NEGOTIATING EDUCATION

The Maine Education Association, the teachers’ union, has gone before the Legislature repeatedly for decades to ask that teachers gain more control of local education policy by making the policies part of negotiations at contract time. The Legislature has rejected this request each time, but when it does so again this year it should also urge the union and state officials to find another way to address the union’s concerns.

LD 1344 would redefine issues that are now considered educational decisions to be made by school boards – length of the school year, length of the teacher’s work day, amount of teacher planning time and standards for evaluation of teachers – and make them conditions of employment. Why legislators would want to take policy decisions out of the public arena of a school board meeting and leave them up to contract negotiators is not clear, but one effect would be to limit local citizen participation in the process. Collective bargaining occurs without public oversight and is not subject to Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, and neither is the binding arbitration that may emerge as a result.

The teachers’ union says it needs this opportunity because “teachers are being given production quotas, assigned endless paperwork, micro-managed and ordered to turn out standardized student test scores.” Even if this is hyperbolic, there is truth in it. Teachers sometimes are given too much paperwork, too little preparation time and too much responsibility for how well a student scores on a standardized test. They should speak out about these issues, but taking policy-making out of the public arena and putting it behind closed doors is not a satisfactory answer.

School boards and unions already bargain over working condition issues such as wages and benefits or classes of employees. And the teachers’ union already participates in forming policy by its members serving on task forces or committees that review curriculum. Before school boards adopt any changes in education policy they must notify the union. Opportunities for input already exist, but the repeated submission of this bill suggests that all sides need to work together on another approach to the problem.

One way to do that was offered by Maine’s new education commissioner, Sue Gendron, who last week said she would support a modified version of LD 1344, which would form a study commission to figure out the best way to ensure teachers are heard on policy questions without sacrificing the public’s role or creating a confrontational atmosphere over countless issues. This could produce more constructive policy and would certainly save a lot of headaches at contract time.