Re: Teacher Unions and The Standards Movement

[Richard Gibson <rgibson@PIPELINE.COM>]

Dear Friends,

The NEA and AFT are U.S. capitalist unions. This means that they are
devoted, above all, to the defense of the interests of US capital:
Exploitation, inequality, and authoritarianism. U.S. unions, all of them,
do not unite people. They divide them, by occupation, race, sex, class,
craft, etc,. The AFL has never defended the interests of working people as
a class, but the privileges of a tiny section of the work force at the
expense of the other; white craft unions which prop up wages by limiting
entry into the craft by race for example. This is true of both education
unions, tho they have somewhat different histories.

In the current social context in the US, deindustrialization coupled with
intensified inequality, all within the most prosperous nation in the
history of the world (a temproary condition), teachers play a pivotal role.
They sit in the central organizing point of society. With the largese
available to dominance, presently, teachers can be purchased, at relatively
low cost, to guarantee social control and to tamp down the expectations of
their students, or they can teach as if their students have a right to
learn to comprehend and transform the world--the last thing any boss wants.
The education unions have taken the wrong path. But many rank and file
teachers continue to teach well, on the side of their kids.

Both unions are deeply involved in promoting the idea of the corporate
state, the unity of labor, business and government, all in the national
interest. Their calls for national unity are made hollow by the realities
of rising inequality, attacks on democracy, and irrationalism. The
corporate state is a key notion of fascist ideology.

The NEA is not affiliated with the AFL-CIO, the decaying labor federation
which spends nearly 1/2 of its members dues outside of the US, working in
cooperation with US intelligence agencies to destroy indigenous left worker
movements.  Anyone who has spent time in the third world is familiar with
the workings of American Institute for Free Labor Development, the National
Endowment for Democracy, etc.

The AFT, especially, is knee deep in this. George Schmidt and others have
documented this very clearly. Al Shanker's hack protege, Sandra Feldman, is
still involved. The AFT is a key player in the AFL, most recently taking a
leading role in getting Gore the AFL endorsement.

The AFT is profoundly racist, having had its most recent roots in the
racist Ocean Hill Brownsville strike in NYC. Feldman et al earned their
leadership in that strike.

The AFT has consistently supported the standardization and regulation of
the curriculum and the segregation of kids by race and class and supposed
ability. In this, the AFT is doubly racist. But the NEA has been heavily
involved too. Both the NEA and AFT are leaders in promoting, further, the
National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a racist maneuver to
promote the craft interests of white teachers. Both unions have regularly
sold real caps on class size for a few dollars for teachers. Both unions
have participated in the wreckage of a tax structure which was aimed at
corporate taxes, and shifted onto the backs of the working class.

This is why, for example, the AFT supported the takeovers of the Chicago
and Detroit school systems, not to defend the interests of the vast
majority of people, but to protect the privileges of the few.

NEA and AFT bosses make three to eight times the wages of the average
teacher. They form a class of careerists whose main goal is to stay out of
the classroom, and who collaborate with(and live with) superintendents, et
al, not to promote the interests of educators or education, but to
guarantee control of the workplace, labor peace. This class gains from
obscuring the sources of inequality.

The AFT's structure is utterly undemocratic, which is one of many good
reason NEA members voted overwhelmingly to refuse to merge with the AFT-AFL
in 1998.

This means that, in many ways, the AFT is a fascist organization. The best
living example of this is the career of Adam Urbanski, high profile AFT
boss in Rochester, who still touts his support for the neo-nazi Solidarity
movement in Poland.

This is not to laud the NEA. While the structures are in place in the NEA
that would allow rank and file members to control the union, this is made
most unlikely by the role of staff in the union, and the corruption of
elected leaders who suddenly gain considerable privileges. NEA's president,
Bob Chase, promotes the Saturn Corporation and its mythology of
worker-employer unity.

Both the NEA and the AFT support policies (like high-stakes exams) which
now deepen the segregation of children along lines of race and class, as
Wayne Ross recently wrote in Z magazine. Both support moves which will
divide teachers from their students, like the continuing whitewashing of
the teaching force.

The burning fuse in education is the fact that in a decade about 52% of the
students will be kids of color, while the teacher corps will be about 95%
white. Over time, as teacher wages are linked to the class background of
the kids they teach, the distance between educators and educators and
students will grow---unless teachers recognize right now that an injury to
one really does just precede an injury to all, that teachers thus divided
become easy targets themselves.

