Bargaining within the school culture: school cultures are unique, which has a lot to do with the unpredictable and sometimes irrational behavior that can occur at the bargaining table.

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice fell into the rabbit hole and encountered a world in which absolutely nothing made sense to her. When it comes to collective bargaining, most educational leaders feel as if they have fallen into that same rabbit hole and entered a world in which nothing seems to follow a logical set of behavioral principles. The world of collective bargaining seems to defy everything that we assume governs human behavior.

The truth that educational leaders must accept is that school cultures are not the "real world." In actuality, school cultures are unique and often don't make sense. In 1932, Willard Waller wrote: "Schools have a culture that is definitely their own. There are, in the schools, complex rituals of personal relationships, a set of folkways, mores, and irrational sanctions--and a moral code based upon them.... There are traditions, and traditionalists waging their world-old battle against innovators."

Even though this was written more than 70 years ago, the unique ethos of schools hasn't changed. Deal and Peterson (1999) believe that "the term 'culture' provides a more accurate and intuitively appealing way to help school leaders bet ter understand their school's own unwritten rules and traditions, norms and expectations that seem to permeate everything: the way people act, how they dress, what they talk about or avoid talking about, whether they seek out colleagues for help or don't, and how teachers feel about their work and their students."

When it comes to collective bargaining, the school culture has everything to do with the unpredictable and sometimes irrational behavior that school leaders experience. When confronting the uniqueness of school cultures, the key to understanding and leading through the trials and tribulations of collective bargaining is to recognize the uniqueness of the people who enter and stay in the teaching profession.

Unique qualities of teachers

Teachers and administrators are not representative of the public at large. Those who enter teaching have unique qualities that make them well suited for the job. While general society is made up of extremely diverse personalities, the people who make up the teaching profession represent a very small segment of that larger group.

In the 1950s, Isabel Briggs Myers discovered the work of Carl Jung, who felt that people were different in very fundamental ways. Everyone is driven by the same factors, but each person has an instinct that drives them, and this preference determines how we function.

Because of these preferences we can be "typed." Myers then enlisted the help of her mother, Katharine Briggs, and together they developed the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. The MBTI has been given widely, and comes in various forms, such as the popular "True Colors" assessment.

While most people find the uncovering of their own individual type to be enlightening, very few recognize the implications that the work of Jung, as well as Myers and Briggs, has for school leaders. When it comes to collective bargaining, the research on teacher types becomes the key to understanding why the cultural behaviors that are so often thought to be irrational and illogical actually are very predictable and make sense.

To gain a clear understanding there nmst first be a brief explanation of the types identified by the MBTI. It is important to recognize that the following explanation will be a very brief simplification of a complex subject area.

Who are we?

The MBTI identifies how we see the world and how we respond to our own unique interpretation of the world. Myers and Briggs divided everyone into four specific groups. Within these four main groups there are four more subgroups, for a total of 16 groups. Each person falls into one of these four main groups and then into one of the 16 specific subgroups.

It is important to recognize that just because we fall into one of these groups doesn't mean that we are rigidly locked into specific behaviors and don't have a full range of emotions or feelings. The MBTI identifies "preferences," or the way in which we seek and find the greatest comfort in reacting to the world around us.

We might feel pretty eclectic in our preferences because no one likes to think they can be labeled, but the reality is that when we are faced with a stressful situation, like highly emotional negotiations, we retreat into our own preference type.

The four groups: SP, SJ, NF and NT

The first group is the Sensory Perceiving (SP). The SPs are the people who bring fun into the world. These people are the fun seekers and if it isn't enjoyable, they won't do it--or if they do, they will be miserable until they can break the bonds and move onto something they enjoy. For the SP, to be impulsive is to be really alive. The SP thrives on situations in which the outcome is not known or predictable.

The second group is the Sensory Judging (SJ). The SJs exhibit an incredible sense of duty and they seem to exist primarily to be useful to the social units they belong to. The SJ is a giver, not a taker. When there is a job to be done, the SJ can be counted on to step forward, or feel incredibly guilty for not meeting the obligation. The SJs are the ones who keep things rolling in our society.

The third group is the iNtuitive Feeling (NF). The NFs are extremely sensitive people. When it comes to making a decision, the NFs will go with their feelings about what may seem to be clear, hard data. They hunger for self-actualization. Their emotions often take over their judgment, and they have the ability to feel and care deeply for other human beings. The NFs are often writers, artists, philosophy professors, theologians and musicians.

