News
Needed: A Voice in Stuff That Matters

NEA members in California and Maryland push for a greater role in decisions that affect students' futures.

If you work for a certain kind of school district, you're probably fed up with top-down curriculum decisions based on fads, scripted teaching programs, powerless teacher committees, and a test-driven mentality that devalues classroom creativity.

Earlier this year, NEA affiliates in two states, California and Maryland, challenged this disturbing trend by seeking collective bargaining law changes that would give educators a greater voice in student learning. A report on this work in progress:

• During California's last legislative session, Assembly Member Jackie Goldberg (D-Los Angeles), with support from the California Teachers Association (CTA), introduced Bill AB 2160. This bill would have enhanced the state's strong teacher bargaining law, which now permits negotiations over issues such as health, welfare, and salaries; transfers and reassignments; school safety; class size; school calendars; and teacher evaluation.

  AB 2160 was a bold proposal to expand the scope of bargaining to include decision-making procedures for a comprehensive list of "professional" issues. Those issues included, among other things, the selection of course content, curriculum, textbooks, and instructional materials, and the development and implementation of local educational standards, professional development plans, and parent involvement programs.

  This cutting-edge legislation put NEA's Golden State affiliate way out in front of a national movement for change. That didn't sit well with a powerful lobby that wasn't ready for such change: every California management group from school board members and district administrators to labor-unfriendly newspaper publishers and corporate CEOs.

  Through a massive public relations campaign bank-rolled by the California Business Roundtable, the opposition derided AB 2160 as a "radical grab for power" by CTA officials, predicting it would shut classroom teachers and parents out of decision making, "put the brakes" on education reform, quadruple collective bargaining costs, and "create a hostile environment" in school districts.

  For those who know anything about the mutual, give-and-take nature of collective bargaining, these wild charges are simply stupefying.

  CTA twice accepted bill amendments to answer the opponents' objections. The final version of AB 2160 called for "academic partnerships" at the district level to reach "binding agreements on the substance" of professional issues, while guaranteeing teacher participation in decision making, a substantive role for parents, and safeguards for the separation of decision making on professional issues from the collective bargaining process.

  But despite a strong CTA grassroots lobbying campaign, AB 2160 sponsors fell six votes short of those needed to advance the amended bill, and legislators shelved it.

  "We were surprised by the mean-spirited, nasty, anti-union rhetoric directed at CTA, the bill, and its sponsors," says CTA President Wayne Johnson. "This response told us a lot about the battles ahead."

• While CTA members dust themselves off and plan for the next campaign to expand their professional voice, they can draw inspiration from NEA colleagues in Maryland, who last spring gained legislation that moves their education bargaining law much closer to California's gold standard.

The Maryland State Teachers Association (MSTA) won passage of Senate Bill 233, which expands the scope of teacher negotiations beyond pay and working conditions to any "other matters that are mutually agreed to by the employer and employee organization."

These "other matters" can involve absolutely any issue from curriculum to student discipline, with the exception of class size and the school calendar. But the new law does provide latitude to bargain over student-teacher ratios, classroom support, and the number of days in the school year.

Equally important, the law extends bargaining rights for the first time to education support professionals on Maryland's Eastern Shore--who endure lower pay and far fewer rights than counterparts in the rest of the state--and gives all Maryland ESPs the right to bargain for due process in discipline and dismissal.

MSTA waged a comprehensive two-year campaign to pass Senate Bill 233, encountering many of the same objections as CTA, right down to bogus charges that the legislation was a "grasp for control" by union officers and would shut parents out of contract talks.

But MSTA members stood their ground, arguing, among other things, that increased teacher participation in professional decision making doesn't equate to a dilution of authority, and that Senate Bill 233 would promote curriculum "stability."

"It seems every time we change superintendents, we change curriculum," Calvert Education Association President Ann Brown told legislators. "We do not object to change, [but we do] object to the complete overhaul of the educational system, throwing out what teachers have worked so hard to put together."

MSTA's convincing arguments won some impressive allies, including the governor and lieutenant governor, more than 100 bill co-sponsors in the legislature, and a majority of the State Board of Education, which regulates teacher bargaining.

