Why Are Schools Changing Their Negotiation Process?
The impetus for change has been two-fold. First, an increasing number of school systems are reaching the conclusion that the traditional adversarial negotiation process does not work well in complex, multi-party, multi-issue negotiations in which intangible issues such as trust, working relationships and precedent, are as important as tangible issues like percentage of salary increase and defining school-based management. The traditional process does not work well because it forces each party to commit to a position early in the negotiation process; this creates an incentive to adopt extreme opening positions and then lock into those extreme positions. In order to reach agreement, each party must then make many concessions. Each concession is viewed by the parties or by their constituents as an indication of weakness; so, to demonstrate toughness each side makes concessions very slowly. Traditional adversarial negotiation is a difficult, unnecessarily protracted, and costly process tha
