Supervisors Can Wreck Power Sharing if They’re Ignored

Expecting teachers to feel sorry for principals or other school administrators when they lose their authoritarian roles would be like thinking that Russian peasants should have felt sorry for the Czar’s regime when it was toppled.

At least that’s the colorful, if exaggerated, simile that feisty Los Angeles teachers’ union President Wayne Johnson used to describe his lack of sympathy for school administrators who are being forced to share their decision-making powers with teachers and parents.

Teachers, like workers generally, may be pleased by the loss of power suffered by middle management in schools, factories and offices when employees are given a voice in the decision-making process. But it is easy to see how that shift in authority can hurt the egos, incomes and job security of those middle-management folk.

More important, when the power shift is made without adequate preparation, the move toward democracy in the workplace can be stalled, if not wrecked.

That possibility may be reduced in the new power-sharing system that will start in about two weeks in Los Angeles schools.

Under the contract won after a strike by the United Teachers-Los Angeles, teachers are electing representatives who will hold 50% of the seats on individual school councils that will make important decisions about the way that schools operate.

The remaining 50% of the seats will be occupied by parents and by appointees of school management. There will also be a similarly chosen central council of 24 members to oversee the local councils.

The councils will start in 100 schools that are open year-round and will begin in the remaining 500 schools in September.

Many principals and other supervisory officials say they are so worried about their prospects under the new system and by the way they have been treated already that they are seriously considering forming their own union.

That may be a useful move and would not be unusual. Supervisory school officials in most big cities have long had unions and have negotiated collective bargaining contracts with school boards with the help of the AFL-CIO’s American Federation of School Administrators.

But a local school administrators’ union could handicap, if not cripple, the exciting new system here if it were to adopt the strong negative feelings of Ted Elsberg, president of the administrators’ national federation, which opposes power sharing.

Elsberg insists that principals must have the ultimate decision-making authority in schools because they are the ones who are responsible and accountable for the way that the schools are administered. They should not be outvoted or turned into figureheads, he argues.

Johnson, the teachers’ union president, should have tried harder to find something other than the Czar’s regime to illustrate how he feels about making school administrators share their authority with teachers. But he is absolutely right in embracing the power-sharing system, which makes good sense for employees and management in all schools, offices and factories.

Unfortunately, supervisors are usually forgotten men and women when workers are given major roles as decision makers.

A new three-year study by the Work in America Institute warns that efforts to democratize the workplace often fail because the critical role of middle management is ignored.

Top management frequently puts great effort into employee training for the transition to power sharing but not much into supervisor training. That is a mistake that can easily persuade supervisors to oppose the change, warns Jerome M. Rosow, president of the institute.

Top managers must realize that by ignoring middle management when forming a power-sharing system, they make a self-fulfilling prophecy. As the institute report puts it:

“Supervisors are perceived as traditionalists, resistant to change, and they are, in truth, threatened by work innovations that restructure their classic roles. Therefore, management bypasses them, thus guaranteeing that they will resist change.”

Supervisors must be consulted at all stages of developing power-sharing systems, and they should not be expected to suddenly know how to delegate authority. That skill is rarely found even among senior executives.

The institute report agrees with critics of power sharing who complain that too often supervisors continue to be held accountable and responsible for results no matter how much authority they are required to delegate to others.

In Los Angeles, however, principals and other administrators are not being ignored, says School Superintendent Leonard Britton. The plan here calls for the sharing of authority as well as accountability and responsibility, and providing special training for the administrators’ new roles. They will be asked to learn more about skills such as conflict resolution.

Teachers, too, will be trained for their new roles as decision makers, and at times the two groups will hold joint training sessions.

Robert Zager, vice president of the Work in America Institute, correctly observes that most top executives rarely offer to share power with middle-management administrators, even when they demand that those administrators share their authority with lower-paid employees.

School principals and other administrators are understandably frightened by the prospect of sharing their power because schools, like most offices and factories, are usually run on an authoritarian basis and changing that tradition won’t come easily.

But these and other problems common to all efforts to democratize the workplace can and must be resolved so that authoritarianism can be eliminated wherever it exists, including public schools.