Reframing the conversation on contracts

On Friday I attended the Education Writers Association annual conference. Among the sessions was one on teacher contracts led by Tim Daly of the New Teacher Project. Some of the basics are not surprising: collectively bargained contracts are somewhat likely to force schools to hire teachers they don’t choose, shuffle poor performing teachers from school to school, and treat new teachers as expendable. Restrictive or confusing contracts also exacerbate the problem of new teachers choosing smaller or suburban districts simply because large urban districts hire so late.

Speaking to a room full of education reporters, he encouraged them to challenge the trope that teachers oppose meaningful contract reform and will live and die on the issue of seniority privileges.  In New York, for example, a new contract basically did away with provisions forcing schools to choose teachers based on seniority and bump new teachers first. And yet 90% of the union membership voted to extend the contract.  The idea that teachers would prefer a system in which neither they nor the schools they work in are able to make intelligent decisions based on personal preferences and talents simply doesn’t make sense.

So where does the idea come from? Daly said that historically the conflict is reported wrong. It’s framed as a labor vs. management issue, but it’s not. In fact, it’s a central office vs. school issue.  School bureaucrats and the unions tend to value a centralized process. It’s easy to manage, black and white, and avoids complicated decisions that can cause grievances to be filed, which is expensive.

Principals and teachers are actually on the same side. They want a process that allows schools and teachers to make good decisions. This is sometimes messy, but the net impact for both teachers and principals is better.

Well, guess who negotiates the contract? Not the teachers or the principals. The contract is negotiated by their central office representatives. Predictable results have been the rule, though recently some major districts have made some big improvements.

Interested in more specifics on various districts? The Fordham Foundation recently released a study of labor agreements in the fifty largest school districts. Chicago earns pretty good marks for its personnel policies, but lags behind in compensation flexibility and work rules. Download the study here.

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