Teaching as Caring
Teaching well is described as an art, craft, and science, as well as a kind of caring, like parenting. Yet schools in the United States are organized in a way that undercuts teaching’s complexity, especially its nurturing functions. For instance, a teacher’s workday omits time for the work that supports instruction. No time is built in to the school day for teachers to confer with one another, meet with parents or students privately, plan, evaluate student work, complete documentation of attendance and achievement, and so on. Mostly teachers are expected to do all these things in the forty-five-minute preparation period they have, an alteration in the school day that was won by teachers unions in the 1960s and ’70s.
Good teaching is personal. In one respect, we’re like parents. I’ve heard this aspect of teaching denigrated as “babysitting,” and though teachers unions need to respect members’ varied—even contradictory—beliefs about what constitutes good teaching, I think defending teaching’s nurturing functions is essential. Neoliberalism has succeeded in making many schools that serve children of working and poor families little more than training grounds for the factory—or prison. It’s both morally essential and practical that teachers and unions stand up for children’s human needs. The national teachers unions have yielded to neoliberalism’s redefinition of schooling’s purposes, away from development of our full human potential into job training. However, many parents look to schools to safeguard their children. It is parents, not bankers or the politicians they bankroll, who are the constituency we need to move to our way of viewing school reform. We are losing political ground because the unions have virtually surrendered the ideological battle about schooling’s purposes. We need to project a different vision of what schools should be for everyone, not just teachers, as the Chicago Teachers Union has done in the proposal I mentioned previously.
The alternative vision has to counteract propaganda that teachers and teachers unions care only about themselves. The steady barrage of policies measuring and punishing teachers and students according to test scores is inseparable from neoliberalism’s ideology of ruthless competition and individualism. It is this ideology we must turn back. An Australian researcher who has analyzed neoliberalism’s success in casting social services, including schools, as profit centers proposes that we push back by insisting that schools be caring communities.10 Rallying parents under the slogan “Make Schools Caring Communities—Not Factories,” teachers and unions can infuse the elements of caring and collaboration into school organization and counter efforts to reduce schooling to job training. We will face a battle in making this argument to cynical reporters and hostile politicians. As I learned in talking with a newly elected union officer, he was battered in a press conference when he argued that the union didn’t want teachers to compete against one another for merit pay. The cynical reporters scornfully dismissed his answer that good teaching was collaborative and that schools should be caring communities. He stuck to his guns in the press conference, as all union officials need to do. His answer was exactly right—and it is one that many parents and students want to hear from us. Our opponents may confuse idealism with naiveté, but we should not.
Especially in schools serving students who are marginalized in our society, school organization and regulations can be inhumane. Partly because contracts don’t permit the union to bargain over nonmonetary issues, it’s tempting for teachers unions to accept the school’s structure and organization as a given. Yet the misfit between teaching as a human, nurturing activity and the school’s rigid structure has a corrosive impact on teachers’ morale and students’ achievement. I realize that not all teachers welcome parent involvement, which can seem (and be) intrusive. But the union has to take leadership in working with parents and community—in coalitions, as equals—to take on the way schools are organized. Doing so is one of the keys to building successful alliances to counter neoliberalism’s “solutions.” Again, something that is a moral responsibility is also quite practical. We cannot expect parents to support us in economic struggles when we do not engage with them respectfully, as partners, in coalitions about their educational concerns.
Working with parents doesn’t come naturally to most teachers or to union officers. Teachers often feel that parents, especially those who have little formal education, are hard to reach. It may surprise teachers to learn that low-income parents feel that teachers are hard to reach! Many parents who lack formal education and who don’t measure up to the school’s expectations are showing they care about their children’s learning in ways that only teachers who have close personal connections to a community know firsthand. Researchers who interviewed African American mothers in a housing project learned that parents considered taking children to church every week a way to provide a sound moral base, which would translate into school success. However, the mothers wouldn’t come to the school’s “open house” to meet the teacher because they said it was not a priority when compared to other responsibilities as the breadwinner.
I often hear parents say that teachers don’t care—and vice versa. This finger-pointing is counterproductive and ignores that schools were designed to be insular, cut off from communities and parents.11 As a result, collaboration between parents and teachers (terms that mask the fact that the parent is usually a mom and the teacher is most often a woman) takes lots of time and commitment. Teachers and teachers unions have to struggle, consciously, not to acquire a bunker mentality. Tensions with parents are inescapable, especially when parents feel they are not respected by the union, as is often the case with groups who have experienced racial exclusion from labor unions. However, this is another hard issue there is no way to duck, as we learned from conflicts between black community activists and the mostly white teachers unions in the 1960s and ’70s. Perhaps the most explosive of these conflicts occurred in Newark, New Jersey, in the early 1970s. In two bitter strikes the city was brought to the brink of race war, as the teachers union, though it was headed by an African American woman, and civil rights activists became increasingly blinded to the other side’s justifiable desires for dignity and equality.12 As I discuss in the article in New Politics reviewing a book on the strikes (reproduced as chapter 9 in this book), the racial divide was never healed, which made the city ripe for one of the most audacious campaigns for privatization, led by an African American, Democratic mayor and paid for by billionaire patrons. To bridge the racial divide, teachers unions must develop a race-conscious culture and vocabulary. Having officers and activists who are members of minority groups is a vital part of this process, but as was demonstrated in the Newark strikes, it is not sufficient. The unions have to nurture a culture in which race and racism are critiqued, frankly. This process can strengthen the union internally and at the same time shows parents and activists that the union is an ally that can be trusted. Building alliances that are mutually respectful is hard work, but as we have seen in Chicago, it can be done.
Professionally Speaking
I should clarify that although “professional” often connotes work that has an elevated social status, I’m using it to mean that someone meets the accepted standards of excellence in his/her occupation. To my knowledge, there’s no word in English that comes closer to what I mean, and a conversation I overheard on a bus illustrates my definition. Many off-duty bus drivers ride this bus route to or from work, and I eavesdropped as my driver and his pal criticized another driver’s cursing at abusive riders. “That’s just so unprofessional!” my driver exclaimed. His colleague nodded vigorously in agreement. “It sure is,” he said. “Very unprofessional.”
What should be the union’s role