I teach in a GED program, not a public school, and I live in a right-to-work state, so I don't belong to a K-12 union (although I do belong to the Association of American University Professors, because I also teach at a university). But, along with the many teachers who are joining today's EduSolidarity event, I do feel passionately that American teachers (and other workers) need their unions, and that those unions have an essential role to play in the current national debate surrounding education. Why do I feel that way? Here are a few of the reasons:

1-Children are not voters. Low income children's parents are often not voters, either, or are not expected to be. I think this is an important point to remember in the current budget discussions. Part of the reason Republicans are trying to defund public education is that they don't like anything "public," especially if it has the potential to shake up class boundaries. But it's also worth noticing that children are in some ways easy to throw under the bus, especially if they're poor. They can't speak up for their own interests via elections, and in some cases their parents can't or don't either. The teachers' unions play an important role here. Contrary to the hype about unions, the truth is that a dichotomy between what's good for kids and what's good for adults in the classrooms is mostly a false one. When teachers negotiate for their own working conditions (class sizes, length of days, etc), they are also, as I saw one sign in a photo of the Wisconsin saying, negotiating for your childrens' learning conditions. The teachers are the ones who are perhaps best equipped to speak up for kids' best interests in the debate surrounding education--and although there's not a ton of evidence that their voices have been included so far, I think they'd be far less likely to get heard without the existence of unions. You could certainly argue that in some cases unions silence teachers' voices-and I think that can be true-but they also provide a framework for mass solidarity, and we all know that many voices speak louder than one. I am also hopeful that, as teachers continue to demand that their union leaders serve them better, the unions will become a more effective vehicle for real, student-centered, educational reform. The structure and the solidarity are already there.

2-Teachers are vulnerable in all sorts of ways in the US. This is especially true of public school teachers. They are faced with a country which does not respect educating children as a form of "real work," where their work has traditionally been seen as "women's work" (anyone who doesn't think that's important should take note of how Scott Walker spared the "men's" unions-firemen and police-in his union bills), where any teacher who worries about her own working conditions is accused of "just being in it for the money," and where the democratic idea that we have a responsibility to educate all children is rapidly vanishing. It's easy to make teachers the scapegoat for any national problem (that's part of what's going on now), because they're at the bottom of the professional totem pole, and because that's easy, it's easy to slash their pay and change their working conditions such that their already difficult jobs become unmanageable. People are constantly saying well, bankers don't have unions. But the fact is that bankers are RESPECTED and seen as valuable workers (although some would argue that they are not)-that's their union. That's how they negotiate pay and working conditions.  I honestly think that all workers should have a union-but having public respect goes an awfully long way towards protecting your rights, and teachers don't have much of that. Their work, however, is essential in a democratic society, and so their unions really protect us all on some level.

3-All people, all classes, need a voice: I read this white paper yesterday, put out by the National Center on Education and the Economy, on the difference between labor history in Europe and the US. One detail that really struck me was that because European countries had an entrenched idea of a class system, the upper classes were prone to seeing unions as an important vehicle for the working class voice. That is, they were comfortable with the reality that class exists and makes a difference, which is part of what makes unions necessary. In America, we (mistakenly) are taught that there is no class system, but of course there is, and of course working people live in a different reality than the billionaires who currently control much of our government and discourse. The unions are the only entities in America that speak for the rest of us, politically and culturally. They are the only leverage working people really have in a capitalist "democracy," and they also are the only voices educating us about the realities of class, the value of solidarity, and what it means to fight for our collective self-interest as workers. I've already said something about why I think that leverage is particularly important for teachers due to their vulnerability-but I also think that cultural voice is particularly important to teachers. In a democratic society, teachers should be able to teach about civic participation and what  can stand in the way of it. They should be able to talk to students about what collective self interest means and how to figure out what theirs might be. The union plays a big role in educating teachers that way, so that they can show their students (like Deborah Meier said) how to be participating citizens.

I do think that every worker should have a union, because, especially in a runaway corporatocracy like the one we live in, all workers are vulnerable. (When people complain about teachers getting pensions, I want to say to them-YOU SHOULD GET THEM TOO! We all should! How can you make that happen without a union?) And I think that in the virulent rhetoric about American individualism and how everyone should be out for himself, solidarity is an important human and democratic value that needs to be talked about and demonstrated and supported. But I think that all these things are especially important for teachers; when they fight for schools, they're really fighting for all of us. 
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  1. As a fellow teacher and blogger, I really appreciate this post. You boiled it right down to the essentials: Kids are not voters, teachers are vulnerable. Nuff said. Thank you, very well done!

    ReplyDelete
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