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Teachers in New Haven, Connecticut recently ratified a contract that U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan praised as an “important progressive labor agreement” for its provisions on teacher evaluation and school reform. David Cicarella, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, recently told us about the agreement.

(Stay tuned tomorrow for an interview with New Haven district officials Garth Harries and Will Clark.)

Public School Insights: There has been a lot of praise given to the new contract in New Haven. What do you think are the most groundbreaking provisions of this agreement?

Cicarella: There are three components that get the most attention. One, our willingness to discuss tenure. Two, our willingness to talk about including test scores as a part of teacher evaluation. And three, the contract’s provisions for the closing and chartering of schools.

Public School Insights: Let’s start with tenure. What do you think the big accomplishment has been on that part of the agreement?

Cicarella: Historically, unions have been completely unwilling to discuss tenure, because it’s the only protection that teachers have against unfair dismissal.

But we’ve got to tighten up the dismissal process. We can’t have folks—and this is a complaint that the public makes and is legitimate—going through two, three, four years of improvement plan after improvement plan, when everyone knows that teacher is not doing a good job.

So with this agreement, we decided that in talking about removing tenured teachers we can’t have the same old fight where we say “You can’t touch the teacher because they have tenure,” and they say “We are going after the teacher because we have our administrative evaluations in place.”

The biggest difference with this agreement is that it says this: If you have a problem with a tenured teacher, you do your evaluations. Do a plan of improvement, or whatever support mechanism you put in place. If the teacher responds and improvement is made, terrific. If they don’t respond, what happens next? Give them to us.

We are going to establish a peer assistance and review program. That’s fairly common—lots of districts have them. It’s done different ways in different places. In New Haven we will have master teachers that we have selected and trained support and review the performance of tenured teachers that administrators consider ineffective.

We are going to use this procedure because, quite frankly, we don’t necessarily trust their evaluations to be accurate.

In New Haven, there is very much a mixed bag. We have some outstanding administrators who could go anywhere and do a great job. We have some who, quite frankly, couldn’t go anyplace else and who shouldn’t be administrators.

We have those folks evaluating our teachers. So we are saying in this agreement that after you evaluate these teachers, give them to us. We’ll put them in our peer assistance and review program. If the teacher improves while working with us, terrific.

If they don’t, the difference is now that we are willing to say, “We agree with you.” You evaluated the teacher and found them to be lacking with classroom management, instruction, maybe both. We see the same thing. Now what are we going do about it?

So again, we are willing to look at and discuss tenured folks. But we want to have confidence that if we are going to look at a tenured teacher, we have afforded that person every opportunity to improve.

Public School Insights: What do you think the incentive is for peer review teachers—those actually reviewing the teachers in question—to counsel those teachers out of the profession if they don’t improve?

Cicarella: The peer review teachers will not necessarily be the ones who have to counsel them out. We’ll do that as a union.

This system acts as a check and balance for us, to make sure we’ve had an opportunity to look at these teachers in case we have some difference of opinion about performance. The role of peer reviewers is to give us their report, their observations. They may say, “We don’t see it—we think this teacher has done a pretty good job” or “We think this teacher has made improvement and want to continue this support.”

If they do, in fact, say that they see the same thing—that a teacher doesn’t have it and is not responding to the support plan—then we have to be willing to look at those folks and say, “Maybe this is just not the job for you.”

There is one area where there is some misconception: We haven’t changed the tenure law.

Connecticut’s tenure law is simply a fair dismissal policy. What we’re saying as a union, and this isn’t any different from before, is that we have the option to support teachers in challenging the termination process. However, while it is our option, we are going to make the decision that we are not going to do it if we agree with the assessment—if you’ve done your support plan and evaluations and we’ve done ours and our colleagues are telling us that it’s just not working.

So we won’t necessarily provide tenure protection. However, for the teacher, it’s a statutory right. The teacher could still say, “I’m going to do it on my own” and get an attorney, et cetera. But usually at that point, when the teacher realizes the union has agreed this is not something worth pursuing, they are going to say they should probably just move on.

We are not looking to punish anyone; in fact it is just the opposite. We want to make certain that tenured teachers have been afforded every opportunity to improve. But we are committed to make sure that the best people are in our classrooms.

Public School Insights: The second area you mentioned involved using test scores in the evaluation of teachers. Could you elaborate on that?

Cicarella: In the past, this was another subject that was off limits. Teacher unions would never even discuss it, for good reasons—there are too many factors beyond a teacher’s control that impact student test scores for teachers to be held solely accountable for those scores. And these tests were not designed to rank schools or judge teachers—they were designed to drive instruction.

However, the fact of the matter is that the tests are here to stay. And scores are looked at in these ways. And people do want us to respond to that.

So our response is: We will. We understand that test scores are important and that there is accountability on the teacher’s part for instruction. But we want to make sure test scores are used properly.

So what we have said in this agreement is that we will include test scores in teacher evaluations. But we’re going to sit down together--administrators and union representatives--to work out how.

Are we going to have some formula for teacher evaluations, so they will be 30% test scores, 30% this, et cetera? It’s not going to be like that. But we are willing to look at it, and we are going to determine the most appropriate use of test scores in evaluating teacher performance.

Public School Insights: I understand that one of the ideas under discussion is that if bonuses are awarded on the basis of test scores, they be awarded for the entire school. Is that right?

Cicarella: That is exactly right.

We want to make sure that we reward people, give some incentive for hard work and accomplishment. At the same time, using an individual teacher’s test scores is just too difficult. It pits one teacher against another. And how can you possibly fairly put a number on that type of thing?

Our feeling is a school-based bonus, where everyone participates—the principal, teachers, paraprofessional, custodians, cafeteria workers…everyone—is the best answer.

So at a school, they will set up benchmarks. They’ll determine their goals for reading, their goals for math, increasing parental involvement,reducing suspensions, how much improvement they want to see grade-by-grade, subject by subject. Then in the end, using whatever amount of money the school gets as their bonus, they’ll decide how much the principal gets, how much the individual teacher gets, how much cafeteria workers get, et cetera.

The idea there is that everyone is invested. No one will turn a blind eye to a student, thinking that it’s not his or her problem. Everyone is invested, working together, and there is a bonus attached to it.

Public School Insights: Let’s move on to the third point you mentioned—closing or reconstituting persistently struggling schools. What do you think is the essence of that provision in this agreement?

Cicarella: We’ve allowed for great flexibility. Everything has been on the table in terms of what you can do if you’re going to close down a school and reconstitute it. Can you bring in a third party operator? Yes, you can. Can you make a longer school day? If that is what you think is necessary. What about new reading programs, new math programs, et cetera? Absolutely.

With this agreement, we have said that if you need to charter a school, that’s fine. Our only position is that you don’t need nonunion charter schools. The unions are not the problem, and to make charters nonunion really flies in the face of all the research. Eighty-three percent (83%) of nonunion charter schools have performed no better or significantly worse than traditional public schools. So nonunion charters are not the way. Do this with us. We have a lot of expertise on it at the national and state level and we have a lot of resources we can, and will, put into it.

Again, everything is up for discussion and there are a lot of different components to this agreement, but this closing and chartering gets an awful lot of attention. And I understand that. But in New Haven, there are 47 schools. They are talking about chartering out perhaps two or three next year.

So it’s not like the whole school system is going to be closed down and we are going to charter everyone out. This is the most extreme measure. It comes after a series of interventions when they don’t see the improvement they are looking for. At that point, they may say, “Look, we have tried everything else, we need to try this.”

Our position is, as a union, we agree. If we have gotten to that point, where we just don’t see the progress, despite everyone’s best efforts, we probably should go to something like this.

Public School Insights: I understand that during the close-down process, there are some implications for staff in those schools—that they are going to be asked to reapply. Is that correct?

Cicarella: That is correct. We want to give the administration, whether it’s the same principal, a new principal or a third party operator--whoever comes in to run the school—the opportunity to pick their staff. So everyone in that building will reapply, though obviously some of those teachers have done a good job.

Whatever changes will happen at the school, they have to let us know by March 15. So if they determine they are going to close down a school, by March 15 they going to say, “Here is the school being chartered out, and this is what we are doing.” They may lay out longer schools days, more days each year, staff meetings on different days…They will list out the parameters for the working conditions.

Then teachers will look at it, and maybe say, “I can’t do it.” It may be too long a day, they may have day care issues, part-time jobs, graduate school—whatever it may be. And some will not choose to be there because they just don’t like the way the program looks. Other folks will say, “That’s for me.”

So whoever wants to stay does have to reapply. And anyone else in the district can also apply. They can look at that school’s charter and say, “That is something I want to do.”

At the end of the day, the new principal, new administration, whoever it might be…they get to choose. And let’s say they have 50 openings and chose 30 people from the district. They may tell the superintendent, “For our program, of the applicants we have, we only have about 30 that are good fits in our opinion. We need to hire 20 more or so from the outside.” They are free to do that.

We also have a process for changing school working conditions, like creating longer school hours, if 75 percent of the staff in a school agree to the change

Public School Insights: As I am sure you are aware, when you read the news about school reform, all the stories seem to be about debates that leave blood on the floor. Big fights. That doesn’t seem to have happened in New Haven. What do you think made it possible to have such a collaborative atmosphere there?

Cicarella: Our position was, we’ll talk about anything. Anything you want to talk about. With tenure and test scores, we had to make sure those were framed properly. But we’ll still talk about them.

And it was the same thing on the administrators’ side. In our initial talks with the administration, myself and a couple of my executive board folks, we decided that everything needed to be on the table, and we needed to have some compromise.

All we have ever done in the past—not just in New Haven but I think in education in general—is work around the perimeter. We make some changes around the edges, and then hopefully everybody will go away and we can go back to what we always done. That’s kind of been everyone’s position. And if we’re making changes then we’re saying we’ve done something wrong in the past, and it’s hard for folks to admit to that.

As a union, we had to recognize that if things are going to improve, we need to do some things differently. We don’t have to throw everything out, but we certainly need to make changes. And we have to be willing to look at everything, including things we were not willing to look at in the past.

The same thing on the other side. They had to be willing to do that. And if they were up there saying, “We’re going to fire all these teachers, we are going to get rid of tenure, and we’re going to charter out all our schools,” then we wouldn’t be able to have any discussion.

So initially all our discussions were based around the need for flexibility and compromise—working in from the ends, the two opposite poles, to get closer to the middle.

Maybe the final point…If you think of a continuum from 1 to 10, with us at 10, them at 1. Ideally things would settle at a 5. Well, sometimes we moved closer to them, to a 3 or a 4. Other times they slid closer to us, to a 6 or 7. So we tried to be reasonable and arrive at the center, but there were some things we had to give to them and other things they had to give to us.

That was the guiding principle the whole way, that this was going to require some compromise. And we couldn‘t just say, “No, we’re not going to talk about that.” And they couldn’t just say, “We’re going to do that, no matter what you say.”

Throughout the entire discussion, everything was open for discussion.