On Unions and Education

[Peter Farruggio <pfarr@uclink4.berkeley.edu>]

The URL and opening paragraphs of a long article, posted in full at Susan 
Ohanian's website.
My note:  Deborah Meier says somewhere in the article that teachers' unions 
are "conservative" because they are concerned with protecting teachers' 
rights.  This is usually called "due process" in contracts, and it is one 
of the main reasons we teachers pay dues to our unions, so that our 
professional and contractual rights will be protected.  I don't see this as 
a "conservative" feature, and in these neo-con times of union busting and 
corporate style school management it can become downright radical to defend 
a teacher's rights.  In my long experience, it has been the innovative, 
"radical" teachers who fight for improving the education of low income kids 
who are most in need of union protection, not the conservative, status quo 
teachers.  Speaking up to a dictatorial principal or a bureaucrat when 
anti-kids policies are being pushed, or defending one's academic freedom 
and professional judgement on matters of appropriate curriculum and 
pedagogy are the two most common situations for unions having stepped in to 
protect a teacher in my experience, not incompetence, chronic lateness, 
foul language, etc.

http://susanohanian.org/show_commentary.php?id=228

On Unions and Education

Publication Date: 2004-03-01

  By Deborah Meier

Meier reports that in her experience it's Central Office that runs from 
innovation, not unions.


NOTE: This commentary is from the Winter 2004 Dissent

Despite popular impressions and dinner-table gossip, the problems of our 
schools, and above all of "school reform," are not the result of unions. I 
speak in part from personal experience over the past thirty-five years in 
New York City and Boston. The last big project I was involved with in New 
York, which required real courage on the part of all the major 
institutional powers, came to a screeching halt because everyone backed 
down except the teacher's union. We had asked for a "free 
zone"-constituting no more than 5 percent of New York's student population 
as an experiment in non-regulation (or at least vastly decreased 
regulation). The state, the city, and the Board of Education ended up 
backing away, but at no point did the United Federation of Teachers. 
Perhaps they would have if and when we really began to operate (except on 
matters of wages and working conditions) outside of the union contract. 
They weren't always enthusiastic supporters; they were skeptical from first 
to last and might have become more so if the idea had caught on. But that's 
speculation; in fact they never flinched. They saw the project, they said, 
as an experiment in providing a form of schooling that would produce better 
results for kids while also empowering classroom teachers.

My experience over the past five years in Boston is similar. The Pilot 
Schools project-involving at the start no more than 5 percent of Boston's 
students-was based on an agreement between the Boston Teachers Union and 
the Boston Public Schools to suspend all the regular contractual agreements 
as they applied to a dozen or so schools, provide a flexible per capita 
budget to each school, and allow freedom from other city-mandated 
requirements with regard to curriculum, scheduling, and staffing. Both the 
BTU and BPS soon lost their initial enthusiasm for the project-which they 
probably first saw as an answer to charter schools. But the BTU never went 
back on the original agreement. Small-scale quarrels between the pilots and 
the BPS, however, were and are constant as we negotiate each provision anew 
every year: Which budget item do we have control over and which do they? 
What voice do we have over state-provided "coaches"? Given the constraints 
of busing, what freedom do we actually have over scheduling? And so on. 
Because most of the daily issues relate to freedom from city, not union, 
rules it is hardly surprising that our frustration is usually focused on 
the "system." The major worry we hear from the union is whether these less 
constrained schools actually offer more power to classroom teachers rather 
than school principals. Both parties also worry that, under the label of 
autonomy, the Pilot Schools are choosier about which students they accept. 
Do they, for example, accept fewer troubled students? And both worry about 
what the consequences would be if the idea really spread-in terms of the 
impact on system-wide seniority, accountability, and so on.

These are legitimate issues. In a climate of high-stakes testing and 
increasing competition, many good reforms can turn into monsters. I'm 
disinclined of late even to call myself a school reformer. Too often it 
feels like deforming.