MSTA Vice President Clara Floyd says member education on the need to expand bargaining rights and grassroots lobbying made all the difference.

"Legislators had to understand that this is more than just a 'union' issue--it's a member issue," Floyd stresses. "It impacts both student learning and the retention of quality educators."

--Dave Winans

For more on the California Teachers Association's campaign to give teachers a voice in their profession, go to www.cta.org/cal_educator/v6i6/ feature_teachers.html.

Life Without Bargaining: "An Awful Way To Live and

If you live in a non-bargaining state, talk in California and Maryland about expanding the scope of collective negotiations might be pretty frustrating.

During this year's NEA Representative Assembly, Texas delegate Michael Miller worked hard to educate colleagues from bargaining states about the reality of working in a state where nothing is negotiable.

"We're handed a one-page 'contract' each May with no dollar amount--until the budget is set," says Miller, a reading specialist and NEA local affiliate president in the Grapevine-Colleyville district, near Dallas. "And we're not sure what our benefits will be in the next year because of the possibility of a financial crisis."

Even without legal negotiating rights, Miller works hard to represent his members, "teachers who do really great work with kids." A while back, he even convinced his superintendent to create a pay scale that rewards the experience of veteran teachers.

But good working relationships with administrators aren't enough. Educators need the right, set in law, to bargain a binding, collective agreement.

In Missouri, another state without a bargaining law, "nothing is binding," says Peggy Cochran, executive director of Missouri NEA (MNEA). "A school board can change any condition under which we work, except salaries, at its next meeting. Some of our largest local affiliates have bargaining agreements, but they could lose them tomorrow.

"It's an awful way to live and work," Cochran emphasizes. "Bargaining ensures you have a voice. That's why we've been campaigning for a bargaining law since 1970."

MNEA has plenty of NEA support. "We're interested in winning bargaining rights--then expanding them--wherever we can," stresses Lynn Ohman, NEA director of bargaining and member advocacy. "Without bargaining, you can't even begin to provide a consistent voice for local Associations in job security and education policy."

"If you just have 'rights' given to you by the employer, they could be taken away tomorrow," adds Wayne Johnson, president of the California Teachers Association, NEA's largest state affiliate. "You need a formal process, a voice in writing, and it needs to be in legislation."

--D.W.

Four Good Reasons To Give Educators a Voice

In too many school districts across the nation, professional or "education policy" decisions are the non-negotiable prerogative of administrators--due to court or arbitration decisions, weak or non-existent bargaining laws, or simply an age-old reluctance to share authority. Here, from California and Maryland, are four powerful arguments for reversing this disturbing trend:

1. Teachers need to be treated as the professionals they are. "In California, we have a teaching workforce in which everyone is a college graduate, 50 percent have advanced degrees, and the average experience is 12-1/2 years," points out California Teachers Association President Wayne Johnson. "It's just ludicrous for teachers to have that education and experience, yet have no say over the curriculum, textbooks, and things going on in their classrooms!"
2. Educators' know-how makes them central to a child's success. "The public understands that teachers are where the rubber hits the road," says Pat Foerster, president of the Maryland State Teachers Association. "We need to drive decision making down to the district and classroom level. Classroom teachers understand how children learn and have a huge responsibility for determining what works. To exclude teachers--and support professionals--from important decisions on needed programs and resources is totally backward and potentially damaging."
3. Take away the joy of teaching, and teachers will leave. "The joy of teaching has to do with working with kids, with the creativity of the whole thing, with seeing the light in students' eyes when they 'figure it out,' says California Teachers Association Vice President Barbara Kerr, a kindergarten and first-grade reading teacher. "If teachers don't take back their say in curriculum, there will be no more joy in teaching, and there won't be anyone left who wants to teach."
4. Teachers--especially the new ones--are already leaving. California state Assembly Member Jackie Goldberg, a former classroom teacher and school board member, reports that many new California teachers are leaving the profession before their fifth year. "Teachers are not quitting because of low pay; they knew they would be paid badly before they entered teaching," Goldberg says. "What [new] teachers did not know is that they would be treated like 'tall children' and be systematically denied any partnership in the academic decision making in their own classrooms."

--D.W.