Re: On Unions and Education

[George Sheridan <learn@jps.net>]

At 04:30 PM 3/3/2004 -0800, Peter Farruggio wrote:

> 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.


You can also find the article at 
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi04/meier.htm

I've pasted a few of the paragraphs that relate most directly to Peter's 
comments.

*
On Unions and Education
by Deborah Meier

When I visited Houston, Texas, recently, I was alarmed at how many teachers 
came up to me to say that they couldn't speak out as I was doing and hold 
their jobs in Houston. There was a rule against speaking or writing against 
district policies. Georgia teachers, meeting with me at a summer institute 
in Massachusetts, literally whispered about their problems with testing. 
"Why are you whispering," I asked? "Because we could lose our jobs."

What do these two states have in common? Weak unions with no legal 
bargaining rights. So there is an eerie internal silence about issues of 
importance. ...

Yes, of course, opposition or foot-dragging by the American Federation of 
Teachers or National Education Association makes such reforms harder to 
enact in states where unions are strong. But it's unlikely that serious 
reforms can be effective if they are enacted from the top down, without the 
enthusiastic support of those who must implement them. This is hardly an 
idea requiring complicated sociological theories. When I was a member of my 
local school board twenty years ago, we received a petition from 99 percent 
of the staff of a local junior high expressing their lack of confidence in 
the principal. I told my colleagues on the board that we really had only 
two choices if our focus was on teaching and learning: we had to get rid of 
most of the staff or remove the principal. The case is similar when 
top-down reforms are resisted by teachers: you can get rid of the teachers 
or learn to negotiate the reforms.

*

So, both union and management need to figure out how reform might be 
enacted with the collaboration of teachers, in a way that provides them 
with appropriate power over major and minor decisions. It may take longer 
to see such reforms take hold, but going faster in the wrong direction is 
no advantage at all! Here is what unions are best at doing-giving those 
closest to the action a voice, giving them respect and dignity. This is at 
the heart not only of teacher unions but of all unions everywhere.

*

When all is said and done, there's another reason why we need to worry 
about the public's perception of unions (and our own too). Not only are 
strong teacher unions critical to the success of teaching and learning, 
they are critical to the survival of the conditions needed to support 
teaching and learning. They are critical to the success of the mission of 
public schools in a democracy: to produce citizens who can effectively rule.

Although there are many folks out there who have a stake in good public 
schools, the only organized and experienced allies, committed over time and 
with the necessary expertise and resources, are the teachers' unions. 
Parents come and go, and given the incredibly busy lives of the women who 
once led parents' organizations (especially in those communities where the 
need is greatest), sustaining their political power is almost impossible. 
They have been effectively weakened-even more than teachers-and are rarely 
represented on state or national task forces, think tanks, or school boards.

*

Thus, there are still many reasons why teachers and parents, and their 
friends and relatives, need to be the allies of their local teacher unions, 
even on those days when the unions make foolish mistakes, act with the same 
short-range self-interest as their opponents, and so on. The kind of 
support that is needed is not uncritical; it is not a matter of falling 
into line behind union leaders. But first and foremost, it means putting to 
rest the inaccurate idea that unions are to blame for the difficulties of 
school reform. Reforms are not always good, and change is not always in the 
interest of better learning. Healthy resistance is sometimes what we most 
need, side by side with thoughtful proposals for change-and this is what we 
will sorely miss if teachers' unions are defeated by the relentless 
hostility of their many opponents.

*
Get up, stand up,
Stand up for your rights.
Get up, stand up,
Don't give up the fight.
Bob Marley



> 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.

George Sheridan