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.
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
·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.
The second United States Department of Education Labor Management Collaboration Conference (LMC) is convening in Cincinnati this week. The theme is harnessing the power of labor management collaboration in the interest of student achievement. I attended the last conference in Denver fifteen months ago as a researcher, part of a team of Teaching Ambassador Fellows. In addition to becoming steeped in the theory and practice of labor management collaboration, I had the opportunity to network with several leaders from the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service(FMCS), which is an extraordinary organization that provides free technical assistance to improve negotiations outcomes at the local level. That learning has proven very influential in changing the tenor of our local negotiations during the last year.
There is an innovation of this year’s LMC that is critically important: the presence of state leadership teams, both as presenters and participants. Three states, Delaware, Kentucky and Massachusetts, are presenting. These states will highlight work they have done to support districts in collaborative work. Vermont is sending a team of statewide leaders, which I find tremendously encouraging. We need structures and supports at the state level to sustain and expand the good work in our state which is already happening at the local level. I am confident that our state leaders will find inspiration and practical ideas at the conference to help us move forward.
Mere process reform, however is not enough. Sustainability of our work ultimately depends on connecting to a greater goal: great student learning. Leaders at ED already get this; it is a theme of both labor management conferences. In Vermont, for us to take it to the next level, and to be able to deal creatively and proactively with 21st century education policy challenges, stakeholders need to refocus on this goal. Thinking about collective bargaining agreements must shift away from emphasis on salary and working conditions, management prerogative and taxation. Our CBA’s must become education improvement plans in which the traditional concerns become tools. When I think of the tremendous civic engagement which goes into our teacher negotiations in Vermont, I see a gold mine of effort and commitment which could be harnessed to our common enterprise of great student learning. Our children deserve no less.
Mapping State Proficiency Standards Onto the NAEP Scales: Variation and Change in State Standards for Reading and Mathematics, 2005–2009
I remember seeing Jesse Jackson on TV many years ago. He said something about language which has always stuck with me, “Don’t say ‘prevaricate’ when what you mean is ‘lie’.” What he was getting at is the virtue of simplicity and directness in the choice of words.
The word collaborate has been all the rage in education, whether we are designing “collaboration time” among teachers at a school, or achieving “labor-management collaboration” between boards, unions and administrators. It’s easy to lose track, when using a fancy term like collaboration, of the human dimension of collaboration, in all its simplicity and directness: people working together towards a common goal.
In education, there is only one goal that matters: great student learning. All other subsidiary goals must be paths to that single thing. Without that, you can collaborate all you want, but the result will be vestigial. Probably not a good use of anybody’s time.
In my experience there are two paths to labor-management collaboration, meaning leaders working together to advance student learning,
The first is charismatic individuals. There are extraordinary people out there who “get it” and can draw others into a home cooked approach to working together that works tolerably well. But there are three disadvantages to relying on charismatic leadership:
1.There aren’t enough charismatic leaders
2.Charismatic leaders retire
3.Charismatic leaders can block the development of other leaders
The second approach is to create collaborative structures and techniques within which normal people can operate. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Serviceis in the business of promoting this body of knowledge. Techniques include Interest Based Bargaining (IBB), labor-management committees, contract language which permits flexibility at the site level, and salary benchmarking.
I’ll use IBB for a moment, because it is probably the best known (if most misunderstood) technique. IBB is not a panacea. Rather, it provides a civil platform upon which other types of work can occur. It is virtually impossible to advance the cause of student learning when, as one of our veteran WCEA negotiators put it, “The two sides are shouting at each other through their spokespersons.”
Luckily IBB has a well articulated body of theory and practice, which makes it accessible to those of us who are mere mortals. People can learn to do this – it’s not a matter of talent.
The danger of this sort of structure is that it will ossify into something ritualistic, that people will value the process itself more than overall end goal of the enterprise. But, providing this detour can be avoided with a little “big picture” thinking (something that seems to annoy a lot of folks when pulling weeds) having a structure for ongoing conversations about local policy and progressive education reform creates sustainability.
Of course the ideal would be to have both the charismatic leadership and sustainability of structures to support meaningful reform. But if I had to choose, I’d choose sustainability. This isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. And there is an essential human dimension to the work which is not captured by a term like collaboration. Let’s remember, as flawed human beings, the advantage of structures that support us in working together.
