(New Bedford) Management, teachers union remain worlds apart

Just to prove I am one of those folks that believes there really is a world on the other side of THE Canal, I'm including an interesting article from this morning's NBST re: discussions with their local school union.

From Jack Spillane column in New Bedford Standard Times 8/12/2010:

How afraid is Superintendent Mary Louise Francis of the New Bedford teachers union?

Very afraid.

How afraid is the New Bedford political establishment?

Terrified.

The silence from the movers and shakers in this city in the wake of the New Bedford Educators Association's outrageous vote against accepting a one-year wage freeze — a vote that resulted in the layoffs of more than 100 teachers and class sizes as large as 40 pupils — has torn back the veil on the way unions function in New Bedford government.

The only elected official of stature who has expressed any level of outrage at the teachers' selfish attitude — and that was milquetoast — was Mayor Scott Lang.

"I'm not surprised by it, but I also think that it is, again, penny wise and pound foolish from an educational standpoint," he said.

That's it.

No outrage. No anger. None of the mayor's famous shout-outs for Team New Bedford.

The mayor, the ex-officio chairman of the committee, had nothing to say about the responsibility of the teachers to be part of a school team. He had nothing to say about their responsibility to put the education of the city's schoolchildren over short-term financial gain.

And who could blame him?

The last time Lang stepped out on a shaky union branch, the city firefighters hosed him real good.

As for the rest of the School Committee, John Fletcher seemed to reflect members' ineffectualness when he announced he certainly would not stand for something over which he has no control. "Certainly, I will not consider having 40 children in the classroom. I will fight against that," he said.  

Not sure what kind of fighting old Doc Fletcher can do, though.

As the result of last week's vote in Congress, there's some federal money coming to bring back teachers. But whatever money is coming, it will never be enough to prevent all these layoffs.

Not a single teacher coming out of the closed-door vote in favor of their pensions, the vote in favor of the layoffs of their fellow teachers, the vote in favor of the bigger classrooms, would talk to the media.  Like kids with their hands in the parents' wallets, they seemed to know there was no good explanation.

One person claiming to be a teacher wrote the paper anonymously — he or she is evidently terrified, too — that the entire story hadn't come out.  "Our union board did not give us the opportunity to vote on a wage freeze. We only voted on a counter proposal," he or she wrote.

I wrote him or her back saying we'd like a comment from a teacher about this mysterious "counter proposal."

I got no response.

The teachers, especially the older ones, have other things on their minds, like the fact that they (like all other government employees in Massachusetts) bump up their pensions with annual pay raises; the retirement formula is always based on the highest three years.

Now they say former Superintendent Mike Longo, a good old boy if I've ever known one, knew how to handle the teachers' union.

Right after Longo was hired, he gave the teachers a healthy raise — between 6.5 percent and 8.5 percent (in the top step) — over three years. After that, Longo could make the union toe his line.

But the days when there was money to give out healthy raises are gone. Superintendent Mary Louise Francis was mostly silent through this union debacle.

She's contacting the state about finding residual money that she knows is often available in state programs.

Francis knows how to find money, but rest assured it won't be enough money to bring all the teachers back.

If I was teachers union president Lou St. John, I'd be terrified of Francis.

Ahm ... not.

Given the silence of the local lambs when it comes to calling out the New Bedford teachers union, I finally sought out guidance from another well-known educator: Dr. Nick Fischer, the guy credited with bringing reform to the Fall River system, just before they chased him out of town in 2008.

Fischer said that last year, his first in New London, Conn., teachers agreed to wage freezes for two consecutive years, and a 2 percent increase in the third.

Fischer didn't seek me out — I sought him. And he didn't bash the union, saying instead that its position is understandable, that building up a positive relationship with a union takes time.

His impression, Fischer said, is that New Bedford's management and union are stuck in an AFL-CIO-type, tough-negotiation model.

Teachers often feel under-appreciated for their tough job and decide that their only recourse is to look out for themselves.

Changing a relationship with a sour union is partly a matter of building confidence, he said.

One of the things he's done in New London is make sure the union is one of the first parties notified when there's a staff person who needs to be held accountable, he said.

"I think that's helped develop some credibility that we're not playing a game of 'gotcha,'" he said.

New Bedford, however, is not New London. It seems stuck in that AFL-CIO model.

It's going to take a different model of leadership than we've seen so far to break through with this city's unions, to break through with this city's schools.