Teachers Clash With Union Prez Over Turnaround

Nearly a year after their union took over High School in the Community, teachers are discovering they may have less power than before — not more.

That’s the thrust of an emerging disagreement between teachers and their union leadership at the 230-student magnet school on Water Street.

High School in the Community (HSC) has been teacher-run since its inception in 1970: Instead of answering to a principal, teachers elect their own peers to run the school through a democratic process.

That democratic process may soon change. The new boss threatening to change the rules is not a central office bureaucrat, but the very man teachers elected to lead their union, Dave Cicarella (pictured above).

Cicarella took on a new role last fall, when his union took over management of HSC as part of a new experiment aimed at turning around a failing school.

In addition to being tasked with protecting teachers’ rights, he became the union point-person in charge of making sure HSC reverses a troubling trend of sinking literacy rates, dwindling enrollment, and rising truancy and dropout rates.

As the school’s manager, Cicarella is now moving to end HSC’s longstanding practice of electing teachers from within the school to serve in managerial roles, which roughly equate to ​“principal” and ​“assistant principal.”

Cicarella argued the practice limits the applicant pool to the 30 teachers in the school and may equate to a popularity contest. He called for opening up the jobs to applicants outside the school and retaining his right to overrule teachers’ votes.

That has sparked some tension, confrontation, and distrust between the union president and his membership at HSC, according to English teacher MarcAnthony Solli. Solli, who was elected by his peers to serve as union steward for the school, said he now finds himself in a disagreement with the union president.

“If you’re a teacher-run school, you should be allowed to elect leadership on your own,” he said. He estimated that two-thirds of HSC staffers agree.

He said teachers fear they will have less power — not more — now that the union has taken over the school.

Math teacher Riley Gibbs said teachers join HSC because of the school’s unique record of valuing teacher voice.

“I came to New Haven to teach at a teacher-run school,” he said. ​“The idea that the teachers union wants to make it no longer a teacher-run school is absurd.”

Recent staff meetings have erupted with concerns over who is making decisions in the school — the union, or the teachers who work there day to day. Some teachers interviewed for this story expressed impassioned concern about protecting their historic decision-making power; some called the concerns unfounded; and some called the whole issue a distraction from an urgent need to boost kids’ failing literacy rates.

The debate comes as Cicarella confronts a challenge: How does a union president simultaneously serve as an elected leader charged with protecting teachers’ rights; and as a boss, charged with managing teachers in a quest to reverse years of educational failure?

The stakes are high: HSC is in the statewide spotlight as one of the first batch of turnaround schools to receive millions of dollars of state money as part of a new ​“commissioner’s network” aimed at improving failing schools. And the New Haven Federation of Teachers is in the national spotlight as one of just a handful of unions nationwide that are currently empowered to run their own schools. While teachers and unions have run schools in the past, the experiment at HSC is unusual in the current national climate, said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten in a recent interview: Modern day reform has meant destroying teachers unions and subjecting teachers to ​“gotcha” job evaluations based on standardized tests, not empowering them to lead schools, she argued. Weingarten has been promoting HSC as she evangelizes about New Haven’s collaborative approach to reform.

In taking over the school, New Haven’s union required teachers to reapply for their jobs, replaced a third of the staff, then gave teachers who stayed at the school the freedom to try out a radical experiment in independent-paced learning. Now the school is preparing for a second year.

The Democratic Process

The school is technically run by a seven-person governance council, including four members of NHFT leadership, none of whom reports to the building daily.

Cicarella, who works from a union office in Fair Haven, has been serving as the point-person in charge of the school. He said he remained hands-off for the first half of the school year.

Most teachers didn’t notice the union playing an increased role in the school until mid-March, when teachers gathered for an annual vote to elect school leadership. They reelected two teachers, Paulette Jackson and Cameo Thorne, to new two-year terms as assistant principals. The principal, Erik Good, was not up for election because he’s mid-way through his two-year term. The school’s fourth administrator, Chris Kafoglis, a former math teacher at Cross, was appointed to the job by the union last summer.

