Labor Peace Seen as Key to School Reform

Neither teachers nor administrators in the San Diego city schools are generally happy with a reform movement designed to shift their responsibilities.

Without outside help, district officials say, efforts to give new power--and responsibility--to teachers and principals involved in an uneasy collaboration to make them more accountable and effective will fail. That will leave public education less able to compete with public or private alternatives to the existing system, they warn.

The timing is critical because the district’s precedent-setting four-year contract, reached in November, 1988, is up for renegotiation early next year.

The district will announce today the receipt of an 18-month, $67,490 grant from the federal government for hiring consultants and holding workshops for teachers, administrators and other employees to suggest how they can bargain contracts and expand their experiments in restructuring with less friction.

Added to the federal money will be $41,029 in local assistance, of which about one-fourth will come from the district’s labor organizations.

“We’ve got to learn how to improve collaboration and how that can be tied into the negotiations,” said Bertha Pendleton, deputy San Diego superintendent, who is coordinating the grant.

Four years ago, schools Supt. Tom Payzant and teachers union president Hugh Boyle closeted themselves after months of fruitless negotiations between the two sides and together hammered out a multi-year contract that they heralded as the beginning of educational reform in San Diego.

In fact, the Panasonic Foundation told them that moves toward labor peace are required before it will support a host of district-wide reform experiments. That support, in travel, conferences and consultants, has been substantial in the past three years as a few schools have started changing teachers’ classroom styles, counseling methods and the process by which principals make decisions.

But now, as time comes for a new contract, all sides worry that neither school school reforms nor the “era of good feelings” that Payzant and Boyle reached between themselves, has broadly affected the district.

“What Tom (Payzant) and I did hasn’t spread,” Boyle said, “and a lot of teachers aren’t very happy because they don’t see any more money, and they don’t see any more trust given them.”

Unless more teachers and principals believe the joint decision-making policy is more than rhetoric, they fear that negotiations will resume traditional patterns of argument, officials say.

Many teachers believe that their union “sold out” to the district because they have seen no clear signs at their campuses of reforms to give them more responsibility for planning curricula or implementing more relevant teaching methods, Boyle concedes.

At the same time, Payzant is under attack from many principals who believe he “gave the store away” to the union by requiring principals to listen more to teachers without the power to force them to become more productive and deal with the slackers within their own ranks.

“The problem has been that (both sides) thought that overall change would happen because of (experiments) taking place school-by-school, that leadership and energy generated individually in schools would be enough” to shake the whole system, said W. Pat Dolan, a nationally recognized labor management consultant who will be used to “broker” the two sides into a better relationship.

“But to have change take place within (such a) large system, you have to have in place a larger process so that principals and teachers can listen and learn as a group--a process that can remove institutional obstacles to making change.”

As one vital step, Dolan would like to see teachers and administrators meet in every school at least once a year, perhaps a day or two after the end of a school year, and talk about what worked, what did not work, and changes desired for the next year.

Then a top-flight “oversight” district committee representing both administrators and teachers would listen to all schools’ requests for waiving rules and other procedures that the they feel block reforms.

In trying to moving negotiations away from traditional adversarial models, Dolan wants both sides to identify four or five major issues, then have joint administration-labor committees quickly devise two or three possible solutions.

If successful, that could wrap up knotty problems and link a new contract directly to the long-term reforms.

“For example, if the district is facing a $30-million deficit, then don’t bargain as much about salaries, because the money isn’t going to be there, but instead try to work out ways of how to structure the workplace better, how to build flexibility” into work conditions and the like, he said.

“Dolan is an important tool for us to learn about why what we are doing now doesn’t work,” said Kroc Middle School Principal Barbara Coates, who first heard Dolan speak last spring. “He’s got a clear understanding of organizations, and he doesn’t get caught up in all of our educational rhetoric.”

Despite the difficulties facing the San Diego district, Dolan said that “at least the system is unstuck, and there’s more movement here than in practically any other urban school system.

“And I’m a neutral third party, I can be tough on all the actors, I can tell Tom Payzant your principals are not in line, that they feel abandoned, or tell Boyle that the membership is going to yank him back if he moves too fast” without better preparation.

“Change is going to hurt, but without staying the course, the public is going to conclude in three or four years that reform won’t work in public schools.”