A Wall Street Journal article describes a new contract between Harley Davidson and it employees’ union. Harley’s management was threatening to move its motorcycle manufacturing operations from its home base in York, Pennsylvania, to a new site in Kentucky. To prevent this the union agreed to workforce cut and increased flexibility for management to hire workers on an as-needed basis. The cuts at Harley were painful, but there seems to have been general agreement that this was the only way to save existing jobs. That part of the story has little relevance to public school negotiations, but I was struck by this paragraph:

The union also agreed to slash the number of job classifications to five from more than 60 and allow for much greater flexibility in moving workers from one task to another.

Although I’ve yet to meet a school board member who wants to sharply reduce the numbers of teachers as an economy measure, the public should be more aware that contract restrictions on ability-based assignments are likely to protect the weakest teachers at the expense of the kids they teach.

Here’s an example — with enough details changed to protect my sources. In response to parental and local employer interest, a school offers an especially appealing elective. Lots of students sign up in the first year, but enrollments drop sharply after that. The evidence points to a poorly qualified instructor with the necessary paper credentials and seniority, but a reputation for mediocre work in his non-elective courses. (But there’s nothing bad enough to warrant an “unsatisfactory” rating.) A highly qualified instructor is available to teach the course — one with a track record her colleagues agree is outstanding — but she can’t be offered the course because the mediocre teacher ranks her. In the end, the elective is dropped “for lack of demand.”

I don’t know if any school districts have as many instructional job classifications as Harley Davidson, and I think most of the credentialing rules are set by PDE, not local contracts. Some limits on management discretion help maintain instructional quality by preventing assignments based on favoritism. Others merely protect incumbents from competition from their own better qualified faculty colleagues. More transparency is contract negotiations would at least legitimize open analysis of the issue.

A negotiations story in Citizensvoice.com at the Wilkes-Barre Area Career and Technology Center has something all too rare: a link to the proposals from both the board and the union. According to the news article, the data came from the district, which the paper check for accuracy with the union.

The newspaper and the reporter deserve credit for including this. Unfortunately, it’s pretty hard to understand. What is the average person to make of an entry like “Column Adjustment,” followed by a bunch of numbers? It refers to a salary schedule that displays salary increases based on seniority and graduate credits earned, but many readers may not even know what it’s about. In any case, without the proposed schedules themselves, this gives no useful information.

The commendable effort of the newspaper to compare the proposals of both sides only emphasizes why we need clear, accurate ways to do that.

Paul Fisher, a member of the Northwestern Lehigh (Lehigh County) school board, has launched a blog entitled Pride and Promise. His opening post is a clear, calm summary of the status of his district’s ongoing contract negotiations. He also publishes the full text of a just-released fact finder’s report, saving his constituents from having to root around for it at the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board website.

It’s good news whenever an elected official decides to communicate regularly with the public. It’s great news when he or she provides such solid information, not personal PR or spin. Paul contributes regularly to this blog, so I can promise that his blog will be a terrific service to his community. Not incidentally, it’s also attractive and user-friendly. Paul has a background in graphics design, and that shows.

Bravo, Paul!

It didn’t take the Whitehall-Coplay School Board (Lehigh County) and the teachers union very long to reach a consensus after receiving the fact finder’s report on November 18, 2009. On Tuesday, November 24th, the board and the union voted to unanimously approve the recommendations. This mutual agreement “seals the deal” on a new 2-year contract, retroactive to September 1, 2009.

Only a few minor details were reported in the Morning Call’s article:

The contract provides for annual raises of 1 percent, plus salary step increments, which translates into average yearly pay increases of 2.9 percent. Under the pact, the teachers’ health care coverage remains the same.

Want to know more about the specific details?…you’ll probably have to file a Right to Know request with the district. The Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board (PRLB) does not release a copy of the fact finder’s report to the public, unless one party votes to reject it.

Jim Butt, whose new blog I mentioned last week, asks (in a recent comment) about incentives for more transparency on the part of school boards. I can think of no personal economic incentives for individual board members, and I’m not even sure that more openness brings any particular advantage politically. It probably does in some instances, but in others it may merely energize the opposition.

I think of openness as an ethical imperative. It’s also good strategy when it comes to contract negotiations, which is one of the three important functions left to Pennsylvania school boards. My own expertise is limited, but I’ve been impressed by books (and a few conversations) with Myron Lieberman. Dr. Lieberman began his career as a public school teacher and soon became a union negotiator. He negotiated on the union behalf for districts in California and New York (and once ran for president of the AFT). At some point he became convinced that the teacher unions had become barriers to serious progress in public education, especially in urban areas. He also concluded that they weren’t doing a good job of representing teachers as professionals — since their negotiating model is based on industrial unionism. In effect, he switched sides and became one of a very few people who has been a consultant for the AFT, NEA and a number of school boards.