Teachers ran into resistance from the union when they sought to convert Kafoglis’s job from an appointed to an elected one, according to Solli. While teachers emphatically support Kafoglis, they wanted to keep the tradition of electing their leaders, instead of opening themselves up to a future appointee whom they may object to, Solli said.

Cicarella put his foot down on that proposal. He said teachers have benefited greatly from the appointment — they never would have gotten to work with Kafoglis if they had stuck to their system of electing from within. (Kafoglis had come to HSC from Wilbur Cross High School.)

Cicarella argued that by electing leaders from within, HSC teachers are limiting the applicant pool to the 30 teachers in the school. He said he won’t necessarily uphold the results of the teachers’ recent vote. The vote will no longer be binding, but advisory to the union, which will make the final call on who’s running the school, he said.

“We’re not going to” continue to abide by staff elections ​“just because we’ve always done it” that way, he said. ​“It is a low-performing school” with declining enrollment and failing scores, he said.

Cicarella called for opening up the administrative jobs at HSC to all 1,800 teachers in the school district.

Solli (pictured) called that an affront to HSC’s very identity. The school has been built on a distributive leadership model, where teachers are empowered to fill in all sorts of leadership roles. That makes teachers more invested in the school, he argued. In the early days, teachers made all decisions by consensus, which led to some tortured, messy slow decision-making, wrote Edison J. Trickett’s in his book, Living an idea: Empowerment and the Evolution of an Alternative High School.

More recently, the school has operated on a democratic process. Staffers vote on many decisions facing the school, such as the framework of new report cards. Solli said teachers joined the school with the expectation that they could help run it through the democratic process.

Gibbs agreed. He said he turned down offers in Brooklyn and elsewhere in the district in favor of HSC because he wanted to join a teacher-run school.

“Too often in the education debate and politics, the teacher’s voice is not heard. HSC is a very unique place where it is valued,” he said. He said the governing structure makes teachers feel more invested in the school, and gives teachers the energy and freedom to try new ideas.

“It would be very ironic if the teacher-run school lost its teacher-run status because the teachers union took it away,” he said.

Solli agreed. If the theory behind letting the union run the school is ​“teachers know best,” he argued, then teachers should be empowered to elect their leadership.

Solli argued that teachers within the school ​“know the school best,” and have been heavily involved in leading the district in a new experiment in mastery-based learning. That has meant reinventing the basic ideas of ​“freshman,” ​“homework,” ​“report card” and high school itself. He said the school leader should be someone who is intimately familiar with that work, not someone from the outside.

“It’s hard for me to imagine a candidate from outside” being in a better position to lead the school than someone from the inside, agreed Good, the school building leader.

Good (pictured) said the democratic process at HSC has worked: Teachers have voted out leaders who weren’t effective.

Cicarella contended the democratic process is flawed: Teachers say they would vote out a building leader who isn’t effective, but ​“how do we know that?” How do we know if teachers are ​“voting for them because they are best for kids” or ​“because they let them leave early and come late” to school?

“I don’t think they’re doing a bad job,” Cicarella said of the HSC leadership. Cicarella noted that in taking over the school, union management did not require any of the three school leaders to reapply for their jobs. He said the school needs to put a process in place so that leaders stay or go based on their job evaluations, not on a popularity vote.

Cicarella noted that there is no legal document establishing HSC as a teacher-run school. It simply existed that way since 1970 by a handshake agreement with school superintendents.

Cicarella said he plans to sit down with school staff and discuss the topic: ​“I feel strongly that we need to look at this.” He said he’s keeping an open mind, but, ​“I’m going to have to have to hear something really, really compelling” to convince him to let the elections continue as a binding vote.

Good said he is open to rewriting the way school elections work, to specify that they are based not on popularity, but on the ​“demonstrated effectiveness” of a given school leader.

