Contract negotiations with the union representing your district’s teachers are likely to open with a sensible-sounding proposal from a PSEA (or AFT) negotiator: “Let’s agree not to negotiate this contract in public. Our initial proposals, any suggested compromises, and tentative agreements should stay in this room. We’ll tell the media nothing until we have something definite to announce.”
The main reason I started this blog is to persuade more school boards to just say “No” to that sensible-sounding proposal.
Pennsylvania law makes the negotiations process not only adversarial but unavoidably political. The union’s legal ability to close down schools is a potent weapon – one granted to no other private interest group involved in public education. Union negotiators can frighten the public with strike threats while simultaneously appealing to the public’s appreciation of education and respect for teachers as individuals. But if dozens of teachers show up at your public board meetings with hand-lettered signs and carefully scripted sound bites, you’d better believe that they’re negotiating in public, even if they never mention a single specific contract demand.
It should go without saying – but I’ll say it anyway – that it would be wrong to publicize sidebar comments, trial balloons or comments made orally during any negotiating session. The public is entitled to know only each side’s written proposals – what the union is demanding and what the board is offering. By all means, negotiate quietly and calmly, but if you give away your ability to explain, compare and contrast your board’s position with that of the union, you’ll be out-negotiated in the one arena that ultimately matters – public opinion. As the finance director of a western Pennsylvania district whose board retained public support through more than one strike strikes puts it: “The union holds most of the high cards. Your only ace is information.”
Although this blog’s focus is on transparency in contract negotiations, mainly in Pennsylvania, I expect us to address other issues. “Transparency” is not just a tactic, and it’s more than compliance with “open records” laws. Most of us understand it as an ethical imperative for public officials. In that spirit, I hope that this blog can both promote informal dialogue among school directors and, over time, become a reference archive of “best transparency practices” (e.g., links to web pages that communicate complex issues to the public effectively).