One of his books, Understanding the Understanding the Teacher Union Contract; A Citizen’s Handbook, offers an excellent clause-by-clause explanation of typical contract language and its implications for a final settlement. It’s not exactly a fast read — more of reference work, just as the subtitle indicates.

A more informative general book, The Teacher Unions; How They Sabotage Educational Reform and Why, is both readable and enlightening. It’s polemical but not a rant. Lieberman isn’t in the least outraged that unions should represent their members aggressively. His tone is matter-of-fact.

I first read The Teacher Unions during a contested negotiation. When I hit pages 52-53 (in a chapter called “Bargaining with the NEA/AFT”), I wondered if Lieberman had somehow spent several months in Carlisle taking notes. It was as if the PSEA negotiator were following a script Lieberman knew by heart — which she was and he did.

Back to the question: are there real incentives for boards to be more transparent? Probably not, if a board puts a high value on avoiding controversy. What people don’t know has no way to become controversial. Yes, if a board has an educational and fiscal plan that the board realizes will need a unusual degree of public support — e.g., building a new high school, making the case for a tax increase above the Act I ceiling, or negotiating a more flexible contract than the teachers union wants. (There are things a union negotiator will fight for behind closed doors but won’t even try to defend in public — e.g., a health plan that mandates dealing with one named vendor. The public understands the value of competition in insurance.)

The North Penn SD (Montgomery County) deserves kudos for a web page posting the “final best” offers of the board and teachers union. (The same page has links to a long series of “board updates.” I haven’t read them, but it looks as if the board has made a good faith effort at transparency.)

[Note: My original version of this post incorrectly used "East Penn" in its headline. East Penn's impressive "dashboard" display must have shorted out too many of my brain cells. Thanks to Paul Fisher for catching the error.]

The North Penn site is very good. My only criticism of what I read is that the proposals — especially the one from the union — remain hard to understand. The board, to its credit, published the actual salary schedule it’s offering. This means that you can see exactly how much any teacher will earn in dollars, based on length of experience and graduate credits acquired. By contrast, the union shows its proposed increases in annual percentage terms (3.5%, 4% and 4%) “plus increment.” That “plus increment,” negotiations jargon for “seniority-based step increase,” would drive average cost up well beyond the percentages listed. And most readers may not understand that the percentages are (almost certainly) averages and can be rigged in any given year to maximize the size of those unspecified “increments.”

Obscurity is standard operating procedure for union negotiators when they’re forced to go public with their proposals at all. Boards shouldn’t go along with the game, and the North Penn hasn’t. The real neglect of duty comes from the Pennsylvania Department of Education — not to mention the PSBA — either of which could put some effort into standardizing clear and informative ways to present competing contract offers.

A sort of postscript: Apparently the union has been complaining that the board’s updates suggest an anti-teacher attitude. On that point a comment online from The Reporter nails it:

The information that the school board is sending out in the mailers is to inform the community about the true status of the teacher contract talks. It is not teacher bashing or teacher hating. It simply illustrates the difference in how much it would cost to cave in to the union’s demands.

Jim Butt, a new member of the Cheltenham Township SD (Montgomery County) board, has started a blog called — matter-of-factly enough — Jim Butt’s Blog. His focus so far appears to be personal and local, but any blog by a Pennsylvania school board members is something of a rarity. (At least that’s my impression. Links proving me wrong will be very welcome.)

Mr. Butt identifies himself as “an engineer, husband, father, manager, school volunteer, umpire, part-time gardener, no-time musician, and wannabe philosopher and economist.” Full disclosure: he asked my advice on one or two small points about about how to start his blog. That of course biases me in his favor. However, I know nothing about his politics or what he’ll have to say about his school board experience once he finds his voice.

His posts so far are thoughtful, if still diffident. Whatever he makes of his blog, a fresh board perspective is welcome. Those of us who’ve been on boards for a while are apt to forget how much needs explaining — and not necessarily accepting. As George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Thanks to Paul Fisher for this link to an outstanding example of school district transparency: the East Penn School District’s website.

Paul was a regular contributor here before I clumsily deleted his posts during a botched try to repair hacker damage to this blog. Paul writes: “Wow!! Very impressive use of technology to give all stakeholders a look into the complex (and sometimes shrouded) world of school finance.”

Yes. I haven’t decided exactly how to redo my old “Transparency Honor Roll,” which I also managed to delete. It praised school districts that try hard to communicate with their constituents, especially on financial matters. In any case, efforts like this East Penn (Lehigh County) merit widespread notice and applause.

Another long-running negotiation came to an end this week with the approval of a contract between the South Allegheny SD (Allegheny County) board and the teachers union. From the news article, it sounds like a reasonable settlement. The contract is reported as increasing salaries an average of 2.0% per year over a four-year term (one year retroactive).

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.