Executive Summary

César Chávez High School Case Study

Victor Forberger

Center for Urban and Regional Policy

Northeastern University

Throughout the 1990s, the Phoenix high school system has been under
tremendous pressure to improve the education it provides. The Arizona
state government has at times been openly hostile to public schooling
and its charter school law is one of the most liberal in the nation. A
classroom and a small number of students is generally sufficient to set
up a charter school, draining revenue from the traditional public
schools \-- a problem made worse by the fact that per capita spending on
public school students in Arizona already ranks near the lowest in the
nation. In addition, the state\'s heavy emphasis on standardized testing
has led to the requirement that students pass a specialized exam
starting in the 2001-2002 academic year to graduate high school. Hence,
the school district finds itself with growing competition from charter
schools just when students must meet rigorous and unyielding standards
of achievement.

At the same time the district has had the problem of managing one of the
fastest growing school populations in the nation. Much of that growth
has been from Mexican-American and Native-American groups. These groups
historically have not received a great deal of educational advantages.
Standardized testing has proven to be an extremely difficult obstacle
for them. The district has been deeply concerned about how to improve
the educational opportunities for such students but has found that a
simple emphasis on educational achievement is not enough. The
superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District, René Diaz,
believes that if grades and test scores are to improve, teachers and
staff within a school must have the authority to plan and carry out
educational directives on their own. To save the district\'s schools,
Diaz and others came to believe that fundamental changes in the
relationship between teachers, staff, school administrators, and parents
were needed.

A beginning at such change came with the implementation of
Interest-Based Bargaining (IBB) in 1995. IBB was used for the first time
to resolve collective bargaining disputes between the district and the
three employee associations present in the district's schools. Two of
these associations belong to the National Education Association (NEA)
\-- the Classroom Teachers Association (CTA) representing the classroom
teachers and the Classified Employees Association (CEA) representing the
support staff at the schools. A third association, the Administrators
Association (AdA), represents managerial interests in district schools.

Turning to IBB occurred after the superintendent imposed a contract
settlement that did little to reduce the animosity among the parties or
muffle criticism of the public school system from the media. After being
trained in this style of negotiating by outside consultants, collective
bargaining among the three associations and the superintendent\'s office
became less antagonistic, provided most of the parties with satisfactory
results, and no longer attracted the critical attention of the media. In
the process, it gave all the involved parties a greater appreciation of
what each confronted and how difficult classroom education was becoming.

Yet, while IBB improved the labor relations in the school district, it
had little effect on the schools themselves. To that end, in the spring
of 1998 the district and the associations adopted a plan for the joint
labor-management-community administration of a new school scheduled to
open in August 1999. This new initiative would replace the traditional
collective bargaining relationship in a school with a revolutionary
cooperative agreement among teachers, support staff, administrators,
parents, and students.

Such a plan was not automatically embraced, and many were skeptical of
the entire idea. To build support for the plan, Doug Kilgore, the NEA\'s
UniServ Director in the area, organized a series of study sessions on
joint labor-management relationships for Superintendent Diaz and the
leaders of the respective associations. Those sessions culminated in
early 1998 with a tour of the Saturn Automobile plant in Tennessee to
study how the United Autoworkers and General Motors had developed their
unique style of workplace cooperation. Each association was represented
on this trip. Participants returned seeking to follow the Saturn model
as best they could.

Association and district leaders recruited volunteers from the ranks of
the three associations and formed a design team to begin planning the
joint relationship and educational operations of the new school. This
design team began work on a charter document along with exercises and
meetings through which the participants might learn about each other.
Facilitators from within the superintendent\'s office and from the
NEA-affiliated associations assisted the parties during these meetings.
Private-sector consultants were also brought in to train the parties in
joint labor-management relationships, and some members of the design
team even made a second trip to Saturn to learn more about
labor-management cooperation. These meetings took place during
after-school hours and on weekends. During its initial meetings, the
design team selected the principal for the new school.

