I wish I could say I had learned something from the education globule’s recent debate over the role of teacher unions, but I haven’t. When the apparent tail end of the discussion ends with a claim that “unions… are tenacious and need to be defeated, over and over and over again if reform is to advance,” I shake my head. Insert “Fordham Institute and other think tanks” where Mike Petrilli had written “unions,” and you probably have Jerry Bracey’s views on one of those days when the air conditioning breaks, the power goes out, and the roof begins leaking. It’s more than a touch of demonization, or what’s worse, facile reductionism (a more damning intellectual sin, in my book).
Surprisingly, Andy Rotherham’s rejoinder
isn’t much more substantive. Maybe there is a role in recapitulating
the arguments for people who haven’t heard them before, but this blog
conversation has read to me much like Joan Scott’s 1986 article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis ($JSTOR), to which one of my fellow graduate students in the late 1980s accurately
responded (and the following is a rough paraphrase), “Well, yes, this
makes sense, but by now it’s obvious rather than productive.”
One
of the missing pieces in all this is some sense of the historical roles
teachers unions have played over the past century, at times when they
have been both powerful and not. Petrilli and others are focusing on
three roles of teachers unions: collective-bargaining agents, public
representatives for teachers (including lobbyists in legislatures), and
scapegoats. The collective-bargaining role of teachers unions is
relatively recent, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, and given the
variation in legal authority (the “why is Mississippi so bad if it
doesn’t have collective bargaining?” question), the facile answer now
is “because they lobby.”
That’s an interesting hypothesis,
but I have yet to see a single study documenting evidence for the claim
that the reason why many school structures in Mississippi are similar
to those in Massachusetts is because of the tremendous lobbying power
of the Mississippi Association of Educators
(the NEA affiliate), or that those school structures are the primary
reason why Mississippi’s education is inferior. Which structures are
the same? Ah, things like changing classes in high school. Bureaucratic
rules. You want to throw away things like an academic curriculum? And
teacher lobbying is responsible for all that? Maybe it has something to
do with institutional isomorphism, or the authority of administrators
at midcentury, when many of these structures were consolidated, or the
inertia that Mary Metz calls the script of “real school” and Tyack and
Cuban call the “grammar of schooling.” Homework, folks: do your
homework first.
I stick “scapegoat” in that list because
teachers unions have been scapegoated in the past in matters entirely
unrelated to the concerns of today’s… I’m with Elizabeth Green here
in needing a better descriptive than “reformer,” “reformy person” (I
think Alexander Russo gets credit for that), or “wannabe reformer” (and
I don’t know from whom I’ve heard that phrase). In Florida in the
1960s, teachers and their unions were accused of various things from
communism to sheltering gay teachers. In the early 20th century, the
Chicago Federation of Teachers was accused of … being a union and
consorting with unions. Now Petrilli blames “unions” writ large for not
being reformy-ish enough for him. Been there, done that, bought the
t-shirt, gave it to Goodwill.
Two other roles Petrilli (and many
others) are ignoring. One is the role of unions in social movements
that extend beyond them. An example of that is the type of innovative
organizing drive that UFT had with day-care workers, which
simultaneously addressed issues of social class, gender, race, and
early childhood education, not to mention the historic focus of
teachers unions with K-12 employees in bureaucratic systems. To put it
bluntly, childcare workers are on the low end of the education totem
pole, women who work for pittances given the huge responsibilities in
caring for young children. Childcare is also one of the hidden
underbellies of the changing gender dynamics of the American workplace,
making possible hundreds of thousands of two-earner and
two-professional-earner households, not to mention professional
single-mother households. Organizing childcare workers is the type of
thing you’d expect SEIU to do (such as in its janitorial organizing
campaigns), not UFT, and there will be consequences down the road
inside UFT in terms of policy and leadership, and interesting
possibilities in other cities.
Reaching back further in
time, teacher unions have been involved in a range of social movements
from the Progressive Era (with the Chicago Federation of Teachers, Jane
Addams, and other progressives suing to recover uncollected taxes from
corporations to pay for city services) to the post-WW2 civil rights
movements. Teachers unions often have struggled with these issues, but
it has also bolstered them. Case in point: the 1968 teachers strike in
Florida, where according to my colleague Barbara Shircliffe the public
images of teachers was often explicitly multiracial, a message of
cross-racial solidarity that’s hard to miss as dramatic in the 1960s.
That
relationship has not always been negotiated smoothly, as Daniel
Perlstein describes in his history of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
controversy, and that touches on the fifth role of teachers unions
historically, as organizers of teachers’ social identities. Probably
the best theorizer here is Ira Katznelson, who has argued in multiple
palces that people construct their social identities and roles around
different contexts. In the U.S., he argues that there is often a split
between the identity at work and the identity in one’s home, and the
outcomes of political conflict often revolves around how and where
those active in a controversy define themselves. Perlstein’s book Justice Justice! is an uncomfortable reminder that workplace solidarity is not always synonymous with justice.
A
more interesting and productive conversation could revolve around the
last, largely ignored issue. How are teachers’ social identities
formed, and how do workplace politics (including unions) feed into
that? To the extent that teachers see themselves as either technical
test-preppers or astructural “facilitators,” they’re ignoring real
needs of students, and the context of those tendencies are important.
Even the reformy-ish-ist folks believe that, or they wouldn’t argue so
hard for “reconstitution,” “reconstruction,” and other proposals to
disrupt local school culture. So we all agree with school culture. We
all agree that teacher unions matter. Does anyone else see a huge
research opportunity rather than a place for pat answers?