to be left to “the other.”  Federal, state and local policies that encourage all varieties of genuine practitioner leadership and engagement are in the long term best interest of our profession, of grounded education policy, and, ultimately, fantastic student learning.

Teacher Negotiation Reform: Beating Swords Into Ploughshares

This is a cross posting from my friend Patrick Ledesma's Leading from the Classroom on Ed Week Teacher Magazine.  He was kind enough to let me guest blog.  I'm putting it here for readers who normally read my stuff on Education Worker.

The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) convened in Cincinnati last month, with a theme of harnessing the power of collaboration to advance student achievement.  I attended the last conference in Denver as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows, and had the opportunity to network with the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS), which promotes sound and stable labor-management relations.

Back in Vermont, in 2011 I was entering my fourth cycle as a negotiator and second as local president.  Our negotiations had always been protracted and contentious, requiring thousands of hours of teacher and school board member time.  The traditional process goes through a predictable sequence: bargaining, impasse, mediation, fact finding, crisis buildup, and, in rare instances, imposition and strike.  Mediation and fact finding employ private consultants costing thousands of dollars.  Boards often call on private attorneys to negotiate, the costs of which often exceed the amount needed to settle the economic issues.

This scenario is repeated dozens of times all over Vermont.  Each negotiation is for a small number of teachers by national standards, resulting in minor changes to “mature contracts.”  It is a time consuming and costly way to preserve the status quo.

Our previous negotiation had required at least 200 hours of each of the ten teachers on our team.  The board commitment was similar.  Rancor adds no value.  Unions, boards and administration should be partners in the cause of student learning, but are instead trapped in a ritualistic process.

I returned from Denver determined that our pending negotiation would be collaborative, and facilitated by FMCS.  It took months of persuasion – one board member could not believe that FMCS services were free.  Finally, a pair of skilled FMCS mediators trained both teams together in the techniques of Interest Based Bargaining. 

We invested in success. The results?

·         Zero dollars spent on a board attorney, mediators or fact finders

·         Settlement was achieved in 6 months rather than 18

·         Team members expending 60 hours rather than 200+

·         No rancorous crisis buildup

·         A labor-management committee to deal with issues as they emerge.

·         Respect between board and teachers, a result of “tough minded collaboration.”

Is this process reform sustainable? Can it become a template for our state?  An innovation of this year’s LMC is critically important in answering these questions: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants.  Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, presented.  Their teams highlighted work they have done to support local collaboration. 

Vermont sent a team of statewide leaders.  We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the collaborative work already happening at the local level.  I am confident that our state leaders found inspiration and practical ideas at the conference.

Process reform is not enough.  Sustainability depends on connecting to a greater goal: excellent student learning.  In Vermont, dealing proactively with contemporary policy challenges requires this focus.  Collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation, and become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools. 

The tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont is a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to the cause of great student learning.  Our children deserve no less.

Progressive unionism flexes its muscles at RA

On July 1, I introduced New Business Item #4 at NEA Representative Assembly.  It was supported unanimously by the Vermont delegation.  A team of fantastic leaders from the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) Caucus organized to support NBI #4, including Mary McDonald of CEC Illinois and CETT chair Maddie Fennell, who mobilized the entire Nebraska state delegation to yield microphones.

An all-star cast of union leaders spoke for NBI #4, including Massachusetts Teachers Association president Paul Toner, Montgomery County MD president Doug Prouty, former Fairfax VA president Rick Baumgartner, and Wisconsin State Senate candidate (and CETT member) Shelly Moore.

This is the text of NBI #4:

NEA will create a plan for presentation at 2013 RA to implement recommendation 9c on page 22 of the NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching report “Transforming Teaching” which reads: “Transform the UniServ Program, making UniServ directors advocates for educational issues to advance NEA’s professional agenda.”

The NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT) produced the policy brief “Transforming Teaching” with recommendations from real teachers on reform.  Recommendation 9 calls for NEA to “Address internal barriers to organizational engagement about teaching quality and student learning.”

The Rationale/background as published in RA Today is a follows:

The Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching provided recommendations from accomplished teachers which highlight that educational issues have come to the forefront more than ever before.  One of the recommendations from the report is substantial and actionable within the current budget.

