Victor Forberger

Center for Urban and Regional Policy

Northeastern University

César Chávez High School represents a unique experiment in public
education at a time and in a place where education has been under heavy
and continuing attack and where public schools must compete for both
students and financing. While the experiment failed to achieve the
ultimate objectives of district and association leaders in the Phoenix
Union High School District (Phoenix Union), association members and
school administrators came together in new, cooperative ways to design
school programs and to develop a new student curriculum. These
achievements were based on the use of Interest-Based bargaining and the
attempted adoption of a Saturn-style "enterprise compact."

**Interest-Based Bargaining** \-- The effort at César Chávez began
several years before the school existed with the development of
Interest-Based Bargaining (IBB) between the leadership of the district
and the three associations representing the teachers, support staff, and
administrators.

Prior to the use of IBB, annual contract talks between the three
associations had been acrimonious and had attracted criticism from the
general public and the media. After extensive training in the use of IBB
for association and district leaders and even some of the elected
members of the school board, the parties no longer pushed for bargaining
victories in contract talks but looked to share information and work
collaboratively to find options that satisfied all concerned. In the
process, the relationship among the parties improved.

The new emphasis in contract bargaining not only improved the annual
talks regarding the labor agreement but it also opened up avenues of
communication among district and association leaders. They began meeting
both informally and formally to discuss issues and events in the
district as they arose, and they even instituted a formal
decision-making body called the Presidents\' Council to oversee district
policy-making. Teachers, staff, and administrative representatives
worked with the association and superintendent's representatives to
address issues such as teacher and staff training, school collaboration,
collective bargaining, and community involvement. The Presidents\'
Council served as the supervisory body for all these discussions.

Interest-based bargaining, however, could not adequately address many of
the structural problems in school governance that existed within the
individual schools. Too many committees and groups in the schools had
similar authority over issues of school governance, and so much of the
time school reform ended up being little more than spinning wheels.
Something that transformed individual school operations was needed. For
that purpose, district and association leaders turned to a model joint
relationship pioneered at the Saturn car company.

**Use of the Saturn model** \-- Two concerns were at the center of the
effort at César Chávez. First, association and district leaders wanted
to establish benchmarks for educational practices in the district. They
wanted to know what were the best ways to educate students and how to
put those methods into practice in a district school. Second, these same
leaders understood that the focus on school governance had to move from
the district office to the local school. Teachers, support staff, and
administrators in the local schools possessed a great deal of expertise
in educational practices, but much of that expertise was going unused
because of the top-down governance model of the district. Getting
educational decision-making into the schools could side-step that
bureaucracy. The issue for both association and district leaders was
somehow to get a cohesive group in place at a school without the
fractured policy-making and oversight found in current school management
policies.

The joint labor-management partnership developed at Saturn Motors served
as the model for how to overcome these problems. Under this plan
administrators, support staff, teachers, students, and the community
would work together in partnership and collaboration in deciding and
producing a successful education for students. All the participants
would have a chance to try new educational approaches, to assist in the
design of those new approaches, and to try any other mechanisms for
doing their work in order to have a better school and better-prepared
students. A classroom where the quality of the education offered was
constantly being scrutinized and improved would come when teachers and
support staff had the opportunity and the mechanisms to take part in the
administrative issues that shaped the broad outlines of educational
content.

**The compact** \-- To create this new structure for school governance
where teachers, support staff, and administrators worked together,
district and association leaders came together and designed a new
charter for the school. The new charter replaced the existing labor
agreements between the parties with a governing structure whereby
teachers, support staff, and administrators shared responsibility and
worked cooperatively. Administrators still had the final say on
educational issues, but they had to obtain input from several
decision-making bodies before making any decisions. Those
compact-specified bodies were an Education Action Council (EAC), a
Professional Unit Council (PUC), and Professional or Specialty Units.

