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.

“We’re all smiling” is how the board treasurer and negotiator for the Crestwood SD (Luzerne County) announced after signing of a five-year contract with the teachers union last night.

It was announced back in August that the board and the union had reached a tentative agreement. But the board refused to say anything more until both board and union had voted.

After the vote the news story still provided no details, except for quoting board president Jerry Orloski that “overall it holds the line on salaries for the first year and also saves approximately $25,000 annually in health-care premiums.” My estimate is that the new contract has to cost at least $75 million. That guess is based only on old data filed at PDE. The Crestwood website posts no financial data whatsoever.

The district’s indifference to fiscal transparency earned it an “F” grade from the Sunshine Review Pennsylvania Project’s review of school district websites. (Disclosure: I’ve contributed to the Pennsylvania Project but never to individual district ratings. Until today I’d never seen the entry on Crestwood.)

Last spring the FBI investigated Crestwood on corruption charges, leading to at least one guilty plea on a bribery charge. According to published reports: Continue Reading »

Here’s a report I’m putting on my must-read list and expect to review here as soon as I can. It’s The Leadership Limbo: Teacher Labor Agreements in America’s Fifty Largest School Districts by Frederick Hess and Coby Loup. (I’m adding the link to the Fordham Institute site today.)

Here’s an excerpt from the review:

Fifteen of the 50 districts are home to Restrictive or Highly Restrictive labor agreements. Nearly 10 percent of the nation’s African-American K-12 students population attend school in the 15 lowest-scoring districts-making these contracts major barriers to more equal educational opportunity.

It’s easy for school boards and the public to fall into the habit of thinking that transparency in union contracts is important only because of these contracts’ costs to taxpayers. Even more important, when we write them badly, we’re limiting the futures of children. This is especially true of children from weak family situations, who’re even more dependent than most kids on the quality of public education.

OK, I owe the subject-line pun to a headline writer in today’s Wall Street Journal. But it applies to all board-union contracts, which lock in at least half of a school district’s budget, usually for several years.

According to a recent news item on Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County) negotiations, the board in that district recently saw the wisdom of transparency. The board seems to have originally agreed to negotiate in secret. About a month ago its negotiating team decided that was a mistake.

How might that happen? I know zilch about this particular situation, but the article says that the union is asking for a 6% pay increase and a five-year contract. Secrecy enables a union to make outrageous demands and stall for months. After a few months, the union team starts to complain that the board is “not negotiating.” Finally, if there’s no agreement, the union asks for fact-finding, which sooner or later results in making public the legal fiction of a “best and final” offer. That offer will usually appear at least somewhat reasonable, and no one except the negotiators is likely to know that the union has been insisting on a far less reasonable amount for the better part of a year.

Are boards above this kind of gamesmanship? No, but it’s harder for them to pull off successfully. It’s almost axiomatic. Whether you’re talking about a vending machine contract, construction bids or union contracts, whenever a private party and public officials negotiate, secrecy favors the private party.

Anyway, on October 14 the Penn Hills board issued a press release summarizing its own and the union’s offer. The union cried “Foul!”

The board may well have reneged on a handshake agreement. If so, that’s not admirable, but no public official should ever agree to that kind of deal in the first place. To repeat the WSJ headline that I’ll be hard put not to steal again: any contract that accounts for over half of a district’s budget is too big to veil.

News stories involving Pennsbury SD (Bucks County) may be worth following for the next few years. Simon Campbell’s web page Stop Teacher Strikes links to a database with the names and salaries of every public school teacher in Pennsylvania (as of the 2007-08 school year).

Simon must have decided that if all politics isn’t local, at least some of it is. He won a seat on the Pennsbury school board. I don’t know anything about that board’s overall composition, but it’s just gained a member with strong opinions and no hesitation about expressing them. And Simon will from now on enjoy (if that’s the word) an insider’s look at board business.

I tried this morning to catch up on one of the longer running labor disputes in the state, involving the Saucon Valley SD. After a second strike, the teachers are back at work, and a recent Morning Call article has a summary of the issues. It looks as if the two sides are very close to a final settlement.

Apparently, one of the last sticking points has been links between pay raises and graduate credits. Here’s the board’s proposed language. This is a substantive issue that deserves more attention than it usually gets. Teacher unions usually despise cyberschools for kids, but they love them when it comes to racking up graduate credit hours for themselves.

Actually, the whole notion that districts should be shelling out large amounts of money to pay for graduate credits is open to question. The Saucon Valley board wants to give credit only for courses that are part of a graduate degree program. This is understandable as a tactic for eliminating junk courses, but the link between graduate degrees and student achievement is probably non-existent — at least when the graduate work is in education. (There appears to be a positive effect when the courses are in teachers’ subject-matter fields, especially math and science.) For at least some links to the research see “Separation by Degrees” at the website of the Center for American Progress — a progressive (left-leaning) think tank.