Pretty technical stuff…. Why then, did it inspire the opposition to organize a floor strategy against it?  NBI #4 became a screen on which the regressive forces in NEA projected their worst fears.  The opposition did not listen to our arguments.  They simply let their imagination run amok.

While NBI #4 was defeated by voice vote, much was accomplished:

·         A substantial debate about progressive unionism occurred on the floor of RA, exactly the type of internal debate which a healthy union needs.

·         The entire body of RA delegates took notice of “Transforming Teaching”

·         The progressive leaders of the Association flexed their muscles and demonstrated a remarkable capacity to organize on short notice.

·         A substantial minority of RA delegates stood up on division and supported a progressive action.  I’m sure the NEA leadership took note.

·         9000 people heard about TURN and saw demonstrated the group’s excellent work.

For the record: here is the text of my speech introducing NBI #4:

While bread and butter issues remain an essential task of our work, in the 21^st century, unionism is shifting. We have the opportunity to take control of the quality debate more than ever before.   We see the link between controlling this debate about quality and our continued success in providing our members with professional pay, benefits, and working conditions. 

We need a Uniserv program prepared to support elected leadership at the local level in meeting 21^st century challenges.  Our Uniserv directors need detailed knowledge of the policy challenges we face as local leaders, and the ability to respond to those challenges – bread and butter and teaching quality, with a full range of contemporary technical skills.

In many places, local leaders tell me this is already happening.  The plan we are requesting will not change that.

New Business Item #4 has three parts:

1.       We are asking for a plan to be brought to the 2013 Representative Assembly.

2.       We are asking that plan to address professional development for Uniserv directors to support our locals on issues of education quality and leading the profession.

3.       We expect that plan to align the Uniserv program to the NEA vision and the needs of our local and state affiliates to take the lead on teaching and learning.

Many of us are encountering challenges to the survival of our union and the well being of our members.  We request NEA create a plan of action for Uniserv professional development and report back to next year’s RA, so that our local and state affiliates have the support they need.

Please support New Business Item #4. 

Update, state caucus positions on NBI #4:

Support: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin

Support - leadership: Maine

Oppose: District, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada

Oppose - leadership: New Jersey

Refer - Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana

No position: California, Delaware, Federal, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia

Awakening a Sleeping Giant

NEA vice president Lily Eskelsen's Netroots Nation keynote last night addressed the attacks on NEA.  She spoke of how we are on the front lines, because eliminate us, and the 1% takes away the largest single institution defending the middle class.

I saw this coming years ago.  I always believed that my union should be much more proactive in reaching out and embracing the aspirations of other working people, even if that occasionally meant compromising some of our institutional priorities.  I believed that vigorous action when others, such as private sector unions, were the front line would protect our union. 

Too late.

This why I have always had an interest in progressive causes and have tried to learn from leaders of other unions. It’s why I provide as much support as possible to groups like the Vermont Workers Center.

There is a tension between my interest in collateral circulation with other activists and my union's need for control.  In internal conversations concerning member engagement one point always stands out:

The problem with membership engagement is that you end up with....engaged members.

Engaged members make mistakes.  Engaged members may not have enough experience because they haven't had a chance to make mistakes.  They may do things that contradict the leadership, either accidentally or on purpose.  But if they just pay other people to be activists, they never learn how to be active themselves.  Lurking in the background: an awakened membership may well make different demands on its own leadership.

In order to have a truly engaged and effective membership, union leadership and staff have to give up control.  Engagement is the only recourse in the present crisis.  The equation looks like this:  There is a tradeoff between institutional control and member engagement.  Member engagement is the last, best source of power in the current struggle.  For our union, therefore, survival involves giving up control.  That's scary for some people.

Real organizing means helping people to find their own voice, not teaching them to parrot yours.  What better group to do this than an organization of teachers?

Awaken a sleeping giant of engaged teachers.  It's the only way.

Follow NN#12

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....

Responsibilty, Autonomy, and Reform - NEA Style

I was invited by Larry Ferlazzo to comment on his Ed Week blog Classroom Q&A on “Transforming Teaching” along with Dennis Van Roekel and Renee Moore. Here are my remarks; I urge folks to read the original.

In "Transforming Teaching," the NEA recognized one incontrovertible fact: you cannot coerce reform. There is reform done to teachers (we've seen a lot of that lately), reform done by teachers (think NBPTS, CTQ or TURN), and reform done with teachers. "Transforming Teaching" calls for the latter: deep organic reform rising from within the profession with meaningful and realistic cooperation from other stakeholders.