The fourth group is the iNtuitive Thinking (NT). The NTs love and highly value competence. Where the SP will participate in spontaneous play, the NT will organize and structure activity because they understand that logically it is important for their health. They want a structured and ordered world that is explainable. These types can be found in professions that require a high degree of logical clarity. They are mathematicians, engineers and scientists.

There is no single "best" type. Everyone makes a contribution, and to have a truly healthy culture there must be a healthy number of each type. At times, everyone will exhibit behaviors that are characteristic of all four types, but when under stress we tend to retreat into our own preferences, where we are truly most comfortable.

The premise of this article is that schools are unique cultures. When elementary teachers are compared with the distribution of the four types in the general population, it becomes easy to see a marked difference. The chart above shows the general distribution of types and the percentages of elementary teachers of the same type.

What becomes immediately apparent is the more than doubling of NFs, from 12 percent in the general population all the way up to 26 percent among elementary teachers. This is easily explained by the NFs' need to help others, their empathy and their desire to have an impact on the lives of children.

The increase of SJs from 38 percent of the general population to 49 percent of elementary teachers may not seem as dramatic as the shift in NFs. However, when the four main groups are broken down into sub-groups, the difference is significant.

The lack of NTs and SPs among teachers is dramatic. While there is no specific research to identify why they avoid teaching, it can be speculated that it might be because teaching isn't logical; our educational system just doesn't make sense. For the SPs there is no immediate excitement because schools and teaching are not a lot of fun, at least in the short term. For the SPs, teaching is a lot of work without many immediate and exciting rewards.

Public school leaders must be aware of the individual types that make up the culture of the school and district so that leadership styles can be adjusted. The first thing to recognize is that SJs and NFs do not work well together. They are motivated by completely different factors.

The SJ is motivated by a powerful sense of obligation and responsibility, whereas the NFs are motivated by their emotional needs and their sense of caring for the individual child and for others.

When added together, these two types make up about 75 percent of all elementary teachers and help drive the unique culture of a school.

Job actions and solidarity

One of the questions asked most often during heated negotiations is why teachers follow their leadership in what seems to be a blind manner. To many administrators it appears that teachers don't want to know the truth about the issues.

A personal anecdote might help clarify this question. "Ed Smith" was an excellent veteran teacher of English and social science. During a period of extremely tense negotiations, a young assistant principal was having a conversation with Ed and realized that Ed had no idea what the real issues were in negotiations.

The young administrator asked Ed if he taught his students to carefully examine all sides of an issue before reaching a conclusion. Ed responded that indeed he did, and that he knew how important that was in a free society. The young adminis trator then suggested that Ed go and meet with the superintendent and seek out the other side of the issue in negotiations.

"Oh no," said Ed. "I can't do that. It would show that I don't trust my union leaders. It would destroy the solidarity that we have built up."

Ed exhibited classic SJ preferences. He had a powerful sense of obligation and responsibility to the leadership of his organization, and even though there was a disconnect between what he taught his students to do, his sense of obligation over-powered his intellectual curiosity.

It should also be noted that SJs have a very difficult time during job actions, such as slow downs, because their powerful sense of obligation to their students conflicts with their obligation to their union leadership. Following a strike, the SJ may feel conflicted for years.

The NF is motivated by how they are respected as valued individuals. Traditionally, union rhetoric has targeted the core emotions of the NF. Union rhetoric such as "they don't respect you" or "they don't appreciate you" has a powerful impact on the NF. You can never develop a solid working and personal relationship with an NF if they feel that you don't trust or respect them.

Give me the facts

In many districts, collective bargaining moves along slowly, with very little attention paid to what is happening at the negotiating table. As things start to build into a deadlock, the union will begin ramping up the rhetoric to its membership. This may start as a whispering campaign and then regular newsletters will start coming out. The newsletters will tell the staff of the reluctance of the district to be fair in its offer, and the "lack of respect" the administration has for teachers.

The "facts" will be so distorted that the district's negotiating team and board will wonder where the information came from. Facts will be hidden, and even over-powered by emotional rhetoric. Finally, when the board and superintendent have had enough and feel like they must move to a more aggressive position, they put out a very logical "fact sheet." The fact sheet will be full of numbers and formulas and clear justification for the position that they have taken in negotiations.

This fact sheet will have a major impact on the NTs in the school system, except NTs make up only 10 percent of the teaching staff! Typically, the business manager (usually an NF) will wonder why the staff just doesn't understand the "facts." To illustrate this reality we only need to look at the communication from a real (but unnamed) school district during the 2006-07 school year.

