How Things Have Changed in Two Years....

In November 2009 a statewide labor conference convened at the Davis Center at the University of Vermont under the auspices of the Vermont Workers Center.  The big news at the time was a contract that the Vermont State Employees Association (VSEA) was considering, a contract which was cutting state employees compensation almost 7%.  A group of us at the conference agreed to begin a statewide letter writing campaign to urge state employees to vote against ratification.

The letter writing campaign was not very successful.  Even though a dozen of us were writing to literally every statewide and regional newspaper, only a couple the letters were published.  It was an object lesson for me in the control exercised over the conventional media by conventional ideas.  My letterended up being published on the Socialist Worker website.  I wrote:

As a teacher, I foresee reduction in services that will reduce the effectiveness of schools, as stressed families are less able to support their children's education. The negative effects of the proposed VSEA contract will be felt in schools in the form of behavior problems, hunger, abuse and neglect, with less backup from state agencies. The bad public policy represented by this contract will diminish the value of our communities' education investment.

Working people everywhere will be dragged down by this contract. Whether public sector or private sector, union or non-union, the task of achieving fair settlements and livable wages will be more difficult with the example of this bad contract hanging over us.

Fast forward two years.  Yesterday a tentative agreement was reached between the state and VSEA.  According to VT Digger

Shumlin administration officials and the state employees union announced on Friday afternoon that they have come to an agreement on a two-year contract that includes the restoration of the 3 percent pay cut that was instituted two and a half years ago and a 2 percent pay increase in July 2012 plus a 2 percent increase in July 2013.

This sounds promising, but I’m withholding judgment until I have a chance to talk today with other labor leaders.  But here’s another important change of attitude:

Jeb Spaulding, secretary of the Agency of Administration, said “I think it’s a fair deal for the taxpayer and a fair deal for state employees, and the fact we can do it without an acrimonious process … is a benefit for everyone, and I hope a morale booster for state employees.”

The agreement marks the first time the three bargaining units – Corrections, Supervisory and Non-Management Units — and the state have not had to resort to mediation or fact finding as part of the negotiation process.

Spaulding said the administration projected ahead of time what it would cost to go through the longer, more typical, adversarial process and determined that if they spent months of wrangling with fact finding and legislative lobbying the result would have been the same. “We spent quite a bit of time trying to project where we would be with the acrimonious route,” Spaulding said.

“We don’t have time for that kind of a game that ends up using state employees as pawns, and it’s not the most courageous or productive way to go,” Spaulding said.

This is the Jeb Spaulding of the infamous Spaulding Commission that two years ago tried to destroy public pensions in Vermont.  How things have changed in two years.

I hope school boards everywhere are listening….

Today the Vermont Workers Center and Students Stand Up! is again convening a statewide conference entitled “Human Rights for the 99%”  In a couple of hours I’ll again be climbing into my battered Corolla for the trek to the Davis Center, this time for a much larger conference which already boasts over 550 registrants.

How things have changed in two years…..

• A VSEA contract that on the surface appears to be reasonable
• An administration that appears to get some of the basics of labor-management collaboration
• A statewide online publication, VT Digger, which is dedicated to balanced journalism and understands that a dialogue of diverse voices is essential to great public policy
• A reinvigorated labor movement, energized by Occupy, rolling back the assaults in Ohio, New Hampshire and Wisconsin, now rallying not just dozens, but hundreds at a statewide Human Rights conference

I look forward to joining with my fellow workers in solidarity to celebrate progress and plan next steps.  As a labor leader, I give up a lot of weekends for the cause.  But without my union, and without the wider labor movement I would not have those weekends to do this work.  It is a great privilege to be able to do so.

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.