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This is, first off, something the Department has never done before. It comes out of Arne’s
vision that we need to spark a movement across the country of partnership of districts, superintendents,
school boards, and their unions, teachers, coming together to collaborate as to how and
in what ways they can improve student achievement.
Student’s success must be at the heart of the labor-management agreement. Other labor
and management goals are absolutely important as well, but they are all secondary to the
goal of improving education and student learning. It’s not a new idea, to say that educators
must put the interest of children first, but that idea is often dismissed as a truism or
empty rhetoric. I fundamentally disagree. Many district policies that perpetuate the
status quo today are grounded in what is good for management or good for labor and yet not
all policies that are fair to adults are good for children, and conversely, what is good
for children is not always fair to adults.
We don’t want this to be a theoretical discussion; we want this to have a practical context.
This is an opportunity for your peers to share with you what it is like in the trenches of
labor-management collaboration.
The work always has to be about actionable items that if the conversation strays in any
way from the question of what is the responsibility of the person who is talking, then we’re
not on solid ground any more. So, you know, that’s the conversation with the board,
that’s the conversation with the union leaders, that’s the conversation with my staff. The
gravitational pull is always towards the pointing of fingers – of the finger and it happens
in the union and it happens in the board and it happens with the superintendent, it happens
with the community. So it’s always – it always has to be about responsibility and
this piggyback on the question of accountability.
You hear the excitement in the hallways that this is possible to do this work together
says volumes particularly in an environment that we’re in right now where conflict seems
to reign supreme. Team work works when we are try to educate kids, when we’re trying
to make every school, every neighborhood school, a school where parents want to send their
kids, educators want to work, when we are aiming like a laser beam on how we help kids
be college and career ready as well as ready for life in this knowledge era.
One thing that I’ve learned is we’re not alone. There are a lot of districts – every
– other people have the same problem you do, that’s for sure.