“I assume the union should be interested in this,” Good said, ​“since it is the union’s job to create a process so that people who are good at their jobs aren’t dismissed because of a personality conflict with management.”

Advocate Becomes The Boss

Cicarella, who has been union president for six and a half years, called his time at HSC a completely new experience.

In the other 44 schools in the district, his role is protector-in-chief. Teachers welcome him with relief, he said: ​“Thank God, here’s Dave.”

At HSC, he said, ​“they view me like the boss.” Tension is so thick, he said, ​“you could cut it with a knife.”

Cicarella’s double duty job at HSC has raised a question: If a teacher has a concern about management, the teacher would typically turn to the union. But when the union is the management, to whom does the teacher turn?

Cicarella said the union prepared for that eventuality: If a teacher has a grievance, he or she can go to a five-person ​“trustee council” within the union, which is set up to handle grievances teachers have with each other. Some teachers questioned how impartial a union-run council would be about a matter concerning its own union president.

Gibbs (pictured) said he still sees an ​“inherent conflict of interest in our president of our union also being our boss, our overseer.”

He likened the situation to a non-unionized charter school he worked at in New York, where ​“not having a separate body to go to, not having somebody else to appeal to, created a big strain on the relationship between the teachers and management.”

“If things are going awry, there’s nobody to appeal to,” he said. Gibbs said it would make more sense to have someone other than the union president manage the school, in which case teachers could appeal to the union president with any complaints.

So far, no HSC teachers have tested the system by bringing up any grievances. At HSC, Solli said, the ​“resilient, intelligent, open-minded” staff and leaders tend to work out disagreements instead of filing grievances.

Solli said part of the tension between Cicarella and HSC teachers comes because teachers aren’t used to having a boss so closely involved in the school. Before the union took over, the school was ultimately managed by the school district, but from a distance. ​“There was a hands-off policy.”

This year, when Cicarella took a more active role in managing the school, some teachers have felt, ​“Why is he managing us like a bureaucrat?” Solli said. ​“Historically, people have bristled at that.”

Suspicion deepened when teachers discovered Cicarella had been reading all correspondence they sent over two group email lists — one for official business, and a second one used for more personal matters.

Cicarella said school leaders volunteered to add him to the lists after he raised a concern that he had been kept out of the loop on some decisions facing the school. He said his addition to the email list prompted some concern: ​“You’re reading emails!”

“You’re always going to get that Big Brother” reaction, Cicarella said. But he said he has ​“no spies, no cameras,” and no desire to use them.

“The union has been a lot more involved in the management in the school than the district ever was,” Good observed. ​“Sometimes that scrutiny can feel like management, but it’s not necessarily management or about taking away power.”

“Who’s In Charge?”

After ​“keeping my mouth shut” for the first four-to-five months of the school year, Cicarella said, he has stepped up involvement. His intervention in decision-making, for example in denying teachers’ request to convert Kafoglis’ job into an elected post, has prompted shouting matches with school leadership over his role in running the school and has sparked confusion among teachers.

“They’ve asked me, ​‘Who’s in charge?’” Cicarella said.

Teachers initially thought a seven-person governance board would run the school, but have found Cicarella taking on a more active role than the board itself.

After Cicarella denied teachers’ request to elect all four school administrators, some teachers launched a fervent hunt for a document spelling out how the turnaround school would be governed. After a weeks-long quest, they tracked down a document outlining an agreement between the school district and union. (Click here to read it.)

To some teachers’ surprise, they found out that document names Cicarella, not a seven-person board, as the point person in charge of supervising HSC.

In the process, staff discovered there was nothing in writing delineating which school decisions would be made by HSC leadership, which would be made by the union president, and which by the governing council.

The confusion has prompted a fear — so far not confirmed by specific actions — that the union might start making unilateral decisions in the school.