I really appreciate the phrase “student learning.” Unlike “student achievement” or “student outcomes” it has not yet become a euphemism for bubble test scores. I appreciate student learning because it enables me to imagine a range of indicators for success in the classroom: true multiple measures.
What can student learning look like? When you leave my classroom after music class, I hope there is something you can do, think or remember, something that you couldn’t before you walked in. Perhaps you can perform a song, or you can play a simple rhythmically independent accompaniment; perhaps you made a connection to prior knowledge, or have deepened your understanding of some concept, such as tempo or dynamics, and demonstrated that deepening by using that concept to create a short musical piece. Perhaps you can finger a new note, or have just acquired some fluency between fingerings that leaves you feeling successful. In any event, my aspiration as a teacher is that you leave my classroom having grown in some small way as a creative person, as a human being.
I acquired this focus on student learning by going through the National Board Certification process. This demanding process requires around 300 hours of work at minimum. You produce a video portfolio and take a tough six part exam on your knowledge of content and pedagogy. It was in the portfolio process that my brain got reprogrammed to focus on student learning. I had a candidate support provider who helped me go over my portfolio with a fine tooth comb. At each stage Dan would ask, “What does that have to do with student learning?” Eventually it became my mantra. It has an annoying tendency to slip from my mouth during faculty meetings. Even if it doesn’t slip out, it certainly echoes around the inside of my brain.
As a union activist, I experience a similar echo effect inside my head as we operate the levers of union influence: negotiations, grievances and so forth. Our recent foray into Interest Based Bargaining is hobbled by the fact that we are not yet focused on student learning. Unlike districts that truly achieve Labor Management Collaboration, our contract talks still focus on adult issues, and not student learning. In the most progressive districts, the adults strive to make the collective bargaining agreement into an education improvement plan. In my district we have yet to cross that threshold.
In this sort of context, things like behavior and climate become ends in themselves. We do not want good behavior in our classrooms or great school climate because it’s nice to be nice to each other; we want it because behavior and climate are necessary preconditions to great student learning. We do not want great working conditions and competitive pay because teachers “deserve it;” again, we need these things to the extent that they promote conditions of maximum growth for students by creating supports for the best teaching and by removing distractions. Without that focus on the learning as the most vital institutional goal, the school drifts, and climate and behavior, working conditions and pay, deteriorate anyway.
Why is a laser-like focus on student learning beneficial to children? It is the best way that educators can express that they care for the students. If we expect that our classrooms will be incubators of intellectual, artistic and ethical growth, this indicates that we want the students reach their potential. We all arrive at school with baggage. To focus on behavior or pay as an end is to get mired in the baggage – all the reasons that we can’t treat each other well. To put the learning at the center of the institution is to put the student at the center in a truly profound way.
How does this express itself in actual classroom practice? In the planning process the teacher keeps standards and curriculum in mind. Not that binder on the shelf, but living curriculum which has been internalized. I strive to make the constant connection between the activities I select, and the things that are appropriate for a particular cohort of students to master. For example, I might look at a group of sixth graders and see that they need some conscious experience of 6/8 time, so I plan a series of lessons culminating in an opportunity for them to improvise and/or compose a piece of music in 6/8 time. I love using a creative act for assessment – to me, it demonstrates true understanding.
Without a focus on standards and curriculum, the focus becomes the activities themselves, and the question becomes not what the students will learn, but what the teacher will do to entertain in order to get through the day. An activity centered classroom is a teacher centered classroom.
It may seem ironic that the direction of institutional attention to student learning, seemingly external to the self, can have such a salutary effect. To lose that focus, however, is to lose the soul of the school, and cripple us in the muck of the psychic baggage we carry. To lift one’s eyes, to see that we can be better than we are, is to express faith in ourselves and in our students. From time to time we may fail, but it is in the relentless movement towards growth that the members of a school community best express their humanity. This is why we need to focus on the learning.
I appeared on CCTV on October 28 with Avery Book and local VT-NEA leader Amy Lester, who is vice president of the Vermont Workers Center.Just discovered it was online.I was incorrectly identified as an executive board member - in fact I am a member of the VTNEA board of directors.This broadcast speaks to the reasons that we need to reform teacher negotiations, and to the reality that we need to act in solidarity with others on matters of social justice.