-   The Professional/Specialty units were the basic building block for
    school governance. Within these units all educational matters at the
    school would be implemented. Representatives of these units would
    serve on the PUC, which served as a coordinating device and
    informational resource for all the various units at the school.
    Everything at the school would be done through the various
    Professional and Specialty Units, and it would be the PUC that
    provided oversight and coordination of those activities.

-   The EAC consisted of three representatives, one each from the three
    associations. It was the job of this Education Action Council to
    provide resources and information for the Professional/Specialty
    Units and the PUC.

-   The Presidents\' Council also had a role at the school as it
    provided overall supervision of the joint relationship and in
    working with the EAC assessed what district resources were needed at
    the school to maintain its operations.

**Joint design of school operations** \-- While the district
superintendent and the association presidents wrote the school\'s
charter, representatives from the three associations joined together and
designed the educational practices, personnel policies, and operating
programs of the new school. To accomplish this huge task, the group
divided itself into three separate units, each addressing a specific
element in the school\'s design. One group focused on the "learning
systems" at the school \-- the curriculum and programs at the school and
any possible educational innovations that might be developed at the new
school. Another group called "people systems" determined staffing needs,
hiring criteria, and the hiring process for the school. The final group,
"business systems," worked on the administration of the new school \--
how educational technology and such basic services as grounds-keeping
and security would be organized on the campus \-- and developed
community and business partnerships with the school. Each of these three
groups surveyed what best practices existed in and outside of the
district and then developed general plans for implementing those best
practices at César Chávez.

# 

# Problems with the joint relationship at César Chávez High School

These achievements did not come easily, however, and in many cases not
at all because members from all sides found themselves caught in a
fractious debate over who should be managing the school and how that
management should take place. Unfortunately, no one had the authority to
put an end to such bickering. These problems can be traced to three
factors.

-   *Mistrust created at the start*. A proposal at the very start of the
    process by some teachers and support staffers on the design team to
    replace assistant administrators with people from their ranks put
    administrators on the defensive and tainted it for some of the
    representatives from the other associations, as well. With distrust
    within the design team, a few participants began to think of how
    best to \"win\" this situation or at least not lose. So, while all
    the leaders of the three associations and the district
    whole-heartedly supported the joint relationship and were committed
    to full cooperation with each other, their representatives on the
    design team followed at times an agenda to protect or expand their
    \"turf\" at the expense of other association members.

-   *The limited authority of the participants*. Almost all the people
    on the design team served as volunteers, and as a result had no
    organizational authority to force issues to be addressed or make
    sure tasks were followed-up. Even when the school opened, many
    involved in the joint relationship took on those responsibilities as
    additional duties to their jobs as teachers or support staff. As a
    result, participation in the joint relationship never had the kind
    of importance associated with their traditional responsibilities. In
    such circumstances, the kind of cultural and organizational
    transformation needed to make a joint relationship work could not
    develop.

-   *Pressure to open the school*. The design team worked with roughly a
    one-year time span to open the new school. This left them an
    extremely difficult task by itself without the added responsibility
    of figuring out how the three associations were to work together at
    the new school. The pressure to open the school forced the parties
    to push ahead past disagreements and issues that should have been
    addressed and to skip past exercises and training needed to
    determine exactly how the parties were going to work together once
    the school opened.

Individually, these factors did not present insurmountable obstacles to
the joint relationship. But, in combination, they created an environment
that prevented the kind of cultural and personal transformation needed
to pursue a full joint relationship at César Chávez. Design team plans
for the school were ignored and at times even dismissed. The compact
itself proved ineffectual at maintaining the joint relationship because
the guidelines that spelled out how the compact would be implemented
were never developed. Participants from one association did not make the
problems and concerns of another association their own. Even third
parties brought in to assist the participants in working through their
differences found themselves facing the same set of problems as the
participants \-- including the participants\' mistrust. The kind of
trust that marked the development of the Presidents\' Council simply did
not exist within the school itself.