“I don’t think the union is interested in taking away our rights. But when there’s not a process that we can refer to, then that produces anxiety,” Good said.

Cicarella agreed he could make unilateral decisions, but that’s not his style.

Cicarella said for the most part, he has tried to let teachers run the school.

“I try to be hands off, which is hard for me,” he confessed.

He said he let teachers run with their new experiment in mastery-based learning, which they began planning before the turnaround. ​“I trust them to do that. … They’ve done terrific work on that.”

But he said he does feel the need to step in at times, in part because he feels he has relevant experience: Before becoming union president, he taught for 28 years at Fair Haven Middle School. He taught math and also headed the literacy department there. He also has his administrator’s certificate.

“I’m not some meddling bureaucrat,” Cicarella said. ​“I really do know a lot” about education.

Cicarella said he has had the most involvement in budget and personnel. Every expenditure, from school trips to renovations to new Mac laptops, goes to him for approval.

“I’m not looking to micro-manage that piece,” he said, but ​“if anything goes awry, that’s my neck on the line.”

Cicarella must personally report to state education Commissioner Stefan Pryor about the use of the state’s $1.5 million annual grant to the school.

The whole year, Cicarella has not denied or changed a single budgetary request, he said, even if he didn’t completely agree with the decision.

After months of more hands-off management, Cicarella recently headed up the search process for a new math teacher. Cicarella said there was confusion about the search process, as people sent resumes to all four administrators at HSC. So he took over the search committee, which includes all four HSC administrators as well as two math teachers.

“That part, I did take control of,” he said, because ​“I do know this stuff, especially math.”

“Who we hire is incredibly important,” he said. ​“I want to be involved.”

He said the decision of whom to hire will be made by consensus on the committee.

Meanwhile, teachers have been seeking more clarity on when the union will and won’t step in.

Good said at a recent staff meeting, teachers came up with 10 areas, based on recent research, in which they would like clarity on how much autonomy they have. Teachers aim to sit down with the union and ​“delineate who has power over what.”

Good said HSC regrettably neglected to work out governance issues before starting the school year, because staff were so focused on dramatically overhauling the curriculum.

“We’ve been building the airplane as we fly it,” he said. ​“It’s always nice to have the airplane built [before] we take off.” 

“There have been some decisions made [by the union] that were not the decisions I would have made,” Good said. ​“We need to make the process clearer … so we don’t bump heads in the future.”

Social studies teacher Sarah Marchesi said the confusion about governance has proved to be a distraction from urgent goals at hand: Tackling a literacy crisis and a social promotion crisis that have left kids years behind grade level.

“With all of this, there’s a lack of focus around literacy, mastery-based learning,” she said. ​“We’re largely distracted as a community.”

“We should be exclusively focused on discourse around the substance of what we’re doing.”

Previous Independent stories on High School in the Community:

• 91 – 39 Blowout Comes With A Lesson For Victors
• New Haven Rallies For Solanlly & Chastity
• Social Promotion Vow Put To The Test
• HSC Heads To Capitol For New Diplomas
• She Awoke To A New Life — & A New Mission
• High School Of The Future Debuts, Briefly
• Gay-Rights Teach-In Goes Off-Script
• Nikita Makes It Home
• 15 Seniors Head To College Early
• No More ​“B And A Smile”
• Students Protest: ​“Give Us Homework!”
• Meadow Street Clamps Down On Turnaround
• School Votes For Hats; District Brass Balks
• Students Invoke Free Speech In Great Hat Debate
• Guv: End Social Promotion
• History Class Hits The Streets
• ​“Misfit Josh” & Alex Get A 2nd Chance
• Guess Who’s Assigning The Homework Now
• On Day 1, HSC Students Enter A New World
• Frank Reports Detail Experiment’s Ups & Downs
• School Ditches Factory ​“Assembly Line”
• State ​“Invites” HSC To Commissioner’s Network
• Teachers Union Will Run New ​“Turnaround”