Please view the video.The teacher negotiations issues start at around minute 10 for those of you in a hurry.The program happened over three months ago, but all the issues are still valid.
The United States Department of Education has opened the application process for Teaching Ambassador Fellows (TAFs) for 2012-2013. In 2010, I was a Classroom Fellow for the Department. I urge any teacher with an interest in education policy to consider the Fellowship.
The path of every Fellow is unique. We are urged to pursue our policy passions, which in my case was labor-management collaboration. I had applied for the Fellowship in part on the basis of my work as an NEA leader on the local level. As a veteran of several negotiation cycles, I was frustrated by the disparity between processes I saw in my two districts.
The Fellowship program looks for teachers with a record of leadership and existing networks to help facilitate conversations with practitioners. What I did not dream of was that participation in the Fellowship would lead to the exponential growth of my own networks.
I joined the Teacher Leaders Network Forum at the Center for Teaching Quality. This organization functions both as a virtual policy think tank for teacher leaders and as an action tank in promoting education change.
I became active in the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), where I get to meet like-minded union leaders striving to bring the union voice to great education policy.
I joined the Board of Directors of my state NEA affiliate, VT-NEA, attended RA, spoke in front of 9000 delegates, and helped organize a TURN caucus that supported the NEA leadership on the policy statement on teacher evaluation.
I attended the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards conference in Washington and learned how to do effective Congressional lobbying.
Finally, all this work led me to create a resource for other teachers interested in Labor Management Collaboration – Education Worker.
As the TAF Director Gillian Cohen-Boyer is fond of saying, “Once a Fellow, always a Fellow.” In fact, on the website it says that “For Fellows, the program adds greater knowledge of educational policy and leadership to their toolkits to contribute to solutions at all levels for long intractable challenges in education.” I hope I was of service to the department during my official Fellowship year, but I know they trained and prepared me to be far more effective than I ever dreamed going forward in what Mark Simon calls “advocating in the public interest from a teacher’s perspective.”
Every Teaching Ambassador Fellow’s journey is unique. The diversity of the group and the diversity of the leadership work of past and present TAFs is astonishing … but it’s also only a beginning.
There are better alternatives. Recent proposals in Vermont concerning changes to collective bargaining in Vermont are both unnecessary and counterproductive. Defanging participants by prohibiting union strikes and board impositions is patently absurd because it strips the collective bargaining process of any means to force the two sides towards each other. Replacing strikes and impositions with binding interest arbitration certainly has the potential to turn down the temperature, and it provides a means of bringing the sides together, but doesn’t get at the systems problem underlying the issue: the collective bargaining process we have in education was never designed for education.
I worry that legislative energy spent on tinkering around the edges of collective bargaining will be wasted. It has the potential to create tremendous controversy without any payoff in terms of improved public policy.
It will distract educators and boards from their primary task of producing great student learning.
The real next step in moving Vermont education forward via collective bargaining is reforming the process itself, reform that cannot be performed by legislative fiat. Even as government leaders consider legalistic solutions to the chronic problem of strikes and near strikes in education, local leaders in Vermont are creating real solutions based on decades of research in alternative conflict management, using proven practices that can save districts and union tens of thousands of dollars, improve school climate, and make collective bargaining agreements into education improvement plans.
The main tool in this effort is Interest Based Bargaining (IBB.) IBB is the term used for methods developed by the Harvard Negotiation Project in the 1980’s. The classic formulation is found in the well known book Getting to Yes by William Ury. IBB needs to be adapted for education, and those adaptations are well represented in the practice of leaders who gather in the Teacher Union Reform Network.
Best of all, Vermont districts and unions do not have to go it alone. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) provides free support and training to teams of local leaders who want to create a negotiation process that speaks to the benefit of students. In the Washington Central Supervisory Union we are using FMCS mediators to reform our process. While the work is in its infancy, the early results have been a revelation to participants.
In a traditional adversarial negotiation, the two sides exchange proposals. They take positions and use whatever power or persuasion they can muster to win for their position. The result is massively time consuming and ritualistic, burning up thousands of hours of time of teachers, school board members and administrators, time which would be better spent thinking about students. The process inevitably wends itself to impasse, when the two sides admit that they can’t get any further. With extremely rare exceptions, it then proceeds to mediation and fact finding. Generally, private mediators are used at this phase, at a cost of thousands of dollars both to the board and the union. In addition, mediation and fact finding can generate tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills for boards, and huge amounts of work for VT-NEA professional staff.
