Sunlight, camera, action!

"We are not negotiating this in the public," said Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis last week.She was responding to reporters curious about the union's ambitious opening gambit in its contract talks with the cash-strapped Chicago Public Schools — a 30 percent raise over two years, smaller class sizes and so on — contained in documents obtained by the Chicago Tribune."Our contract negotiations have just begun and are negotiated in good faith and not in the public," said a follow-up statement from a CTU spokeswoman.The schools are public. The funds to be spent are public. On one side of the table is a public body. Why shouldn't the public have a seat at that table, if only to listen in through the media to the offers and counter-offers?

Negotiating a contract of this dimension is a major governmental act — far more significant than many of the twists of the statutory knob that must, by law, be performed by legislative bodies at open meetings.Closed doors are antithetical to democracy. Our traditions tell us that public oversight and input not only help keep officials honest, but also aid them in their quest to represent the will of the people (assuming that is their quest).In the case of teachers union negotiations, parents are major stakeholders — even more so than most taxpayers — yet are totally shut out of the process until the parties emerge from marathon bargaining sessions brandishing a settlement.

Part of a sweeping education reform package that went into effect last year was a requirement forcing teachers and school boards to negotiate at public meetings. And while the Idaho Education Association, a teachers union organization, opposed nearly all aspects of the reforms, it supported the open-negotiations provision."We think it's a really good thing, very positive" said IEA spokeswoman Julie Fanselow. She said it's been hard to evaluate its effectiveness so far "against the backdrop of an otherwise very, very damaging law."The Education Action Group Foundation Inc., a Muskegon, Mich.-based union watchdog group that promotes open negotiations, points to isolated districts around the country where details of ongoing talks have been posted on the Internet in an effort to break or prevent logjams.