Good reform is ultimately about changing teaching practice in order to achieve better student learning. Without the full force and participation of the teaching profession this simply cannot be done.

A couple of settlements ago, our school board demanded and got a 7.5 minimum hour day. Administration immediately designated that the time before and after school as "collaboration time" and created uniform start and end times at all schools. In my school there was widespread resentment over what one teacher called "forced collaboration." People watched the clock. The minimum became the maximum. The scheme backfired, producing far less collaboration than might have occurred by creating a great climate where people want to stay and collaborate because they love their jobs.

This story illustrates principles of human psychology and group dynamics. Multiply that by three million, the size of the teaching profession in the United States. You can't do it to us, as satisfying as that might seem at times; you have to do it with us.

The NEA recognized the psychology of the teaching profession by forming the Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching, a group of master teachers charged, among other things, to tell NEA a few things it did not want to hear. What emerged is a picture of systemic reform by and for teachers to elevate teaching into a true profession.

"Transforming Teaching" calls for real reform by demanding the conditions that create great teachers: professional responsibility and collaborative autonomy. Notice that I said responsibility. Much has been made lately of that fact that there is no word in the Finnish language for accountability in the sense that we use it in American education. If we aspire to the level of the best performing systems we need to embrace an essential principle that drives these systems: collective responsibility.

Yes, "Transforming Teaching" makes demands on other stakeholders: on the unions and their professional staffs, on the US Department of Education, on legislatures, and on school districts. But read the document closely - given professional responsibility, we teachers are far harder on ourselves than any outside entity. Why? Because we work for and with kids and our lives are better when their lives are better. Teachers live reform and are the ones who must ultimately create it.

"Entrenched Job Security"

A friend of mine recently wrote:

"For other contexts, staying in the classroom may the best option- teaching has lots of perks that are often underappreciated- relative stability when compared to other job options based on education/experience, shorter work year, decent benefits, and again- entrenched job security despite what many actually perceive...."

"Entrenched job security" is a necessary feature of the sort of deferred compensation schemes historically employed in civil service.  What "entrenched job security" really means is robust due process, i.e. one can only be fired for just cause related to actual performance, not because you are the wrong race, you didn't give the school board chair's daughter an A, a younger teacher would be cheaper, or the superintendent's niece needs a job.  I am willing to talk about ways that due process has become too robust, but I strongly believe that due process and seniority protections are absolutely necessary corollaries of the single salary schedule.

As I've written before, we have a system that provides civil servants with the greatest rewards in terms of top level salaries and dignified pensions in exchange for longevity.  There's a whole raft of assumptions built into this system, but in the final analysis, it is what it is.  Unless you have a reasonable expectation that you can make it to retirement in your chosen profession, a single salary schedule is not worth the paper it is printed on.

Another historical thing to remember is that government employees and their unions have tended to opt for pensions and benefits at the expense of salaries.  If these seem generous, it is because we have paid for them with cold hard cash.

In the current environment it would be a lot safer to take the cash up front.  We are governed by a kleptocracy that is seeking to steal the deferred compensation not only of teachers, but of all manner of government workers.  Our due process rights, pensions and benefits (thanks to our unions - not just NEA and AFT but all public sector unions) are a slap in the face to private industry, and create pressure for decent treatment for all workers.  Very inconvenient for the 1%....

To be clear, I am not a fan of the single salary schedule, and it's accompanying arrangements. I would prefer to explore different compensation methods.  The political/economic problem is that these methods would accelerate payment of wages and benefits from the future to the present.  Let's face it - it's far cheaper to be unfair to people, to get rid of expensive employees, and to steal their deferred compensation, than it would be to create rational strategic compensation plans that pay people today for the work they do today.

The recent release of test data in NYC is part of an ongoing effort to flush the system of mid-end career educators.  People are not excrement; they should never be flushed.  We must be offended when people are treated this way, not because we are fellow teachers, but because we are fellow human beings.  Even if we were not teachers, I would claim we would have a moral obligation to be offended by what is at best basic unfairness and at worst criminal contempt for human beings.

Teacher compensation is not bunch of "perks" and rights that other people do not have.  That plays right into the so-called "reform" narrative playing out in Indiana, Wisconsin, NYC, etc.  Rather, we have earned these things.  Want to talk about other ways of doing business Mr. Politician?  I'm all ears.  But we're not going to fund it through wholesale theft.  Crime is un-American - at least in the America I aspire to.