The combination of three problems, however, undercut the efforts of the
design team. Budgetary constraints, too little time, and the failure to
address some outstanding tensions between labor and management leaders
on the design team meant that some key disagreements about the nature of
the joint relationship at the school were never addressed. As a result,
school administrators along with some of the teachers and the support
staff never fully embraced the joint relationship for governing the
school, the work of the parties was diverted over disputes over how to
manage the school, and the school\'s governance structure did not
develop into what district leaders had originally hoped it would. The
AdA representatives on the design team were especially concerned by
their belief that some aggressive union members looked on the design
team as a way to put the \"workers\" in charge and to make
administrators at the school unnecessary. In response, the
administrators dug in to defend their authority against any challenge to
their role. This distrust coupled to the inherent weaknesses of the
design team \-- its volunteer character and the participants\' limited
budget and time \-- pushed development of the labor-management
relationship to the background as participants struggled to open the new
school on time.

As a result, there was little common ground between teachers and support
staff on one side who wanted to create a completely new and as
\"perfect\" as possible school and on the other side those
administrators whose mission was to open the school on time. For the
latter group, trying to build and open a new school while simultaneously
designing an entire new governance structure to run it required too much
effort in too little time. As the meetings dragged on through 1998 and
the school\'s scheduled opening was drawing ever closer, they began to
act on their own initiative, bypassing the design team and the
procedures it had established.

The members of the design team were still meeting, however, juggling
their work and personal lives on top of their commitments to this new
joint relationship. By the end of 1998, they had largely finished the
design of school operations. Learning systems, hiring protocols, and
procedures for supplies, materials, and personnel were in place.
Moreover, a compact was now complete, providing a governance structure
that brought members of the three associations together at a variety of
decision-making levels \-- from the classroom to school policy-making.

Unfortunately, when the school opened in August 1999 such plans had no
one to carry them out. The decision-making bodies specified in the
compact were barely functioning or did not exist at all because there
were no written guidelines for how people would implement the compact
and the plans of the design team. Moreover, between one-third to
one-half of the new teachers and support staff at the school were hired
with no idea about the nature of the joint relationship, nor did they
have any training in how worker-management cooperation was supposed to
work. Further, the link to the community and parents \-- the third triad
to the school\'s structure \-- was all but forgotten.

The failure to come together at the beginning of the process, the
pressure on the parties to put aside all issues but those related to the
planning and opening of the new school, and the limited authority
participants had in the design process because of their volunteer
positions made keeping the project centered around establishing school
policies and rules a difficult prospect from the start. Instead of
working together on how to govern the school jointly, several teachers
and a few support staffers ended up waging a battle with administrators
over who would manage the school. Confrontations and allegations of
conspiracies became common occurrences, and all sides acknowledged that
these failures to get along were not helping the students get the
education they needed. Even such a simple a problem as keeping students
out of the school\'s hallways during class time proved too elusive to
solve in this climate.

Despite these setbacks, during the first year some of the teachers and
staff who had participated in the original planning started reaching out
to their colleagues to explain the unique goals and structure of the
school and to invigorate still-dormant decision-making bodies. At the
end of the year, all the governing bodies spelled out in the compact
were at least functioning. But, an effort during the second year of the
school\'s existence to get the joint relationship fully implemented
failed, and district and association leaders decided to end the
experiment. The substance of a joint relationship did not exist, and the
continued in-fighting among school personnel made a joint relationship
increasingly an impossibility.

Nonetheless, there was much that succeeded at César Chávez. The joint
effort in planning the new school, the ideals regarding school
governance now taking hold among teachers, support staff, and frontline
administrators, and the creation of the new school itself showcased a
remarkable endeavor. Unfortunately, this effort was diverted into an
unhealthy debate over school management that no one had any authority to
resolve, and as a result a new culture as well as a practical
understanding for working together never developed. As a result, new
programs were achieved but fundamental change was not.