Collective Bargaining Agreement Provisions in the Wake of Ohio Teacher Evaluation System Legislation

• In Event: 49.073 - Politics of Education Association Yearbook: Revisiting Education Policy Implementation

Abstract

Background and Context
The Ohio Teacher Evaluation System (OTES) was created by state legislation and approved for the scope of work associated with Ohio’s Race to the Top (RttT) application and the state’s approved Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) waiver application. RttT, particularly its efforts to change how teachers are evaluated and rewarded, has powerful private support. Notably, the Gates Foundations has incentivized closer collaboration between teacher unions and administration in order to establish less restrictive personnel placement and teacher evaluation policies. We asked, “Are the local teacher associations bridging to state policy by allowing teacher evaluations to be used in the important personnel decisions, or are they buffering by negotiating provisions that protect more experienced and tenured teachers regardless of OTES evaluations ratings?”

Theoretical Framework
Guided by Honig and Hatch’s (2004) conceptualization of “bridging and buffering”, we analyzed the first teacher collective bargaining agreements negotiated after the enactment of OTES. Bridging and buffering is a framework rooted in organizational and institutional theory that seeks to understand the complex relationship between organizations and their environment through organizational strategies to manage core technical activities in the face of external regulation and control.

Methods
We analyzed CBAs from 15 different Ohio districts representing the first CBAs negotiated after policy implementation. As teacher contracts are finalized, they are submitted to Ohio’s State Employment Relations Board (SERB) and made available to the public at its website. Our analysis focused primarily on provisions dealing with cooperative issues: the purposes of evaluation, the use of data that result from walkthroughs/informal observations in teacher evaluation, reductions in force, voluntary transfers, involuntary transfers, contract renewals (pre-tenure), contract renewals (tenured), and processes/requirements for applying for tenure. One competitive issue was examined—compensation. Multiple coders used NVivo10 qualitative analysis software and an iterative team memo-writing process.

Findings
Researchers have documented the trend of centralization in American education policy (e.g., Mavrogordato, 2012, Meyers, 2012). However, rather than finding centralizing tendencies, we found surprising variation in provisions across districts. Most notable was how districts defined “comparable evaluations” in making reduction in force (RIF) decisions. While the term comparable appeared consistently across the sample of first contracts, we have shown that the districts’ operationalized definition of “comparable” differed greatly across what was a very small number of districts in Ohio. A majority of the districts hold fast to single salary schedules with pay increasing with years of experience and educational attainment levels, but some negotiated merit pay provisions. Likewise, most districts opted not to incorporate explicit OTES performance language in provisions for contract (non)renewal. Districts were split as to whether they adopted state evaluation forms, partially adopting state forms, or opting for their own. Our findings approximate how DeBoer (2012) described the US education policy environment—“The overall picture that emerges is one of a continuous tug-of-war, with national and local policymakers stumbling together toward incrementally more standardized and centralized policies” (p. 510).

Authors

• William Kyle Ingle, University of Louisville

• Chris Willis, Bowling Green State University

• James Fritz, Anthony Wayne Local Schools