School Bosses Impeding Power Sharing

Painfully slow progress is being made in the drive to improve public education by giving the nation’s teachers a major voice in the way our schools are run.

Bitter quarrels between public school teachers and administrators, such as those in Los Angeles, often seem so insurmountable that it’s a wonder they continue to function as well as they do, much less agree on ways to share power.

The revolutionary concept of power sharing is working out reasonably well in some communities, such as Dade County, Fla., which pioneered “teacher power.” A handful of other school districts can also claim success.

Shared decision making in another pioneering school system, Rochester, N.Y., seemed to flourish at first. But, like similar programs in other schools, Rochester’s foundered when student test scores failed to meet everyone’s high expectations.

Nobody in Rochester, though, seemed to want to return to their old authoritarian days when school administrators and principals just told resentful teachers how and what they should teach and how the school system itself should operate.

So a process of conciliation began. The Rochester program, while still somewhat shaky, “is now back on track,” says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Los Angeles is a sad example of a school district where power sharing began with a flourish but now is making little real progress, partly because administrators are fighting it with increasing intensity.

It started here in 1989 as one of the major contract gains won by teachers after a nine-day strike called by their union, United Teachers-Los Angeles. Teachers also won substantial pay raises at that time.

School principals and other administrators here did not have their own union then but demanded the same pay increases won by the teachers. Then, unhappy about the prospects of surrendering part of their power to teachers, the administrators formed their own union, the Associated Administrators of Los Angeles.

Now the teachers’ union is in negotiations for a new contract with the school board, which is demanding pay cuts to help cope with a serious budget crunch that has already forced the layoff of 2,000 teachers.

The teachers are willing to freeze salaries even though that means, in effect, a pay cut because the buying power of their income will be reduced by inflation. The teachers also want to put many administrators, who are already certified as teachers, back in classrooms to help make up the shortage.

Helen Bernstein, the teachers’ union president, says the teachers’ supposed partners in the power-sharing program, the administrators, are trying to kill it.

The administrators deny the accusation, but they are pressuring the teachers by offering to take a pay cut and demanding that the teachers do the same. The administrators are also demanding that the union’s contract provision that created so-called site-based management and power sharing be eliminated.

Site-based management entails decentralizing authority by transferring some of it to principals, parents and teachers in individual schools. It is a key aspect of decision sharing in the schools.

Many school administrators across the country are fighting these revolutionary changes because they mean a surrender of administrators’ traditional power over teachers. Giving power to one’s subordinates is never easy.

Eli Brent, the administrators’ union president, says it is not fighting the fundamental ideas of sharing power with teachers and parents. But the administrators strongly oppose the way the process was set up because it was done under a bilateral agreement between the teachers’ union and the school board.

It could work, Brent says, if the current system is killed and a new one devised by the board, administrators, parents and teachers because “as it is, the process is just a dictatorship (of teachers).”

It’s hard to understand how a system that gives teachers only half of the seats on a power-sharing council can be called a teachers’ dictatorship, particularly since the teachers often disagree among themselves.

Certainly, the opportunity is already there for Los Angeles teachers, administrators and parents to share authority. And besides, there is almost no chance that the administrators can kill the current system.

Unfortunately, however, the administrators’ demand to dump the system and put in a new one can only hurt the mutual trust essential in any power-sharing system, even if they cannot kill it.

Not all administrators toe the management line. Some administrators, such as May Arakaki, principal of the Los Angeles 4th Street Elementary School, welcome the revolution that power sharing promises.

Arakaki understands that in the long run it will be best for the students if teachers--those closest to the children and classroom problems--share in both the authority and the responsibility of running the schools.

But the fear many administrators have of losing their own power is only part of the reason why the revolution isn’t spreading faster.

Too many teachers shy away from the responsibilities their leaders want them to accept. They want to do only their basic jobs as teachers, go home to their family or other interests after school and not take on added administrative and problem-solving work.

Also, the shameful failure of the federal and state governments to provide funds needed to make America’s schools at least as good as those in other advanced nations makes the drive for power-sharing all the more difficult.

But the long-range goal of involving teachers in all aspects of school administration is so fundamental to other necessary school reforms that it must ultimately succeed if we are going to have an effective public school system.

Obviously, you can’t share power to run the schools--or, for that matter, any factory or office--without taking away some from those who now have almost all of it.

However, the idea is slowly spreading despite the odds against it, and it’s time to press ahead with the power-sharing revolution in the schools and all workplaces--not only in Los Angeles but all across the country.