Teachers creating and leading schools . . . is union work!

The original charter school vision included heavy doses of teacher contribution in all aspects of curriculum and administration. That is not how they evolved. Until now.

Twenty-two years after the first charter school opened in Minnesota, we’ve come full circle. Teachers once saw the schools as laboratories for innovation and professional autonomy — the vision sketched out by former American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Albert Shanker. But teachers quickly became disillusioned when charters came to be seen as a way to turn over schools to outside operators. Now teachers can play a key role in regaining the promise of innovation, professional leadership, and autonomy through the Minnesota Guild of Public Charter Schools, the first union-sponsored authorizer of charter schools in the nation.

The Guild is a bold development that grows out of a decades-long effort to create professional autonomy for Minnesota teachers, where teachers are the deciders in licensure, selection, induction, development, and evaluation. In autonomous schools, teachers also may choose to take the lead in budgeting, assessing, compensation, governance, transportation, and curriculum, among other areas. While the corporate charter sector shows antipathy toward experienced professional teachers and their unions, the Guild offers a way to bridge this divide and put teachers at the forefront of ensuring the quality of district and charter schools because we believe teachers know education as few others do. The Guild’s name harkens back to the history of professionals training their own.

While the corporate charter sector shows antipathy toward experienced professional teachers and their unions, the Guild offers a way to put teachers at the forefront.

The Guild was born in 2010 when Lynn Nordgren, the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers (MFT), an AFT affiliate, applied for a grant from the AFT Innovation Fund. This fund, created in 2009 by AFT President Randi Weingarten, underwrites work that cultivates and supports teacher-driven reforms. The MFT used the grant to help create the nonprofit Guild. The Guild went forward to become a “single-purpose” charter school authorizer — a high bar to reach considering that the state had toughened requirements for such entities, which resulted in many authorizers getting out of the business. Single-purpose authorizers do nothing but authorize charters and are required to closely monitor whether the schools live up to the promises in their approved agreements.

In a historic 2011 decision, the Minnesota Department of Education approved the Guild’s application. Testifying to the Minnesota legislature earlier that year, I explained that the union was frustrated trying to create a professional role for teachers through the existing school district hierarchies. The union concluded it needed to move upstream to gain the ability to assist and oversee creating schools itself.

Efforts at autonomy

The journey to the Guild began in l988 with AFT President Albert Shanker’s National Press Club speech describing what would make teaching a true profession. As an AFT vice president, I joined in the vigorous discussion and debate and then rushed home to make it happen. We began labor-management committees to professionalize teaching. We helped create mentor programs, induction programs, professional standards of practice, job-embedded professional development, action research on best practices, and professional pay. We viewed ourselves as reformers, risk takers, and role models to lead the way to creating a true profession.

Later in 1988, the Minneapolis Foundation invited Shanker to its annual Itasca Seminar, a forum where business, government, and civic leaders network and discuss common problems. Shanker presented a vision for charter schools organized as communities of practice where professionals rather than administrators set the agenda. The professionals would seek, refine, and implement the newest innovations. They would keep up on emerging research, improving their practice and one another. They would work in partnership with parents who believed in the strength of the design and innovations and would be partners in the practice. The charter schools would improve student learning, re-energize dispirited urban teachers, and give the country’s stagnating public education enterprise a boost without costing more than taxpayers were willing to pay.

In 1991, Minnesota became the first state to try to turn Shanker’s dream into reality. But as legislators began to generate the bills to implement the concept, teachers and their union leadership became skeptical, if not hostile. They were concerned that schools started by “outsiders” would not be as good for children as schools governed by school districts. Further, they worried that a proliferation of charter schools could lead to school closures and job losses in district schools. Finally, some saw the push for charter schools as part of a campaign to privatize and profit from public education.

When Shanker saw that Minnesota’s bills were weak on union support and professional teacher empowerment — they excluded teachers from leadership roles and normal legal protections — he was not supportive. There was also a battle to make sure teachers were licensed. Collective bargaining, professional licensure, and academic freedom were all strong positions for Shanker. Because the bills failed to meet these tests, Shanker did not support their passage.

Meanwhile, the 1990s saw attempts in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Bloomington, and elsewhere to try to create other types of professional communities of educators. The MFT collaborated in starting several innovative “schools of the future,” some advanced by outside partners. Within six years, all these wonderful schools had been sucked back into the districts, their uniqueness eliminated, turned back into plain vanilla schools by bureaucracies that couldn’t tolerate or in some cases couldn’t afford differences in delivery or design.

We learned that it is difficult to run a school with full independence inside a centrally managed district. Despite our efforts, the professionals were never fully in charge. Their fate was determined not by student outcomes and decisions at the schools, but by the central office that was often weighed down by changes in leadership and commitments. The decisions sometimes revolved around transportation schedules, costs, perceived difficulty in communication, and keeping track of significantly different staffing models and programs.

We viewed ourselves as reformers, risk takers, and role models to lead the way to creating a true profession.

Still, we kept working toward our goal. In 2005, the MFT worked with an unlikely ally — the Minnesota Business Partnership — to pass a law for “site-governed schools.” This law created the opportunity for a self-governed school program within the district. When the opportunity was announced, groups of teachers and parents submitted proposals for innovative schools for urban students. But four years went by with no real cooperation from the Minneapolis district to work out the delegation of authority needed for self-governed schools. In 2009, the MFT went back to the legislature and got the law amended to put the delegation of authority in law, so the question to the district would pretty much be a simple yes or no on a proposal. Teachers came up with five proposals. The district grudgingly approved one, putting it through piles of paperwork not required of other schools.

