Union-Management Collaboration Can Help Public Schools

For most of the past decade the policy debate over improving U.S. public education has centered on teacher quality. In this debate, teachers and their unions have often been seen as the problem, not part of the solution. Further, current discourse often assumes that conflicting interests between teacher unions and administration is inevitable. What is missing in the discussion, however, is a systems perspective on the problem of public school reform that looks at the way schools are organized, and the way decisions are made. Most public schools today continue to follow an organizational design better suited for 20th century mass production than educating students in the 21st century.

"Reforming Public School Systems Through Sustained Union-Management Collaboration," a paper by Saul A. Rubinstein and John E. McCarthy, offers an alternate path in this debate—a counterstory that looks at schools as systems. It focuses on examples of collaboration among stakeholders through the creation of labor-management partnerships among teachers’ unions, school administrators, and school boards. These partnerships improve and restructure public schools from the inside to enhance planning, decision-making, problem solving, and the ways teachers interact and schools are organized.

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Governor Kasich offers shabby solutions

The Dispatch brings us news of one of the most appalling rationalizations for S.B.5 that the Governor has made to date. Because Bob Evans offers "shabby" benefits, teachers, firefighters and police should be worse off too.

Talking about the need for the collective bargaining overhaul he recently signed, Gov. John Kasich today suggested employees at Bob Evans have "shabby, at best" health insurance benefits.
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"You know, when I go to Bob Evans and I see a woman working in there who doesn't have any pension, and I don't even know that she has health care benefits, and if she does they're shabby, at best, to think we're asking public workers to do a little bit more, people who have guaranteed benefits and people who are not paying very much for their health care, and to ask them to a little bit more to provide balance to that mom who is trying to educate her kids, it's fairness."

The Governor has it backwards. Perhaps if workers at Bob Evans could collectively bargain, their benefits might not be so "shabby". Perhaps the Governor should be less excited to extended millions of dollars of tax payers money so the CEO of Bob Evans can have a shorter commute - and instead insist that companies receiving tax dollars provide their employees benefits that aren't "shabby".

It's time this Governor stopped believing that a race to the bottom is "winning".