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

Teacher Voice and Unions: Rivals or Partners?

I'm a member of a teacher voice group, and a member of a union.  Well actually more than a member - an activist.  I value both experiences a great deal.  I struggle to bring them together.

The Teacher Leader Network Forum (TLNF), the granddaddy of teacher voice groups, has been a valuable community for me to talk to teachers across the country, and broaden my perspective on education policy and its impact on the classroom.  At the same time, as a union activist, I have my hands on levers to make that policy perspective influence local and state policy.  I see the two things working together, but I also feel a tension between teacher voice and teacher unionism.

The emergence of a plethora of teacher voice groups such as VIVA (Voice Ideas Vision Action), Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, and the Center for Teaching Quality (sponsor of TLNF) throw that tension into higher relief.  These groups tend to be nimble, low budget, and high tech - and very effective in developing a big picture perspective in participants.  The question becomes are they alternatives to the unions or are they complementary?

Unions theoretically are supposed to bring the voice of workers to the table.  They suffer some disadvantages in that task in education.  They are huge, expensive bureaucracies which become caught up in issues of institutional sustainability which often can obscure their original intent and purpose.  Their orientation to economic issues, while essential to public policy, obscures important professional issues, weakening impact and credibility.  The focus at the state and local level on the nuts and bolts of unionism, on the legalistic aspects of contract negotiation and administration, obscures the big picture.

In the best of both worlds, the union would cultivate the capacity of members to see the big picture, then marry that perspective to the nuts and bolts of policy making via collective bargaining agreements and legislation.  Unfortunately, engagement of a high capacity membership is not perceived to be in the best interests of the union bureaucracy.

In the best of both worlds, teacher voice groups would help teachers not just become adept at persuading the powerful, but actually become powerful themselves.  Unfortunately, the messiness of power is often treated as "unprofessional," as if we could somehow surf above the fray, pure and innocent and virtuous.

What if we thought of unions and teacher voice groups as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive?

I just heard of an effort to bring together a union and a teacher voice group in partnership.  Paul Toner, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, invited VIVA to build a teacher voice network in the gateway (smaller) cities of Massachusetts.  Toner regards VIVA as a partner who can build the capacity of the union by engaging teachers with interests beyond the traditional bread and butter issues of industrial unionism.  VIVA, for its part, partners with an organization with a robust capacity for making real impact in terms of access to the levers of power that can make the vision real.

There is a risk for both: an engaged membership may make uncomfortable demands on the union; the teacher voice group may have to descend from the ivory tower into the impure realm of political sausage making.  But the potential results in terms of great public policy, as well as the health and well being of both institutional partners, seem well worth the risk.

Rights: Use'm or Lose'm

It is one thing to have rights, another to have a mechanism for exercising those rights, and yet a third to actually exercise them.

On the first and second points, there is an active national effort to destroy our limited rights to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" (expressed in the first amendment) and due process (as in the fourteenth amendment aka just and sufficient cause.)  We as teachers typically exercise those rights through our unions and through an orderly grievance process spelled out in collective bargaining agreements, rather than avail ourselves of remedies available through the legal system. 

Yes, as teachers and public employees we labor under restrictions that do not apply to the general public, but historically we have had certain rights and protections pertaining to our chosen profession.  State by state, those rights and protections are being systematically stripped away, a death by a thousand cuts.

Both the rights (expressed through collective bargaining) and the mechanism for expressing those rights (a system of grievances and arbitration which sits outside the court system) are being abrogated.  My view is that this allows deferred compensation such as pensions to be treated as a piggy bank by unscrupulous politicians.  The disempowerment of workers facilitates our rightward lurch towards a capitalist/fascist dystopia.

On the third point, for those of us who have not yet experienced the cataclysm which is North Carolina, Wisconsin or Michigan, rights mean nothing whatsoever if they are not actively enforced.  Every act of meek submission to authority is another nail in the coffin of teacher voice.

Too many of us view teaching as apolitical, on the excuse that conflict will hurt our students.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  As government employees OUR JOBS ARE POLITICAL!  That is reality.  It goes against our natures, as the sort of human beings who enter a service profession, to embrace conflict.

The bottom line is that the conflict has embraced us.

It is not our fault.  It becomes our fault if we don't push back by whatever means are at our disposal.  Yes, some of those means are political.  The venues can be corrupt and scary.  Activism and leadership require courage - the courage to live with the consequences of your inevitable mistakes.

Those who would destroy our profession, "destroy the village to save the village," fail to realize that every act of disempowerment promulgated against educators, students, and citizens is a distraction from our core mission and a disruption of school culture and community.  Culture and community are critical to a successful education system. 

I don't believe we should be blaming teachers by complaining about their passivity.  This is a symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional and totalitarian political culture.  Rather, we should acknowledge the harsh realities of citizenship and government employment, and as compassionate leaders help nurture engagement. 

Could Ike Have Foreseen the Education-Industrial Complex?

In his farewell speech in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of the new military-industrial complex.  What he perhaps did not foresee was how that complex would become a paradigm for policy making outside the field of defense.  In the excerpt below I changed a few words, such as “military” to “education” and “federal contract” to “foundation grant”, and am struck by how Eisenhower’s prescient warning rings true for education in 2012.

"This conjunction of an immense education establishment and a large education industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the education-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge commercial and education machinery with our peaceful methods and goals, so that we may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-education posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.  In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary teacher, toiling in her classroom, has been overshadowed by task forces of researchers in foundations and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a foundation grant becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

The structure of the military-industrial complex has become a meme. It has recreated itself in the schools and universities of America.  A shadowy, revolving door world of government and quasi-government agencies, think tanks, foundations, corporations, universities, political and advocacy groups, and private contractors, form the ecosystem of education policy.  Oh yes – and unions, to be fair.  We need to call this out – it is the Education-Industrial Complex.

A self-reinforcing scientific-technological elite, detached from the everyday realities of the work, performs vast social engineering experiments behind closed doors in a cloud of group-think and acronyms.  Fueled by the endemic soft corruption of revolving six figure sinecures, as members pass easily from government to foundation to university, etc., this elite presumes to manipulate the masses of citizenry for their own good.

I have seen this with my own eyes.

It will take an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to deal with the consequences.  But where will that citizenry come from if their education is being engineered by people whose interests are money, status, and power, rather than democracy?

I Wanna Vote For This Guy For Something

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

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

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

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

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

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