This blog was hacked back in July. I couldn’t post anything with being told that I had first to log on some trashy site. When I tried to fix the problem myself, I managed to delete a lot of material, including about half of my own posts. The blog is now on a new server, but some “tags” and other references may include dead links. I apologize for that and will clean them up as I find them.

Yesterday was election day. Since I was one of only five candidates for four school board slots, I had an 80% chance of re-election if the voters chose by throwing darts. However they did it, I was re-elected (as were the other two incumbents on the ballot and one new member). So I’ll soon start my fifth term as a school director. It seems like a good time to get back on my soapbox here.

One of the things lost when I screwed up my online repair job was my “Transparency Honor Roll” — my list of Pennsylvania school districts that have done a superior job of posting financial information on their websites. Fortunately, the Sunshine Review has a more systematic approach than I had as part of its Pennsylvania Project. I intend to rely heavily on the work the Sunshine folks have already done and start my own supplement in a different way.

More soon.

Recent Pennsylvania Office of Open Records (OOR) decisions seem to me to imply that any citizen can get on demand whatever contract package a school board has officially offered to a teachers union during negotiations. But, as far as I know, there’s been no test case on this specific issue.

The Pennsylvania Right to Know Act says that public agencies, including school districts, bear the burden of proof in keeping almost any “record” secret — even if their authors intended for them to be read by only a few people. Although the law makes exceptions for several classes of “predecisional” documents — e.g., memos relating to pending lawsuits — the OOR has been whittling away at these exceptions.

Consider, for example, background data on a proposed budget. In the Unionville-Chadds Ford SD, a former school board member, Keith Knauss, wanted to see the current version of a budget briefing book he’d received when he was a board member. The district denied his request, arguing that the briefing book was predecisional. (Mr. Knauss’s disagreements with his local board, for which he is now a candidate, were the subject of an earlier post on this blog.)

The OOR rejected the district’s argument, partly because board members had mentioned the briefing book in a public meeting in support of the proposed budget — which no one doubted was a public document. The OOR added that the district could withhold specific material dealing solely with “strategy,” as distinct from factual data. (Knauss v. Unionville Chadds Ford SD, AP 2009 0443, 07/13/09.)

That logic could well apply to contract negotiations, which set in concrete at least half of districts’ annual budgets. Strategy memos preceding an actual offer are self-evidently “predecisional,” as are tentative, “what-if?” proposals made during negotiations. But giving a union a formal, potentially binding offer means that the board has already made a decision. If the union says, “OK, we accept,” the board can’t reply, “Hey! That offer we made to you was just a little predecisional noodling. How about we now offer you something less?”

Of course, the real point is that citizens shouldn’t have to ask the OOR for help in seeing for these kinds of contract offers in the first place. Boards should be posting them voluntarily on their websites.

The union membership in East Pennsboro Area SD (Cumberland County) rejected a fact finder’s report, according to a story in the Carlisle Sentinel. The board accepted the report by a 7-0 vote (two members absent). As usual the text of the fact finder’s report is enlightening. Reports like this are one of the few places where the public can learn what school contract negotiations are actually about.

The union wanted a five-year contract while the board, citing economic uncertainties, proposed three. The fact finder agreed with the board.

The big dollar differences between the proposals of the board and the union involve salary. The district was offering pay increases averaging 2%. The union was demanding 4.5% per year. On this issue the fact finder roughly split the difference, leaning slightly toward the union position. He recommended average increases ranging from 3.8% to 4% — which doesn’t sound too shabby during a recession. (He tilted toward the board on several other issues.)

The union chutzpah on graduate credits was almost breath-taking. East Pennsboro teachers now get pay raises for earning 45 graduate credits (without a masters), for a master degree, and for M+45. This is called “lateral” movement on a salary scale, as distinct from “vertical” movement based on seniority. The union asked for the addition of seven new pay increases for earning graduate credits. Under the union proposal teachers would get salary boosts after earning 12, 24 and 30 credits beyond the bachelor’s degree; 15, 45 and 75 credits after the master’s degree, and after earning a Ph.D. The fact finder recommended adding only one new increment — M+75.

The Fort Cherry SD (Washington County) has a clean, user friendly website.

The graphics on spending in the 2008-09 budget are clear, and the explanatory notes, which appear in boxes next to the charts, are helpful. (I found the data on PSSA results too colorful — distracting from content.) The explanation of the 2009-2010 preliminary budget is especially effective. I found it interesting that the budget access page provides an RSS feed for the 2009-10 preliminary budget — presumably to enable a district resident to be informed as the budget progresses toward final approval.

The annual Report to the Community focuses on test scores. It includes useful explanations of the differences among tests.