Tired of Having Little Say, Teachers Pushing for Shared Authority

At Jefferson High School in South-Central Los Angeles, Cathy Nadler and a small group of fellow teachers run a special program in which they devise the courses, write the curriculum, choose their own textbooks and directly control some money for books and supplies--all without having an administrator peering over their shoulders every step of the way.

“Teachers make all the decisions,” Nadler, a 16-year veteran of the classroom, said with pride, “and administrators come in at the end.”

That may not sound like much to crow about. But for teachers, who have long complained about being treated like “tall children” by their bosses, such autonomy is all too rare. And that, say teachers and other education experts, is a big part of the problem facing public schools.

Held Accountable

For the most part, teachers are left out of decisions about books, money, teaching methods, class schedules and course content but are held accountable--by parents, the public and administrators--when academic goals are not met.

Tired of having little real authority to change what they think is wrong, teachers in Los Angeles and other districts throughout the country are pressuring their school boards and superintendents to share the reins of power with them. They talk of “teacher empowerment” and “shared decision-making” as the keystones of improving schools.

In the Los Angeles school district, where labor negotiations between teachers and the administration have been deadlocked for months, the 22,000-member teachers union is making its strongest push ever to insert broader powers and professional rights for teachers into its contract.

Some demands are not controversial, such as eliminating yard duty for elementary school teachers, while others, such as a union proposal to give those teachers at least one hourlong preparation period a week, have met with stubborn resistance from the administration.

But the most contentious issue, aside from salary demands, centers on changing the system of school management. The district and the union have floated proposals to create school councils to make many decisions that traditionally have been the sole province of the principal, including budget allocations and scheduling.

The union wants teachers to hold the balance of power on the councils, a stipulation strongly opposed by a Board of Education majority that, union officials say, favors administrators over teachers.

As tension builds over a threatened teacher walkout May 30, union leaders hope that they can hold onto board member July Korenstein’s seat in the June 6 runoff election as well as pick up another supporter, Mark Slavkin. Korenstein faces Gerald E. Horowitz, principal of Richard E. Byrd Junior High School, and Slavkin is challenging board member Alan Gershman.

“No one gives up power willingly,” United Teachers-Los Angeles President Wayne Johnson said. “Administrators, particularly at the school site level, are really terrified that somehow their power and control is going to be dismantled, that teachers and parents will suddenly be running the schools and they are going to be gofers. The principals are the real obstructionists.”

Broad-scale experiments with new forms of school governance are under way in Dade County Public Schools in Florida and Rochester City Schools in New York, and smaller efforts are being made in places such as the Poway Unified School District in San Diego County.

In Dade County, 96 of the 263 schools have signed up for school-based management, a term for the movement toward giving teachers more say in budgets, programs and curriculum. In the San Diego County city of Poway, a new panel dominated by teachers makes all decisions relating to training and hiring of new instructors.

But no one has hard evidence that such radical restructuring of schools achieves the ultimate goal--higher student achievement.

Said Marc Tucker, president of the Rochester-based National Center on Education and the Economy, who helped draft an influential Carnegie Foundation report three years ago on the need to give teachers a stronger voice: “The object of the game is to produce big gains in student performance. In order to do that, you have to have in mind a very different way of managing the work of people not just in (individual) schools but in school districts. It takes a long time to carry out that kind of reorganization. I don’t really think we have” definitive results yet.

‘The Latest Panacea’

Nonetheless, school-based management has become “the latest panacea for improving schools,” said Gary Jerome, a legislative consultant to state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach). Bergeson, a former teacher, is the author of one of five bills the state Legislature is considering this year that are aimed at shifting more decision-making power to individual schools and to teachers.

Robert Collins, principal of Grant High School in Van Nuys, where a form of shared decision-making has existed for three years, said principals are not fearful of losing power. In fact, he said, most principals he has talked to react favorably to the idea. But he acknowledges that sharing authority with teachers “changes the traditional relationship” between faculty and administration.

“It involves a very close, trusting relationship,” he said. “If the faculty is going to use it as a power play, then the program isn’t going to work. If the principal is going to nix everything, that’s not going to work either.”

At Grant, Collins said, major decisions are made through the consensus of a school council of teachers, administrators and students, the academic senate and himself. Theoretically, no decisions are made without the agreement of all three parties. Sometimes the process has resulted in actions that Collins initially opposed, such as last year when the faculty, concerned about student discipline problems, wanted the school to hire another dean.