Typical of the NEA and the AFT is the cry that we must all join together
and support the public school system. In practice, this means vote for Al
Gore. But there has never been just one public school system, but four or
five--amybe more--each serving to produce and reproduce a given kind of
student, mostly based on race and parentlay income. As Jean Anyon, Pauline
Lipman, and many others show, methods of teaching and curricular content,
even school architecture, is based for the most part on the social class of
the kids in the school. This is a problem of the social structure of
capitalism and will not be resolved by Gore, Bush, or any of the
politicians who promise to do so. It will only be resolved by a mass
movement of conscious people motivated by a commitment to democracy and
equality.

The cry to save public schools is utterly disingenuos. This pretends that
there is a universal system, which we must all defend. That really makes no
sense. The idea of standards has some of the same roots: that there is a
common national interest, and a universal child. Both these takes are
equally nonsense.

What does make sense is to build an organization which fights for democracy
and equality, against racism and sexism, against the regulation of
knowledge through standarization, for real caps on class size--and books
and supplies--in the context of understanding that solidarity is an issue
rooted within the contradictory interests of social classes. Working with
the NEA and the AFT, and within all kinds of professional organizations
like NCTE and NCSS, the Rouge Forum which unites educators, parents,
community people and students, is gaining in effectiveness. It is an
organization that knows we are NOT all in this together, and is able to
answer the old labor question: Which side are You on?

It is really not possible to detail the corruption and Quisling nature of
the union bosses in a net post. There is a good deal of data on the teacher
unions on my www page. George Schmidt, as noted above, has written a very
fine pamphlet on the relationship of the CIA and the AFT. Paul Buhle has a
new book which touches on the subject. Jack Scott's "Yankee Trade Unions Go
Home" is a good starting point, as it "The Politics of Heroin." Daniel
Perlstein has written good introductory material on the history of the
AFT-UFT. Roger Keeran and William Serrin have writen great material on the
labor movement.


best,
r










At 06:03 PM 10/15/99 EDT, you wrote:
>>>I am interested in knowing why the unions have not supported teachers in
>fighting this "standards" movement. Why the rush to help the city "fix"
>assessments instead of calling a time out so that every one can step back and
>look at the whole educational picture. Sure would've been preferable to the
>fiasco over the New York test this summer.
>
>Mary O'Brien<<
>
>Let me do my best to answer this question.
>
>The issue of how teacher unions approach the question of the "standards
>movement" is really a local question, as the approach will vary widely among
>different AFT and NEA locals. I would not venture a generalization about all
>of them, because I think it would probably be without a very solid
foundation.
>
>I can say that for that part of 'teacher unions' I know well, my own local --
>New York City's United Federation of Teachers, the overriding issue of
>importance is that of the very existence, as a viable, meaningful system, of
>public education, and the threats to that existence posed by various
>privatization schemes such as vouchers. For us, this is both a question of
>great principle -- in our view, democracy and the abatement of social class
>inequality depends, in very large measure, on public schooling -- and
>self-interest -- the living standards and teaching conditions of teachers
>will decline dramatically if privatization makes a serious headway.
>
>All other questions -- the standards movement, standardized testing, whatever
>-- is seen through this prism.
>
>In New York City, the movement to raise standards is generally seen, when we
>have polled our members, as a positive phenomenon, and something the UFT
>should support. Further, the UFT see its success as a very central part of
>our efforts to save public education here from the privateers and
voucherites.
>
>At the same time, and because we make a distinction between standards and
>standardization, we have been supportive of our members involved in the
>Performance Based Assessment Consortium, primarily from the new, small
>schools, who have been seeking a waiver from the state to substitute rigorous
>performance based assessments, aligned with the state standards, for the
>State Regents examinations.
>
>As I said in previous posts, I believe it is an error of judgment to focus
>totally on the obvious failings in the administration of the standardized
>reading tests in NYC, while ignoring the much greater scandal of the previous
>system, in which large numbers of students, invariably low income and of
>color, were regularly advanced, especially in failing schools, without ever
>having been fully taught the essential skills they needed to succeed in
>education and in life. The UFT would not support a simple "stop the tests"
>approach which just restored the pre-test status quo, going back to that
>scandal, one which was far more injurious to the children. At the same time,
>we have made the point that the problem was much more than the administration
>of the test; it lay in making that test into such a high stakes venture for
>the individual child, solely determinant of promotion.
>
>While this is the UFT's official stance and approach, it is also -- as you
>might gather from my own posts -- an approach which I personally support.
>
>Leo Casey
>United Federation of Teachers
>
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Rich Gibson
Program Coordinator of Social Studies
Wayne State University
College of Education
Detroit MI 48202
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html

        Life travels upward in spirals.
        Those who take pains to search the shadows
         of the past below us, then, can better judge the
         tiny arc up which they climb,
        more surely guess the dim
         curves of the future above them.





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