Celebrating Labor-Management Collaboration: The Literature Grows

A year ago, I began a bibliography of every web and print resource I could find on the subject of labor-management collaboration.  I was worried that heading into the U.S. Department of Education’s Labor –Management Conference in Denver, participants would lack the background and context to deal with the ideas and practices they would encounter.

Initially, I did only web resources, and could find just seventeen.  It was a sparse literature.  Over the ensuing year I added several books, including classics like United Mindworkers and Getting to Yes.  I added the research we performed for the Denver LMC.  It still looked pretty sparse to me.

Suddenly, there has been a small, but exciting explosion of publications on the subject. 

Recently, Education Week published a special report on labor-management collaboration entitled “Joining Forces: Moving district-union negotiations beyond bread-and-butter issues”.  With this report, labor management collaboration has gone mainstream.  But leading up to this breakthrough, there have been several other publications of note that have significantly expanded the literature.

“Improving Student Learning Through Collective Bargaining” By Adam Urbanski (Harvard Education Letter May/June 2011) Urbanski, the brilliant local president of the Rochester, NY NYSUT affiliate,  and cofounder of the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) writes of the use of continuous  and expanded scope bargaining to promote student learning.

SRI International and J. Koppich & Associates published “Peer Review: Getting Serious About Teacher Support and Evaluation”  This paper reaches three important conclusions based on in-depth analysis of two established Peer Assistance and Review (PAR) programs in California: 1) Peer support and evaluation can and should coexist.  2) PAR is a rigorous alternative to traditional forms of teacher evaluation and development. 3) PAR leads to better collaboration between districts and unions.

The NEA Today Summer 2011 issue had a cover story entitled “Change Agents: Union led collaboration is driving success in schools across America.”  The story profiles several locals which employed the traditional levers of unionism to benefit student learning.  I was particularly struck by the story about the Dayton local employing the grievance process to acquire textbooks for special needs students.  This aligns with John Wilson’s call for use of expanded scope bargaining to achieve social justice in his farewell speech at the 2011 RA in Chicago.

Richard Elmore’s I Used to Think….and Now I Think is a brilliant meditation on policy by 20 leading education reformers.  Among the many wise and provocative essays two stand out with regard to the subject at hand:

Brad Jupp’s “Rethinking Unions’ Roles in Ed Reform” takes on union reform from a systems perspective.  Jupp, who as Denver Classroom Teachers Association lead negotiator was one of the architects of Denver’s ground breaking ProComp strategic compensation system, tackles the issue of union reform from a systems perspective.  He writes, “If we are to see teacher union affiliates take a leading role in improving our schools, we must begin to ask some questions about how they are designed.”  He posits that unions are well designed to “get the results they are presently getting.”  Several pointed questions encourage repurposing unions to support the success of the overall educational enterprise: great student learning.

Mark Simon, former president of the Montgomery County MD NEA affiliate, and a TURN leader, contributed “High Stakes Progressive Teacher Unionism.”  He writes, “Teacher Unions have a responsibility to advocate not just in the narrow self-interest of their dues paying members, but in the public interest, from a teacher’s perspective.”

But Joining Forces really excited me when I saw it this month.  Here is a national education policy newspaper highlighting the difficult work successfully pursued by unions and districts across the country.   From New Haven to Memphis to Los Angeles and Lucia Mar , CA, the articles highlight unions and board as they grapple with the art and science of collaboration, wrapped around tough issues like Value Added Methods, the Teacher Advancement Program, and new forms of compensation.  Included is a great introduction/overview and a timeline.  This is a must read to get the history and flavor of Labor-Management Collaboration.

Oh yes - hot off the presses: Transforming Teaching: Connecting Professional Responsibility with Student Learning - 2011 Report.  The NEA Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching (CETT) just published their report chock full of union reform recommendations.  More on that later.

Last February at the Denver LMC Arne Duncan spoke of igniting a movement that would make labor-management collaboration the norm.  Speaking as a union leader, on the subject of labor-management collaboration I support the Department of Education - and the CETT.   The current wave of significant research and publication leads me to believe the vision is getting traction.

What other publications should I add to this list or to my Union Reform Resources Page?