“I resisted it,” the principal said. “I thought, ‘Do I need another dean or another counselor?’ They continued to press the issue, and I finally felt (their reasons) were convincing. Now we have three deans instead of two. It’s worked out real well.”

Alan Ringer, who serves as Grant’s faculty chairman and union representative, said the system more closely approximates “shared idea-making” than shared decision-making because the principal still has the final say in all matters.

Nonetheless, “it’s better than not having anything at all,” he said. “Teachers feel involved. They feel that somebody listens to them. And when we help make decisions, we’re more apt to buy into them than if they’re just foisted on us. There is more unity, and more things get done.”

‘Have a Vested Interest’

Jefferson High’s Nadler agreed. “When workers have a vested interest in the company, the company is successful,” she said. “The same goes for teachers and schools.”

Nadler is a participant in the teacher-run Humanitas Program, which promotes interdisciplinary learning. It operates in 17 Los Angeles district high schools.

Teachers follow district and state requirements, but because the program is financed primarily by private foundations, they have an unusual degree of freedom. They decide what grade levels the program will reach, recruit the students, pick the themes they will weave through the courses, and choose their own books and materials.

At Jefferson, for instance, the 10th-grade Humanitas staff decided to teach history, literature, science and art to show the development of Western civilization, said Nadler, who teaches social studies.

“Teacher empowerment was the primary reason for starting the program,” said Judy Johnson of the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a nonprofit organization that raises money from corporations and foundations and administers the Humanitas Program. “We operate on the theory that the people who know best are the people who work with kids everyday in the classroom. They need the freedom to experiment . . . to get support from each other and make the curriculum richer.”

Educational Partnership also puts money directly into teachers’ hands by providing small annual grants--$1,000 for the program and an additional $200 per teacher. This enables teachers to pay for extras, such as field trips or books that state monies will not cover, without digging into their own pockets or wading through district red tape.

Teachers say that having the power to run their own program has led to big payoffs, beginning with enhanced job satisfaction. “This program blows teacher isolation out the window,” said Phil Bliss, a 10th-grade biology teacher. “We’re constantly talking to each other, coming up with new ideas. It’s stimulating.”

‘Seem More Enthusiastic’

Students enrolled in the Humanitas program at Jefferson seem to notice the difference. “Our teachers seem more enthusiastic,” said Portia Neal, 17. “They’re always talking with each other, and they want to see how we’re doing in all our classes.”

Nadler and other teachers say they have noticed that students try harder than they do in regular classes, improving in reading--in some cases, by two or three grade levels--and causing fewer discipline problems.

But with the participation of only 116 of the district’s 26,000 classroom teachers, the Humanitas program is a modest effort. “We’re still stuck in a system that is very slow to change,” Nadler said. “We’re a very tiny piece of a big picture.”

In other districts, teachers and school boards are struggling to find a way to change the whole system, instead of just a few schools.

In 37 of 153 schools in the San Diego Unified School District, the faculty and administration have volunteered to set up governing councils to reorganize their school. The changes range from reorganizing the way instruction is delivered to limited-English students to breaking large schools into smaller, more manageable clusters.

In the Poway Unified School District, four experienced teachers were chosen last year to supervise and train new teachers. And a peer review board made up of three union members and two district representatives assesses new teachers and decides who will be retained.

Dade County Public Schools, which include Miami, is experimenting with shared decision-making on the broadest scale of any district nationally.

In 96 schools, the faculty and principal have agreed to form “cadres” that have the authority to make decisions involving nearly every aspect of school operations. Some schools have adopted peer review, said Assistant Supt. Gerald O. Dreyfuss. In other schools, the cadres have eliminated the assistant principal’s job and changed the schedule to provide longer blocks of instruction time.

Pat Tornillo, executive vice president of United Teachers of Dade, said it is too early to tell if the new system of school management is helping students learn. But he said it has changed the atmosphere of schools for the better.

“It’s hard to describe, but when you walk through the door, you know something different is going on,” he said. “You talk to teachers and you talk to students and you get the feeling, ‘My goodness, how can these people be so enthusiastic?’ There’s an electricity in the air. That’s got to make a difference.”

CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE: Trainees are caught in the middle in the teachers, school district dispute. Metro, Page 2