L.A. School System Can Learn From Dade County, Fla.

All minor and almost all major decisions about the way schools in Dade County, Fla., operate are made only when both teachers and school administrators agree on them.

The concept--if not the practice--of shared decision making has the enthusiastic support of many top school administrators around the country, according to Ray Tolcacher, president of the Assn. of California School Administrators.

Powerful support for both the concept and the practice of the Dade plan comes from local teacher unions such as United Teachers/Los Angeles and from national union leaders such as Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which helped pioneer educational power sharing.

The plan in Dade, which includes metropolitan Miami, was originally designed about five years ago by Pat Tornillo, president of the United Teachers of Dade County, and Leonard Britton, then school superintendent there. Britton became superintendent of Los Angeles schools 15 months ago.

After Britton left Dade, the exciting--and apparently successful--plan was improved further by his successor, Joe Fernandez, and the union.

It is more comprehensive than somewhat similar programs being used increasingly in private sector companies, such as Ford Motor, to give workers key roles as decision makers and reduce their roles as order takers.

But Dade’s program is dramatically different from other power-sharing plans in this country.

First, the county’s school budget is developed jointly by administrators and teacher representatives working from the same financial data in what they call a partnership of equals.

True, the participants can disagree on terms of the budget, and the school board, like management in most public and private sectors, retains final authority over it. This means that a teachers strike is possible if the disagreements are not resolved.

But veteran union leader Tornillo said: “We haven’t reached an impasse over the budget since we agreed to use the new system.”

The main reason for that is a provision in the plan making teacher salaries the highest budget priority--not among the lowest, as it usually turns out to be in the school budgets of so many communities, including Los Angeles.

Dade’s negotiated budgets are not always balanced. For instance, there is enough assured income to pay for only the first year of a three-year plan, including teachers’ salaries, that has just been adopted.

The new budget will boost teacher salaries by 30% over three years, and top-scale teachers--who now get $35,000 a year--will be paid $50,000 annually. Specially trained teachers with extra duties or responsibilities will go over $60,000. In Los Angeles, the top-scale teacher now earns $40,800, and teachers with special training and duties can earn as much as $44,950.

Based on their experience so far, teachers and administrators are convinced that the additional money they need will be obtained because their once bitterly feuding forces are now united and together they petition the Florida Legislature for the funds.

Also, teachers and administrators at the top level jointly make policies to enhance the “professionalization of teachers,” which generally means improving teacher performance and classroom efficiency.

And all that is just for starters. Even more innovative is the way the school district’s budget is spent.

Each school gets its share of the budget in a lump sum that is used to pay for almost all expenditures except basic salaries, which are determined in those top-level discussions.

Using what they call their School-based Management/Shared Decision Making Plan, the principal of each school and the administrative staff and the school’s union representatives jointly decide how to spend the money, subject to approval by teachers in the school.

Together, they decide how much goes for everything from textbooks, staffing and substitute teachers to maintenance, school construction projects and even utilities. They jointly decide school schedules and curriculum.

The power-sharing plan is so intriguing and successful so far that Shanker, the AFT president, says Dade union leaders and school officials are in demand as speakers across the country.

Tolcacher, speaking for California school administrators, is enthusiastic about the fundamental idea of shared decision making: “The best, most rational way for us to help our kids is to develop a non-adversarial, cooperative relationship between teachers and school officials.”

Despite this support, the sad truth is that few teachers in the United States have any real authority yet over school affairs, other than over children. Even the teachers’ authority in their own classrooms is limited because the way they teach and the curriculum and textbooks they use are still usually dictated by others.

The intelligent Dade way to run schools has been adopted in a meaningful way only in Rochester, N.Y.; Pittsburgh; Toledo, Ohio, and Minneapolis, and so far they haven’t gone as far as Dade. Many more school districts say they are seriously considering it, but in a much modified fashion that will give teachers less decision-making authority.

Unless the Dade plan fails unexpectedly, however, it and a few others like it around the country ought to be models for the nation, particularly in troubled school districts like Los Angeles, where teachers constantly battle decisions of administrators, who regularly challenge teachers’ competence and even their integrity.

This harsh adversarial relationship debilitates the entire system.