As attacks on teachers unions have intensified in the past few years, I’ve been asked by teachers for practical reading about how to improve their unions. Finding no book that I could recommend, I’ve written this one. In developing my ideas for this book, I’ve drawn on my work as a researcher, teacher union activist, professor of education, and career high school teacher. To make the book more readable, I’ve tried to keep references to the absolute minimum. For current updates on research and analysis on teachers unions, you may want to refer to my website.7 All royalties from this book will go to Teachers Unite, an organization that I think embodies the goals of building a movement of teachers, parents, and community activists committed to social justice in education and social movement teacher unionism.
The second section of this book contains articles I’ve written over the past thirty years for New Politics. This material provides additional background about issues that deserve more attention than I could give in this book, which I conceive of as an intelligent activist’s guide to the teacher union universe.
One final note: I often use the word “teacher” to signify members of teachers unions, but I acknowledge in advance that the label is misleading. Teachers unions usually represent constituencies other than K–12 teachers with their own classrooms, including social workers, paraprofessionals, psychologists, librarians, adult school teachers, and substitute teachers. A strong, democratic union values each constituency’s unique contribution and takes care to demonstrate to all members that it is a union of equals.
2.
Protecting the Heart of Teaching
Our responsibility to do right by our students is at the heart of teaching. Under the present conditions in many schools and most school systems, teachers are pressured to carry out mandates that actually harm kids. Though some teachers manage to protect their students from test-prep mania and other destructive policies, many more lack the skill, confidence, and courage to resist as individuals. I think teachers can no longer presume that if they shut their classroom doors and concentrate all their energies on what goes on in their classrooms, they are satisfying their moral charge. While our first responsibility is always to our students, teachers need to open their classroom doors, literally and figuratively, enlarging the definition of the workspace to include the school and community.
To be clear, I am not saying we should expect every teacher to become a political activist—though we’d certainly be in better shape to defend public education if many more were. What I am proposing is thinking about how to politicize teachers who do not understand why the world outside their classroom has to be a consideration for the decisions they make in their work lives, as well as encouraging teachers who are already more politically aware to become more active. For instance, I know several teachers who are adamant about insulating themselves (and their students) from negative influences in their schools, who were receptive to my suggestion that being true to their professional obligations meant informing parents of their English as a Second Language (ESL) students about cutbacks in ESL services. Other teachers may be politicized through work informing parents about the harm done by standardized testing, a project the British Columbia Teachers Federation undertook.1 An encouraging sign of teachers’ increasing politicization is the growth of local organizations of social justice teachers that hold conferences, study groups, and projects to encourage social justice teaching.2
To create a new social movement of teachers who understand what’s at stake in protecting teaching’s moral core, and who are passionate about social justice, we need new spaces that bring teachers in varying degrees of politicization together. We need to support the development of networks that emerge naturally when social movements are more robust than they are at this historical moment.
New Territory and New Rules
In fall 2011 the Occupy Wall Street movement and its local offshoots have excited hope of reversing the control of the 1 percent and helped to create space for resistance. Yet today’s struggle occurs on a landscape that was unimaginable forty years ago. Richard Nixon signed laws protecting the environment, civil rights, and labor that all but the most liberal Democrats today dismiss as too costly, intrusive, or radical. Vast changes have been made to education, and parents, teachers, and even seasoned school activists are often not sure what to believe. Neoliberal rhetoric about “putting children first,” ahead of purportedly selfish school employees and their unions, may seem to make sense, even if parents don’t see selfishness in their children’s teachers. Nonprofit organizations and foundations do the work of right-wing think tanks pushing for privatization and profits.3 Often citizens and parents who see through the propaganda and oppose making schools into profit centers for corporations feel helpless to stop these policies. Parents who experience the reforms’ damage firsthand often feel they are powerless to act. Elected officials, from school boards to governors, break the law with impunity. Take the governor of New Jersey (please!), who proclaimed that his crusade to save New Jersey’s children justified his defying the State Supreme Court’s orders to give the state’s low-income school districts the funding to which they were legally entitled. Democrats and Republicans excuse violating union contracts or firing teachers wholesale from schools and districts with the rationale that they are saving children’s lives.
Another change is the labor movement’s diminished power. The percentage of workers who are in unions has fallen—dramatically. Public education is the only sector of the economy that is still heavily unionized, and many teachers, especially those who come through “fast track” certification programs and worked in the private sector where unionization is negligible, may be unfamiliar with unions or even scared by them. Also, teachers unions’ traditional allies, including civil rights organizations and community-based groups, can no longer be counted as automatic supporters. Traditions of solidarity within the labor movement are weak, although they are being revived, as we saw in the inspiring struggle of Wisconsin’s teachers and public employees. Still, the reelection of Wisconsin’s governor also illustrates the pitfalls that face teachers and other public employees if they play by the old rules. We will not be able to defend education if we rely on the same strategies that unions have been using for the past twenty years, especially looking to “friends” in the Democratic Party.4
Neoliberal think tanks and foundations, like the American Enterprise Institute, the Broad Foundation, and the Gates Foundation, have recruited people identified by the popular media as spokespeople for oppressed groups. When the Reverend Al Sharpton joined former New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein, Newt Gingrich, and Arne Duncan to campaign for Barack Obama’s “Race to the Top” legislation, the alliance was big news. What didn’t get the same attention in the media was the half-million-dollar grant to Sharpton’s organization from a hedge fund headed by another former New York City Schools chancellor, Harold Levy.5 Who these people touted as community leaders really represent is never clear, but their endorsement of policies like charter schools, behind the smokescreen of educational equity, adds to the public perception that the reforms have the support of minority parents—and that teachers who oppose the changes are blocking real improvement.
At the same time, teaching has become more demanding than it was just a few years ago, due to larger class sizes, cuts in support services, and more autocratic administration.