A couple of weeks back (November 6) the New Haven, Connecticut, board of aldermen approved a new contract between the New Haven city schools and the union, an AFT affiliate. The contract has been extravagantly praised by everyone from Arne Duncan, US Secretary of Education, to one of the New Haven aldermen, who called it “something of a miracle.” It got especially enthusiastic praise from Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT.
Thomas W. Carroll, president of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (a New York-based organization that supports school choice), offered a cautionary note:
Like many teacher union contracts, the New Haven contract preserves tenure, does not allow good teachers to get paid more than bad teachers, allows a minority of teachers to block work rule waivers favored by a majority of teachers, and makes no commitments to close any specific bad schools.
Education Week offered a useful summary, and the article there includes a link to the actual contract language.
Whether the contract is a breakthrough or a sham will depend on how various teacher-administrator-parent committees function. Meanwhile, I was struck by a process-related point in the Education Week article:
Officials from both the union and district said an unusual bargaining model in which reform issues were discussed apart from bread-and-butter ones helped get the pact finalized before a tight deadline under the state’s collective bargaining law sent it into arbitration.
My experience with contract negotiations in Pennsylvania (and what other board members tell me) is that they never even raise educational issues. I blame boards for this, not the union. Nothing bars boards from initiating discussions on issues like scarcity-based pay or what schools should expect in return for picking up 100% of the cost of graduate credits. The trick is to decide what issues are worth raising and how to do this. To introduce ideas only behind closed doors is to treat them as mere bargaining chips, but not to link them to a contract is to reduce them to academic seminars. Boards need to be thinking whether they expect too little from negotiations and how to open up the process intellectually, as well as financially.
