Local efforts to improve the performance of schools over the last decade have begun to yield several general conclusions about school reform: The emerging consensus is that successful efforts are those that are built around small, autonomous schools that are intimately linked to parents and local communities. While we believe these are necessary conditions, they are by themselves insufficient to produce fundamental and enduring school reform.
This popular conception is flawed because these reform efforts fail to include teachers and their unions as partners from the outset. At best, most local reforms seek only tacit and temporary support from unions in the form of exclusions or waivers from standing collective bargaining agreements. While such strategies may be expedient in the short-run, they fail to alter the underlying adversarial relationships between administrators and teachers that thwart even the best efforts. They become mortgages on the future that come due when temporary agreements between administrators and unions run out causing reforms to founder on the old adversarial culture that pits teachers against administrators and creates deep divides between parents and schools. Reforms created without the full participation of teachers and their unions also reinforce fears that administrators are out to "bust" the unions, a belief that further undermines concerted school reform. When reforms are created without the participation all stakeholders, administrators are forced to rely heavily on external resources and thus overlook internal human resources. Not surprisingly, when they are scaled up in large urban districts and in state systems, they fail to sustain continuous improvement over the long run. Bypassing unions also represents a tremendous foregone opportunity to change the culture of unions themselves to become active agents and leaders of reform.
Including the unions as partners in transforming public education is essential to achieving the ultimate goal of improving student learning. Progressive union leaders have begun to recognize that fundamental cultural change in their own organizations is a precondition to broader reforms that will culminate in better education for students. Just as industrial trade unions have recently begun to discover, rapid and unpredictable changes in the environment now demand the rethinking of the roles and structures of unions. Both AFT and NEA participating locals embrace this conclusion and seek ways to recreate themselves to meet the needs of a new millennium.
TURN (Teacher Union Reform Network) is a union-led effort to restructure the nation's teachers' unions to promote reforms that will ultimately lead to better learning and higher achievement for American's children. TURN will rely on models drawn from a variety of research, internal initiatives, and the experience of some industrial trade unions which have been forced to begin to transform themselves. The primary goal of TURN is to create a new union model that can take the lead in building and sustaining high performing schools for all students in an increasingly complex and diverse world. Because teachers are closest to students and to the learning process, and because of their link to parents and the larger communities, they are in a unique position to play a powerful role in stimulating change in other stakeholder groups.
TURN members, 21 presidents of large AFT and NEA locals, recognize that reversing a century of hostile labor relations and replacing them with a compact that says "we are all in this together," will be difficult. But, succeeding in this new and unpredictable environment can only be assured by the mutual effort of administrators, union leaders and teachers, and the creation of a new social framework to hold it together. A pervasive sense of mutual obligation must be at the center of such a new compact. The nation's 3,000,000 teachers and their union leaders must be secure in the knowledge that they are important to their districts' well-being, and they will be treated fairly (terms of employment to which the unions and district administrators have agreed) and that they will share fairly in the fruits of their labor. And to the degree feasible, they must be secure in their jobs. And finally, trust and cooperation must begin to replace the mistrusting and hostile relationships that have characterized school labor-management relations for generations. As UCLA's Wellford Wilms and RAND's Francis Fukuyama have each noted, the value of trust has been greatly underestimated and social capital, represented by trust, will become every bit as important as physical capital in the 21st century.1 The implications of this new compact changes what we mean by "human resources" redefining it to stand for the ability to work interdependently and cooperatively, to participate in decision making and to develop mutually respectful and trusting relationships. It puts the highest priority on being able to learn how to learn. These concepts are the very antithesis of those that were created by mass production of the past--the model on which public education was built.
Some traditional unionists worry that shifting from an adversarial to a cooperative model of labor relations may spell the end to the need for unions. Wilms' research shows, however that far from diminishing a role for the union, this emerging new compact between labor and management casts the union in a new light. The union continues to function in its traditional role of representing its employees and balancing management's power, but it now becomes an instrument of productive change. Under new assumptions of mutual obligation and cooperation, the union's focus shifts. In the years of mass production's heyday, trade union's confrontational tactics were entirely rational. Visible and angry conflict with management symbolized the lack of a common interest and the lack of fairness. Conflict reminded workers that management could not be trusted, and that they were out to strip workers of everything they valued--secure jobs, good wages, and control over working conditions. The new compact, however, shifts union's focus to insuring that members develop a powerful collective voice about a broadened set of interests. The need for cooperation creates new incentives for the union to resolve conflict quickly and fairly, and the symbolic value of confrontation diminishes. The new compact also expands collective bargaining from traditional "bread and butter" issues like work-rules and rates of pay, to include in the case of teachers' unions, peer evaluation, student assessment, curriculum and instruction, accountability and professional development.
History shows us that cultural change of this kind is never invented, rather it is always produced as a creative adaptation to a changing environment. TURN members recognize that such demands have already been precipitated by external events, but that such revolutionary change must be generated and supported from within the organization itself. We believe that no serious restructuring can take place if it is mandated only from above. As Wilms found in his recent study of private industry and their trade unions, it must be embraced fully by teachers and administrators at every level of education. Only in this way can the beginnings of a new social compact between teachers, union leaders, administrators, parents and students be truly fashioned.
Over the next two years we propose to explore, develop, and demonstrate workable models that lead to successful restructuring to enable teacher unions to become high performing organizations to meet the needs of members and to become agent of school and educational reform that will ultimately contribute to improved student learning. At the end of the project we plan to present a number of reform proposals that bring together unions and teachers, administrators, parents and students and other significant stakeholders to the Pew Foundation and other potential funding sources for consideration.
To this end, we plan to develop a partnership with members of UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies to develop a conversation among TURN members and UCLA researchers as a first step in formulating action steps to build capacity in participating local unions to transform themselves into high performance organizations.
Critical to creating high performance unions is developing a network of reformers to share ideas, creating mutual systems of support, and participating in the evaluation of progress to build organizations committed to taking on broadened responsibility for educational quality.
Meetings: To this end we plan to convene at least three meetings each year to examine unions' strengths and weaknesses and to develop models to ready them for reform. We will also aim to develop the capacity and readiness among these locals to develop partnerships with other educational stakeholders for reform. These meetings will aim at:
Electronic communication: We also plan to create a Web site for TURN activities to stimulate and continue the conversation. Specifically we plan to:
Action research: We propose to use action research methods to help document the process of change among the participating locals. The results will also be used to feed back findings at regular intervals to the participants to identify conflicts and areas of agreement and to help members gauge progress within the two-year period.
Infusion of learnings into graduate education: Learnings from the project will be infused into UCLA's Executive Leadership doctoral program through which pass nearly 100 practitioners each year. Results from the project will bring immediate information to these educational leaders who will become the union leaders and administrators charged with reform in the future.
Final Conference: At the end of the project we plan to convene a national conference at UCLA to reflect on the two-year experience and to summarize lessons drawn from it. We will invite national figures to comment on new reform proposals and to galvanize support for next steps.
TURN members will:
Local unions will:
List of participating locals:
(Also includes the chairs of NCUEA (Urban Educators with NEA) and PPC (K-12 representative council within AFT)).
TURN Home Page
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies