Leadership magazine May/June 2015 V 44 No 5 | Page 12

Effective

labor-management

partnerships

This district’s partnership
is about more than civil
cooperation. Labor and
management actually work
together to improve
student achievement.

12

Leadership

I

n recent years, there has been mounting interest in building strong collaborative relationships between labor
and management as part of school
improvement efforts.
The U.S. Department of Education has
sponsored national conferences about collaborative models of school improvement
each year since 2011. Organizations such as
the American Federation of Teachers, the
National Education Association, the American Association of School Administrators,
the National School Boards Association, the
Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service,
the Council of the Great City Schools and
the Council of Chief State School Officers
have been co-sponsors.
At each conference, approximately 100
school district teams that include the superintendent, local union president and the
board of education president learn more
about labor-management collaboration
from other districts across the country. I
have been asked numerous times to share at

these conferences how ABC Unified School
District in southeast Los Angeles County
created and sustained a successful labormanagement partnership for over 15 years.

The power of collective capacity
It’s encouraging to recognize that the importance of labor-management collaboration is growing. Michael Fullan, professor
emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies
in Education, University of Toronto notes:
“The power of collective capacity is that it
enables ordinary people to accomplish extraordinary things – for two reasons. One is
that knowledge about effective practice becomes more widely available and accessible
on a daily basis. The second reason is more
powerful still – working together generates
commitment.”
Many of us are aware that systemic change
requires collaboration, especially in imple-

Mary Sieu