An evolving view of charter

Trends in K-12 education have changed teachers’ work in district schools and slowly affected the union’s view of chartering. Consider the standards movement: Decisions once made by teachers moved from the classrooms to the districts and to the state and federal level. This intensified with the federal No Child Left Behind Act and its pressure for test-based accountability, and then even further with the federal School Improvement Grant program and its insistence on drastic measures that include removing teachers. The job and career of teaching was now to carry out what superiors wanted done, often under time constraints that made achieving these goals nearly impossible. Simultaneously, incoming teachers wanted and expected a more professional role. We’ve seen experiments with various types of schooling across the U.S., including self-governed schools and union-run charter schools such as those in New York City, Denver, Chicago, Maine, Boston, and Texas. In each case, the efforts were designed to create communities of practice (Farris-Berg, Dirkswager, & Junge, 2012).

All this made room for the Guild’s example of how unions are evolving and can serve as a national model for other teacher union-led charter authorizers to create and oversee schools. The Guild has an advisory board of expert practitioners who evaluate exciting proposals for schools, work with applicants to fully develop their plans, and make recommendations to the Guild’s executive board. Further, the Guild is building state-of-the-art management systems so that it can monitor the schools and ensure they meet the highest standards. Applications to become a school organized under the Guild’s authority must include a clear mission, detailed curriculum, high student achievement benchmarks, a healthy governance structure, and sound finances. The Guild also will require labor-management collaboration and emphasize educator expertise, respect, and leadership.

New as it is, this model of teacher-driven charter authorizing appears to be working. The Guild has fully authorized one school — the Arts and Science Academy — that will open in fall 2014. Further, the Guild’s board has approved four more applications that are awaiting state approval. We fully expect that by spring 2014 the Guild will have authorized five schools that could open as early as fall 2014.

The Arts and Science Academy, a K-8 school, will restore arts and sciences to their proper role in the curriculum with interdisciplinary lessons designed by teachers. Teacher leaders and others who designed their application have longstanding ties to the state’s arts community. Teachers will collaborate to provide students with a well-rounded education that doesn’t just boil down to doing well on reading and math tests exclusively.

New roles for unions

The Guild and other efforts to create autonomous communities of teachers will mean change for teachers unions. When schools are organized as partnerships, teachers can select their colleagues, assess one another, help each other develop, and work together on learning. In self-governed schools, teachers tackle challenges eagerly and are willing to accept responsibility because they control what matters for school success.

None of this is to say, however, that teachers don’t need unions. If teachers are empowered, they will need a different kind of collective representation. The needs of professional partnerships will change the services, responses, and organization of the new union. Teachers in Guild-authorized schools will be able to organize a union without unfair employer interference. In fact, there’s been a sharp increase in the number of teachers in charter schools who are voting to join unions. For example, the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS) mobilizes charter school employees around issues of common concern, such as providing the best possible education to all children, strengthening the profession, expanding professional development, improving teaching and learning conditions, and bolstering teachers’ voice in school-level decision making. Members of ACTS schools also share best practices and professional resources and speak out on public policy issues that affect their jobs.

In discussions at the Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) — founded in 1996 by a group of progressive union leaders to encourage unions to promote education reform — the attitude toward charters is changing. Members see opportunities in many of the developing charter school models. They’re frustrated with the top-down “managed instruction” they see in many districts and with these districts’ unwillingness to collaborate with teachers. They see reform going toward centralization — opposite of where teachers say it should be going. Richard Ingersoll (2007) of the University of Pennsylvania has found an important truth: Schools work better where teacher roles’ are larger. Such schools are more orderly, have less student truancy, and have lower teacher turnover. The degree of power and control that practitioners hold over workplace decisions is one of the most important criteria distinguishing the degree of professionalization and the status of a particular occupation or line of work.

Coming full circle

Overcoming the final challenges regarding Shanker’s vision of charters as teacher-led schools, as teacher-parent partnership schools, and as union-supported schools can illuminate what’s possible for the future. What does the future of unions look like as they respond to the reconfiguration of districts and to opportunities for self-governed schools, union schools, performance agreements, and other communities of practice? Our thinking at this stage includes moving to a new model of professional unionism.

Teachers must risk reaching well beyond their personal and professional comfort zones to gain the true professional status Shanker envisioned.

Large groups of employees in one bargaining unit in one large district may still have a master agreement negotiated by the union. That contract will allow for many of the exemptions, guides, standards, and articulated collaborative processes such as performance agreements that may be used by school sites. Schools can choose to enter into a “reciprocal obligations” agreement and/or a “teacher-led schools memorandum of agreement” with the school board and the union. A reciprocal obligations agreement acknowledges the shared responsibility by the school board and teachers to stop the reform churn and to establish an empowered school environment. This gives educators the resources, control, power, and autonomy to transform individual schools, so students receive a genuine opportunity to obtain a quality education.

So, we have come full circle to realize Shanker’s dream of charters where teachers and parents are partners and kids learn a lot. We’re actively cultivating these schools through the Guild and will help ensure they meet their targets by operating as a high-quality authorizer with best practices and high standards. We realize that teachers must risk reaching well beyond their personal and professional comfort zones to gain the true professional status Shanker envisioned and that we have worked to create. Whether they organize themselves as teachers in private practice or in self-governed schools or charter schools or union-led schools or teacher-led schools, teaching professionals need to be innovators, leaders, and risk takers and recognized, respected, and treated as true professionals.

References

Farris-Berg, K., Dirkswager, E., & Junge, A. (2012). Trusting teachers with school success: What happens when teachers call the shots. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education.

Ingersoll, R. (2007). Short on power, long on responsibility. Educational Leadership, 65 (1), 20-25.

CITATION: Sundin, L. (2014). Teachers creating and leading schools . . . is union work! Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (5), 31-34.