Public School Policy

Last year, after years of refusal, the Legislature did not simply reject the Maine Education Association’s bill requiring that teachers gain more control of local education policy by making the policies part of negotiations at contract time. It assembled a task force to find out more about teacher workload and stress and about communication between teachers and administrators.

Though the studies are not yet complete, the bill was in the Legislature this winter again anyway, where even an amended version did not win majority support from the Education Committee. There was no reason it should have; the task force should finish its work and offer alternatives to the often-defeated legislation.

LD 1344 would redefine issues that are now considered education policy decisions to be made by school boards – length of the school year, amount of teacher planning time and standards for evaluation of teachers – and make them conditions of an employment contract. 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. Collective bargaining occurs without public oversight and is not subject to Maine’s Freedom of Access Act, and neither is the arbitration that may emerge as a result.

The bill was amended this time to make this area of bargaining optional, but that hardly changes the problem – lots of what goes into a contract is theoretically optional until one side or the other insists on it. School boards and unions already bargain over working conditions 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. Superintendents meet regularly with the union or with other teacher representatives, and the initial data on “meet and consult” outcomes don’t suggest any significant problems overall.

First at the state level and now at the federal, lawmakers have taken school policy issues away from boards and voters and handed it to education departments. On occasion there is reason to do this, and while the reaction to the state’s Learning Results or the federal No Child Left Behind Act is less than uniformly positive, at least there are elected officials ultimately responsible for the policies. Making them part of the give-and-take of contract negotiations takes away even that tissue of accountability.

If the task force turns up specific problems with teacher workloads, it should make recommendations for solving these problems. If it finds superintendents aren’t responsive to legitimate teacher concerns, it should urge those districts to find new superintendents. But turning these issues into a contract dispute serves neither side well and cuts the public out of the debate.