What goes around, comes around ... Last week, as I was debating the former school superintendent of one of our largest cities on schools, I suddenly felt as though I had stumbled into a time warp. I was back in the early '60s, in the midst of one of those debates about whether or not teachers and other public employees had the right to engage in collective bargaining and, if they did, what this would do to the balance of power.
As you may remember, people who questioned this right talked a lot about how inappropriate -- perhaps even illegal -- it was for government and its agencies to bargain or enter into contracts with employees. If they did, the argument went, public employee unions might be making public policy instead of the elected representatives of the people. And teacher unions, not school boards, could be running the schools.
Well, it's been nearly 30 years since collective bargaining in the public sector became a reality, and we know what happened - and what didn't. Employees have negotiated salaries and working conditions they've gotten some work rules changed and set up an orderly way of handling grievances. And stronger teacher unions have emerged, which work with the school boards on some issues and fight them on others. Nevertheless, public officials still run the government, and school boards and superintendents still run the schools.
But this lesson of history -- that shifts in power can change institutions without destroying them -- was lost on my opponent. He was showing blowups of various contract clauses that allow teachers to share in school decision making and trying to convince our audience that this was worse than setting loose the bubonic plague. With shared decision making, he said, school managers would no longer be able to manage because they would have to get the approval of the people they used to boss around. Of course, this was all theoretical stuff He couldn't actually show where shared decision making in any of the school districts that practice it had reduced the management of the schools to chaos. He didn't have any bodies to show.
The private sector's successful experience with participatory decision making doesn't bear out his predictions of disaster, either. It does, however, suggest why some school administrators might be uneasy at the idea of teacher involvement in decision making.
Many businesses, here and abroad, have adopted a management style in which employees work together in autonomous teams that are responsible for the production process and quality control and in some cases for the design of the product. People in top management favor this approach because it increases productivity and quality. And employees, who are bored and tired of being treated like idiots, welcome the chance to make a greater contribution to the manufacturing process.
Predictably, the biggest opposition to these private sector reorganizations is from middle managers. Teams like the ones I've described don't need a boss to tell them what to do, so lots of middle managers are cut. The rest might be able to earn a position of authority in a team, but they will not be remote managers. They might be able to lead, but they won't be able to dictate. And that's really the point of most administrators' objections to school reform proposals that involve sharing power with teachers. Unlike middle managers in a restructured company, the majority of administrators don't have to worry about losing their jobs. Almost all of them were teachers, and they could become part of a team in a restructured school -- perhaps even its leader. And some are so accustomed to the present way of doing business that they honestly don't see how schools could go on if administrators were not there to give orders. But for many, the loss of power is the real issue.
These administrators almost always couch their objections in the rhetoric of strong leadership: "The only way to run a school is to tell people what to do and make sure they do it." This, of course, is the authoritarian brand of school management. But objections to sharing power with teachers come in many variations.
For instance, in Rochester, NY, a couple of years ago, the administrators' association sued the school district and the Rochester Teachers Association/ AFT over the mentor-teacher program, one of the cornerstones of Rochester's school restructuring effort. Administrators claimed that the program, in which ace teachers act as mentors to beginning teachers, was taking over their duties and that teachers were not qualified to act as mentors. But the State Supreme Court couldn't find the administrators had been damaged in any way or that teachers weren't qualified for the role and dismissed the case.
It's human to resist change; and it's human to fear a change in which you feel you will lose something, especially power. But administrators aren't going to be able to hold on to their traditional roles, no matter what, because the public is fed up. Our school system is in terrible shape; the demands for change are tremendous. Like everybody else, administrators have a choice: Embrace change or find they have no power left to fight over.