In worst cases, the two sides resort to their nuclear options; boards impose and unions strike.
And the result? Usually a handful of contract language tweaks and a little bit of new money on the salary schedule. These tweaks are often fraught with unintended consequences that then need to be fought over in subsequent negotiations. In my experience positional bargaining is an expensive and wasteful way to preserve the status quo.
What does the alternative look like? In Washington Central we contacted FMCS, who provided a team of skilled and experienced Federal mediators to train the board and the union together in the methods of Interest Based Bargaining . Our training took a full Saturday. A mediator attends each session to advise both teams and keep the process on track. There is quite a learning curve, as the deeply ingrained habits of mind and practice of veteran negotiators have to be replaced by new, unfamiliar ways of doing business.
In a typical session now, using IBB, the work looks like this: the sides identify an issue they want to talk about and define the problem to be solved. Then participants identify their underlying interests and determine which interests are shared by both teachers and board. So far, we have discovered that the two sides share most interests.
The next step is mutual brain storming of options to resolve the issue. People are encouraged to contribute anything they think of at this stage, without criticism. Sometimes an option which at first glance looks impractical contains a kernel of something helpful. Only when the collective creativity of the team is exhausted is the list of options judged by a set of mutually agreed upon standards. There are a couple of ways to do this.
The way we chose is a three part filter:
Is it feasible? For example an option which is illegal is not feasible. Therefore we do not apply the second test.
Is it beneficial? Does it help solve the problem? For example, a committee to further study the problem may not, in the absence of other action, be beneficial enough to become part of the contract. But if an option passes this test, we move to the third one.
Is it acceptable? This test asks whether the option under consideration violates any of the interests identified prior to the brainstorming of options.
An option which passes through all three of these filters can become the basis of a tentative agreement. A pair of negotiators from each side would then meet independently to draft contract language.
In many cases, the two sides simply agree that the collective bargaining agreement is the wrong tool to resolve the issue. This is quite normal – in an adversarial proceeding each side can arrive with a list of 20 or more positions, most of which never make it into the contract. Mutual agreement to exclude an issue is a far more efficient and civilized way to get to the same result.
As I said before, this process has been a revelation for the veteran negotiators in the room. One team member likened the old positional bargaining to “the two sides shouting at each other through a spokesperson.” Our new process has a group of sensible people from a variety of backgrounds working together to solve problems. The anger and rancor of the old process has been replaced by mutual respect, and the discovery that boards and teachers share most interests.
I am optimistic that the agreements that result from our IBB process will be superior to our traditional process. After all, a proposal in positional bargaining is simply an option attached to a set of interests. There is no guarantee that it is the best possible option, and positional bargaining provides very little space for the consideration of alternatives. A collective bargaining agreement is a means of creating local education policy. A better process is in the interest of great public policy.
Again, our process is in its infancy, and I write this with some trepidation. It may be that we reach a point, perhaps on economic issues, where positional bargaining is the correct tool, and we revert to that process. This would be normal, and it is the practice in many negotiations across the country. Nonetheless, I am confident that if we reach impasse having given IBB our best shot, the scale of the remaining disagreements will be greatly reduced, and the climate of our talks will allow a more civil result.
My other concern is sustainability: will this process outlast this particular set of leaders and this particular negotiation? The answer here has three parts. The first is how successful this particular group is in arriving at a new agreement. The more successful we are, the more sustainable the process.
The second is whether this process then becomes a template for other supervisory unions, and spreads across Vermont. If IBB becomes a cultural norm and an expectation in Vermont, sustainability becomes moot. This is part of the reason I am writing even as the result hangs in the balance. We need to do more of this work. I am committed to this vision.
Finally, while we can count on the continued support of the Federal government through the free services of FMCS, what supports will our state leaders provide those of us trying to reform process for the sake of great student learning? Or will our state government get distracted in desultory and destructive tinkering with collective bargaining laws, legalistic games that are irrelevant to grassroots reforms available to every community?
We do not need to change collective bargaining laws to use IBB and the FMCS. What is required is that teachers and their unions join with their communities, turn away from the mutually assured destruction of business-as-usual, and find reasons to do that business in new and better ways.
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. 