District fact sheet: "As occurs every year, the Governing Board must balance competing priorities and make choices about how to spend its limited resources ... The District has committed the following to compensation improvements (salary and/or benefits) for its employee groups. These amounts reflect a proposed 5.25 percent increase to employee salaries and benefits." (The bargaining update from the district was four pages long!)

Union response: "(During negotiations) we presented spreadsheets showing where this offer would put us in comparison to our agreed-upon list of (comparison) districts; we also provided spreadsheets illustrating the district's offer of 5.25 percent. It was immediately made clear by the district that their offer is still 'fair and reasonable,' while ours, it appears, is neither fair nor reasonable.... Now, in a year when the district has received a sizable COLA and a repayment from the state, we are expected to be grateful for less of a percentage than we received in the past? ... There are things that you can actively do to make sure that your voice is heard. Until a settlement is reached, we will continue to emphasize the following: The future depends on the present." (The negotiations update from the union was one page long.)

Greater emotional impact

The union updates will vastly outnumber the district updates and have a much greater emotional impact on the teaching staff. Note that he union alluded to the fact that the district didn't think they were "fair and reasonable" people, thus implying that the district doesn't respect, value or trust its teachers. The union update illustrates how the union is building solidarity among its members.

It should be noted that in this particular district, the negotiation process hadn't even reached the impasse stage when these updates were distributed. As mediation drags on, the union rhetoric focusing on fairness, respect, trust and solidarity will dramatically escalate as it builds stronger and stronger support from its members.

What can a school district do to counter the position of the union? Ira school district waits until negotiations begin to stalemate, there is very little that can be done to counter the powerful position the union holds. The union's advantage rests in its ability to gain the allegiance of its members, since unions are seen as the protectors of the teachers. When a teacher is being "attacked by the administration," it is the union that comes to his or her rescue.

In a perfect world, employees would be dedicated to the employer, but in a school system the teachers feel an allegiance to the organization that they perceive to be looking out for their interests and caring about them. At the conclusion of negotiations, the union will always point out, "We got you the raise from the Them (the district)."

Effective communication is proactive

The development of an effective communication system for NFs and SJs involves a very pro-active effort. To effectively communicate with NFs and SJs,

Dunning (2003) feels that communication must:

* be organized and efiqcient;

* be made well ahead of time in order to provide time to process the situation;

* avoid ambiguity and surprises;

* focus on developing rapport and trust while showing a strong sense of understanding of how the teacher feels; and

* be an attempt to create a harmonious environment while showing the impact it has on people.

Communication about issues facing a school district cannot wait until the eleventh hour. An organized and ongoing system of communication must be in place 365 days a year.

When the governor presents the state budget in January, the teachers need to know the implications of the budget for them and their schools. Continual updates must be given, with a careful analysis of how the various factors affect everyone. Newsletters, Web sites, administrator blogs and meetings are just a few ways this can be accomplished. School leaders cannot allow unfriendly newspapers or unions to control the information. The control of information is not limited to collective bargaining, but to everything that takes place in a school district.

What teachers want

Over the past few years, I have conducted several superintendent searches. As a part of the process, meetings were held at school sites to get teacher input on the qualities they want in a new superintendent and the biggest challenges the new superintendent will face.

In conversations with well over a thousand teachers, their answers are amazingly consistent. Teachers want a leader who is highly visible and frequently visits school sites. In this day of NCLB stress, teachers want a leader who understands what they are dealing with, and the challenges they face in the classroom. In other words, teachers want leadership that cares about them, respects them and empathizes with what they face every day--all consistent qualities of NFs and SJs.

Ongoing communication, personal contact and recognition of the valuable, unique individuals making up our teaching staffs are the most important factors in successful collective bargaining.

References

Bridges, W. (1992). The Character of Organizations: Using Jungian Type in Organizational Development. Palo Alto, CA: Davies-Black.

Center for the Application of Psychological Type, Inc. (1998). An Assortment of Facts About Type in Education. Gainesville, FL: Author.

Deal, Terrence E., & Peterson, Kent D. (1999). Shaping School Culture. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dunning, Donna. (2003). Introduction to Type and Communication. Los Altos, CA: CPP, Inc.

Waller, Willard. (1932). The Sociology of Teaching. New York: Wiley.

Paul M. Hewitt is a retired superintendent, the outgoing A CSA Member Services Representative for Regions 2 & 4 and an assistant professor of education at the University of Arkansas.

MBTI: Comparing teachers to the general population

             Percentage

     General population   Teachers

NT          12               10
SJ          38               49
SP          38               13
NF          12               26

Note: Table made from bar graph.