School Principals Ponder Unionizing

Principals and other administrators in San Diego city schools, stung by simultaneous demands both to improve student achievement and to share power with teachers and parents, are for the first time exploring the idea of forming an official labor organization.

The moves toward a union-type arrangement are as yet tentative and best characterized as an attempt to find out what the administrators could achieve compared with their present Administrators Assn., which has no legal standing to bargain on wage or workplace issues with the school board.

Few if any administrators are willing to formally endorse the idea of unionism--given their longstanding battles with the teachers union over work rules--but there is a consensus among a majority that they are not sufficiently listened to before Supt. Tom Payzant and school trustees hand down key policy mandates.

“There’s a strong feeling that administrators are not getting the respect they deserve,” Irv McClure, executive director of the Administrators Assn., said.

“It’s not a question of salary or money,” said Errol Bennett, principal at Madison High School and last year’s association president. “It’s rather one of respect, of a feeling that we’re being left out” of the decision-making loop. “I’m not sure that a union is the way to go, but we want to find out if there is a better way” than the present setup.

Several principals in the San Diego Unified School District cite actions by the board and Payzant in the past two years to require school restructuring--originally a voluntary program for schools wishing to establish new power arrangements between administrators, teachers and parents--and to require schools to close by half the gaping test score differences between white and Asian students, on the one hand, and black and Latino students, on the other, within two years.

In addition, many principals in elementary schools with predominantly nonwhite student populations remain highly uneasy about statements by board members that they will hold principals accountable for carrying out those mandates, and that administrators face as-yet unspecified consequences if they fail to meet the standards.

They also look askance at the close relationship that Payzant and teachers union chief Hugh Boyle have developed on the issues of restructuring and on more power for teachers in deciding how their schools are run.

“Our membership is asking us to explore this, and we have to do this,” said Anita Calhoun, president of the Administrators Assn. and principal at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary. She said that trustee talk about accountability crystallized the issue in the minds of many principals.

“This is the first time I’ve heard so many people saying, ‘Let’s explore something new,’ ” said Jim Vlassis, Mira Mesa High principal and a longtime veteran of the city schools system. “The feeling is that we are getting more and more mandates while having less and less control over how to carry them out.”

Even Bob Stein, who, as head of the new O’Farrell Middle School, has adopted with a vengeance the practice of consensus decision-making with teachers and parents--he calls himself the chief education officer rather than principal--sympathizes with the dissatisfaction.

“To be an urban school leader these days is anything but easy,” Stein said, what with “the demands to educate all children educationally, socially and emotionally in spite of poverty, of drugs--of having to deal with a microcosm of society.”

The stirrings among San Diego administrators, who run the nation’s eighth-largest urban district, mirrors those in other urban California districts. Administrators in San Francisco and Oakland are affiliated with the AFL-CIO, and those in Los Angeles have petitioned their Board of Education for recognition as an independent bargaining agent after 70% of the Los Angeles administrators association authorized the change this fall.

“There’s been a noticeable trend of administrator associations moving toward looking at representation in a negotiation stance, resulting from a general feeling that administrators have been left out of the picture compared with the (top) administration and the teachers union,” said Walker Brown, executive director of the Los Angeles group. “Our people reached the conviction over a period of time that they would be more effective if they had this new status” to be the exclusive representative.

The Los Angeles administrators have been recognized by the state Public Employees Relations Board as the exclusive agent for principals.

“We want the least adversarial relationship as possible with our superintendent,” Brown said. “But it is our intent to put any agreements into writing, even those that are not formally negotiated across the table.”

However, for San Diego Supt. Tom Payzant, there is strong dislike for any move among his middle managers toward becoming a legally recognized bargaining group.

“I understand why there is anxiety and ambiguity among some principals,” Payzant said. “It’s clearly related to what is going on here and elsewhere in California, a result of concern about the changing role of principals, the need for shared decision-making, the serious conversations about accountability . . . the belief that, with the increased attention other employee groups are getting, that they are becoming overlooked and losing their traditional leverage.”

But Payzant says, in essence, that the administrators should stop crying and instead embrace the new reforms.

“There’s been a fundamental change in how things get decided in this district,” he said. “I don’t accept their argument that I don’t listen to them. I listen to them all the time, but I also listen to parents, to teachers; there is no longer a traditional approach to decision-making, and we are plowing new ground on who gets to participate in decisions . . . ground that pretty much has been controlled traditionally by administrators.

“It makes a difference in how people behave when you can no longer rely on power determined by position but rather must govern more on the power of your arguments.”

Payzant said he “would not be comfortable if everyone I rely on for the hopes and dreams of this district is in a union that I have to negotiate with. . . . That really takes away from efforts to build a real team; it would be a setback.”

Delmar Evan, principal at Wagonheim Junior High and the incoming president of the Administrators Assn., agreed that most of his colleagues would prefer a collaborative relationship with Payzant.

“I personally would like to find a way to work this through, and I think the situation would have to get worse before we really would go union,” Evans said. “But we must have more attention paid to our views.”

Kearny High Principal Mike Lorch said administrators must develop their own policy base about the best way to govern schools, to carry out new curricula and to increase long-term student achievement.

“We need to do it internally, to show that we cannot be ignored, that our input is critical, when these issues come up for discussion,” Lorch said.