The Leadership Limbo

This article from the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation explores the relationships, and often the conflicts, between school reform and teacher union contracts.

By Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael J. Petrilli


It’s no real surprise that, after years of lurking menacingly in the shadows, The Contract
has emerged into the spotlight, indeed has leaped to the top of the
education policy agenda. Sooner or later, the purveyors of any number
of flavors of school reform were bound to see their prospects entangled
with teachers’ collective bargaining agreements.

Consider the standards-and-accountability movement. In its early
days, reformers focused on setting clear expectations for what students
should learn, developing reliable measures of whether they were
learning it, and spouting vague talk about holding “schools”
accountable. Eventually, though, they came up against the plain reality
that one can’t really hold institutions accountable (especially when
they’re not legally distinct entities); one holds people accountable.
And if those people are to include teachers, their union contracts are
an unavoidable issue.

So too with the school choice movement. (Those disappointed by the
weak response of school districts to vouchers and charter schools
eventually blame union contracts.) The “teacher quality” movement. (How
to transfer great teachers to poor schools if the contract works
against it?) Or those, like us, who want to see stronger school
leadership and effective management. Each has collided in some sense
with collective bargaining agreements (and, in non-collective
bargaining states, the formal board policies that substitute for such
agreements).

So, all roads lead to Rome, and all reforms lead eventually to The Contract. Hence it’s no wonder that the past few years have seen an explosion of
studies, analyses, and symposia examining teacher collective bargaining
agreements and their impact on just about everything that matters in
education.

Some of this work has been quite good. The most impressive product
has come from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (on whose
board Finn serves), with financial help from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation: an exhaustively detailed database that
codes the collective bargaining agreements of the fifty largest school
districts–along with analogous board policies in non-collective
bargaining states.

Meanwhile, our friends and colleagues Rick Hess (director of
education policy at the American Enterprise Institute) and Marty West
(assistant professor at Brown University) published A Better Bargain: Overhauling Teacher Collective Bargaining for the 21st Century.
In this crisp manifesto, they laid out a compelling argument for
thinner, smarter teacher contracts, the kind that allow principals to
do their jobs effectively while still protecting teachers from
arbitrary and capricious behavior. They specifically identified three
areas–compensation, personnel policies, and work rules–where leaders
need significantly greater authority if they are to manage strong
schools.

We saw the makings of a great combination: NCTQ had the data while
Hess and West had the vision and theory. Put them together and perhaps
we could find out which of the nation’s fifty largest school districts
have contracts that allow for strong school management–and which do not.

West wasn’t available, but to our delight Hess agreed to identify
the indicators in the NCTQ database that best mapped onto their vision
of effective school leadership, then use them to appraise the teacher
labor agreements of the nation’s big districts. The result: The
Leadership Limbo.

The results are truly informative–but complicated, too, and a bit
surprising. Those seeking simply to bash teacher contracts may want to
stop reading now. To be sure, at the time we tapped NCTQ’s database,
plenty of large school districts (fifteen, to be exact) had the sort of
restrictive, cumbersome teacher union contracts that most alarm
reformers. They explicitly barred school leaders from many of the
practices that their peers in the business world take for granted:
offering extra pay for high-demand skills or strong performance, for
instance, or choosing the best applicant for a job instead of the
person with greatest seniority, or outsourcing tasks that aren’t
central to the organization’s mission.

Nor should reformers take solace from the fact that just five of the
fifty districts in the analysis can claim relatively “flexible” teacher
labor agreements that explicitly give leaders broad authority to manage
their schools effectively. (The Fortunate Five are Guilford County,
North Carolina; Austin, Dallas, and Northside, Texas; and Fairfax
County, Virginia.) Particularly because the study is skewed to the
“right to work” South–Dixie tends to organize its districts by county,
making them bigger than those in the North and West, and thus is
disproportionately represented in any study of the “largest”
districts–it’s disappointing to see so few leader-friendly agreements.

Yet the most surprising finding is that labor agreements in a
majority of large districts are neither blessedly flexible nor crazily
restrictive: they are simply ambiguous, silent on many key areas of
management flexibility, neither tying leaders’ hands outright nor
explicitly conferring authority on them to act. We call this the “Leadership Limbo.”
And we take it as more good than bad, for it means, at least in the
short run, that aggressive superintendents and principals could push
the envelope and claim authority for any management prerogative not
barred outright by the labor agreements. And it means that, for a
majority of big districts, the depiction of The Contract as an
all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated.

But don’t call us naïve. The long run may be very different and
leaders who move aggressively to exploit contractual ambiguities may
end up paying the price. Teacher unions have ways of tying leaders’
hands beyond getting explicit language into collective bargaining
agreements.

Still, reform-minded leaders should take some heart. In the report,
we offer our advice for language to fight for in the next contract
negotiation, language that others have succeeded in getting into
contracts in their own districts. In the meantime, most leaders can
push the envelope more than their lawyers may be telling them–a measure
of management flexibility is waiting to be seized.