Joint Labor-Management Training Programs for Healthcare Worker Advancement and Retention

[Excerpt] Filling vacancies and retaining workers in shortage areas such as nursing and other allied health occupations remains a challenge in today’s healthcare industry. At the same time, low-wage workers in the healthcare industry often lack the educational credentials necessary to move into higher-paying occupations. This study seeks to understand the role of multi-employer joint labor-management healthcare worker training in meeting the needs of employers for career ladder advancement in their incumbent workforce. The study focuses on hospital employers and their experience with strategies for the advancement of low-wage and entry level workers into healthcare career pathways

Interest-Based Bargaining in Education

[Excerpt] Despite almost 20 years of experience with a variety of alternative techniques in collective bargaining in education, there is no summary of the research on negotiation practices or survey of practice variations in use. The parties in negotiations have little to guide them in their investigation of the utility of what are commonly referred to as Interest-Based Bargaining (IBB) strategies. In order to give negotiators tools with which they can make choices appropriate to their needs based on current knowledge and practice, this report offers an informed discussion of the utility of various bargaining models. It provides: ◗ A summary of the research on the use of IBB techniques in educational collective bargaining; ◗ An overview of the current practice of IBB in education; ◗ Examples of IBB in practice in education. A survey of the literature on IBB practice and outcomes, including empirical, theoretical, and qualitative research, as well as case descriptions during the period of 1985-2002 on the use of IBB in educational, public sector, or industrial settings identified approximately 100 journal articles, dissertations, and cases in practitioner publications. The majority of the empirical research reviewed was too limited in scope and methodology to provide evidence that could be cited in this report. The analysis of the literature provided a set of internal and external factors affecting the use and utility of IBB, which were used to frame questions for facilitators and bargainers on current practice in IBB. A second goal of this report was to describe the current state of IBB practice, including its method and rate of diffusion, variations in practice, and factors motivating and supporting the use of IBB in educational settings. Given the absence of empirical data, practitioners providing IBB training and facilitation were identified as primary sources of information on current practice. Trainers/facilitators possess diverse and broad perspectives because of their interactions with multiple sites, their participation in professional associations or networks, and their (often) institutional affiliations with unions, employers, school boards, and state or federal employment relations agencies, and the variable IBB practices they employ. Seven practitioners who provide training and facilitation were interviewed: three staff members of NEA state affiliates, two FMCS commissioners, one practitioner in private practice, and one staff member of a state school board association. Among them, they have had direct experience facilitating more than 200 negotiations using IBB over viii NEA Collective Bargaining & Member Advocacy the past 10 years, in states with a variety of collective bargaining laws, as well as states without collective bargaining laws. These interviews provided detailed information on the IBB models in current use, which was used to create a matrix of variations in practices. The practitioner interviews also provided experience-based perceptions of the factors identified in the research as motivating IBB use and those supporting or suppressing bargaining team successes with IBB. While it cannot be claimed to represent a complete description of current practice, this summary provides a snapshot of the existing range of experience. In pursuit of sources of data on current IBB awareness and use in educational bargaining, 34 NEA state associations were contacted for information on IBB practice in their state. These contacts helped to identify sources of IBB training and facilitation and to give a rough depiction of the state of training activities and providers nationally. Based on the review of the research and interviews with facilitators, criteria were identified for choosing case studies to represent a cross-section of IBB experience. The three sites selected represent variation in state collective bargaining laws, the type of IBB model in use, geography, size of district, length of experience with IBB, the role and methods of the facilitator, and types and numbers of bargaining units and constituents participating in IBB. For each case, the primary negotiator for the union and the district were interviewed, and pertinent documents describing the process or outcomes of IBB were requested. Finally, based on practitioner reports, case studies, and the literature, a set of questions were developed for bargainers to discuss when considering the use of IBB and assessing the likelihood of its effectiveness in specific circumstances

APPR Appeals Process Report: Panels

[Excerpt] This report describes the characteristics of joint panels and examines where they are being used in New York State to resolve APPR teacher evaluation disputes. The information presented here was gathered by analyzing the provisions of the APPR appeal procedures, which are publicly available on the New York State Department of Education website

APPR Teacher Appeals Process Report

[Excerpt] The Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR) is the new teacher evaluation system adopted by New York State in 2012. Through APPR, each New York State teacher’s performance is evaluated annually. If a teacher is rated Ineffective, he or she must take part in a Teacher Improvement Plan (TIP). If a teacher is rated Ineffective for two consecutive years, the teacher may be dismissed even if that teacher has tenure. Given these potential consequences, the ability to appeal APPR ratings and how those ratings are conducted has been a major issue for teachers and their unions. Under New York Education Law 3012-c, which establishes APPR, each school district negotiates its own APPR procedure with its local teachers union, including any procedures for appealing the performance review. This report examines the APPR appeals procedures established by school districts in order to investigate the following: Which aspects of the APPR process can teachers appeal? Who has the fi nal say in that appeals process? How much time do appeals processes take? Can teachers appeal APPR issues through the regular contractual grievance-arbitration procedure? This report addresses these questions by analyzing APPR appeal procedures for all New York State school districts. The data analyzed was gathered by coding the provisions of the APPR appeal procedures, which are publicly available on the New York State Department of Education website (1)

New York State Teacher Salary Report

Teachers are central to the success of any education system and the salaries paid to teachers are among the most important issues for both school districts and the unions that represent teachers. For school districts, teacher salaries are a major com- ponent of district budgets. Teacher salary levels are also a crucial factor in attracting and retaining quality educators. This report presents data on teacher salary levels based on teacher contracts throughout New York State. In addition to reporting overall statewide salary levels, it also documents the wide variation in teacher salary levels across New York State. This New York State Teacher Salary Report was prepared by the Bargaining for Better Schools (BBS) project, which is an initiative of the ILR School at Cornell University through the Scheinman Institute on Conflict Resolution and the Worker Institute. The data provided in this report comes from an analysis of the teacher contracts from every school district in the State of New York. The database of information came from two sources, both of which are publicly available on websites: DigitalCommons at ILR and SeeThroughNY, each of which contain the full text of teacher contracts, i.e. collective bargaining agreements and asso- ciated memoranda of understanding. The most recent contract from either website was selected for inclusion in this data

Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution [24, 1, 18, 14] for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in live Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically signifcant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result

Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government\u27s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution [24, 1, 18, 14] for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in live Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically signifcant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result

Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government’s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science researc