{"id":1643,"date":"2009-05-29T22:27:15","date_gmt":"2009-05-30T02:27:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1643"},"modified":"2009-05-29T22:27:15","modified_gmt":"2009-05-30T02:27:15","slug":"disappointing-debate-over-teacher-unions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1643","title":{"rendered":"Disappointing debate over teacher unions"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> 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). <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n

Surprisingly, Andy Rotherham’s rejoinder<\/a>
\nisn’t much more substantive. Maybe there is a role in recapitulating
\nthe arguments for people who haven’t heard them before, but this blog
\nconversation has read to me much like Joan Scott’s 1986 article Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis<\/a> ($JSTOR), to which one of my fellow graduate students in the late 1980s <\/a>accurately
\nresponded (and the following is a rough paraphrase), “Well, yes, this
\nmakes sense, but by now it’s obvious rather than productive.” <\/p>\n

One
\nof the missing pieces in all this is some sense of the historical roles
\nteachers unions have played over the past century, at times when they
\nhave been both powerful and not. Petrilli and others are focusing on
\nthree roles of teachers unions: collective-bargaining agents, public
\nrepresentatives for teachers (including lobbyists in legislatures), and
\nscapegoats. The collective-bargaining role of teachers unions is
\nrelatively recent, dating from the 1960s and 1970s, and given the
\nvariation in legal authority (the “why is Mississippi so bad if it
\ndoesn’t have collective bargaining?” question), the facile answer now
\nis “because they lobby.” <\/p>\n

That’s an interesting hypothesis,
\nbut I have yet to see a single study documenting evidence for the claim
\nthat the reason why many school structures in Mississippi are similar
\nto those in Massachusetts is because of the tremendous lobbying power
\nof the Mississippi Association of Educators<\/a>
\n(the NEA affiliate), or that those school structures are the primary
\nreason why Mississippi’s education is inferior. Which structures are
\nthe same? Ah, things like changing classes in high school. Bureaucratic
\nrules. You want to throw away things like an academic curriculum? And
\nteacher lobbying is responsible for all that? Maybe it has something to
\ndo with institutional isomorphism, or the authority of administrators
\nat midcentury, when many of these structures were consolidated, or the
\ninertia that Mary Metz calls the script of “real school” and Tyack and
\nCuban call the “grammar of schooling.” Homework, folks: do your
\nhomework first. <\/p>\n

I stick “scapegoat” in that list because
\nteachers unions have been scapegoated in the past in matters entirely
\nunrelated to the concerns of today’s… I’m with Elizabeth Green here
\nin needing a better descriptive than “reformer,” “reformy person” (I
\nthink Alexander Russo gets credit for that), or “wannabe reformer” (and
\nI don’t know from whom I’ve heard that phrase). In Florida in the
\n1960s, teachers and their unions were accused of various things from
\ncommunism to sheltering gay teachers. In the early 20th century, the
\nChicago Federation of Teachers was accused of … being a union and
\nconsorting with unions. Now Petrilli blames “unions” writ large for not
\nbeing reformy-ish enough for him. Been there, done that, bought the
\nt-shirt, gave it to Goodwill.<\/p>\n

Two other roles Petrilli (and many
\nothers) are ignoring. One is the role of unions in social movements
\nthat extend beyond them. An example of that is the type of innovative
\norganizing drive that UFT had with day-care workers, which
\nsimultaneously addressed issues of social class, gender, race, and
\nearly childhood education, not to mention the historic focus of
\nteachers unions with K-12 employees in bureaucratic systems. To put it
\nbluntly, childcare workers are on the low end of the education totem
\npole, women who work for pittances given the huge responsibilities in
\ncaring for young children. Childcare is also one of the hidden
\nunderbellies of the changing gender dynamics of the American workplace,
\nmaking possible hundreds of thousands of two-earner and
\ntwo-professional-earner households, not to mention professional
\nsingle-mother households. Organizing childcare workers is the type of
\nthing you’d expect SEIU to do (such as in its janitorial organizing
\ncampaigns), not UFT, and there will be consequences down the road
\ninside UFT in terms of policy and leadership, and interesting
\npossibilities in other cities. <\/p>\n

Reaching back further in
\ntime, teacher unions have been involved in a range of social movements
\nfrom the Progressive Era (with the Chicago Federation of Teachers, Jane
\nAddams, and other progressives suing to recover uncollected taxes from
\ncorporations to pay for city services) to the post-WW2 civil rights
\nmovements. Teachers unions often have struggled with these issues, but
\nit has also bolstered them. Case in point: the 1968 teachers strike in
\nFlorida, where according to my colleague Barbara Shircliffe the public
\nimages of teachers was often explicitly multiracial, a message of
\ncross-racial solidarity that’s hard to miss as dramatic in the 1960s. <\/p>\n

That
\nrelationship has not always been negotiated smoothly, as Daniel
\nPerlstein describes in his history of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville
\ncontroversy, and that touches on the fifth role of teachers unions
\nhistorically, as organizers of teachers’ social identities. Probably
\nthe best theorizer here is Ira Katznelson, who has argued in multiple
\npalces that people construct their social identities and roles around
\ndifferent contexts. In the U.S., he argues that there is often a split
\nbetween the identity at work and the identity in one’s home, and the
\noutcomes of political conflict often revolves around how and where
\nthose active in a controversy define themselves. Perlstein’s book Justice Justice!<\/i> is an uncomfortable reminder that workplace solidarity is not always synonymous with justice. <\/p>\n

A
\nmore interesting and productive conversation could revolve around the
\nlast, largely ignored issue. How are teachers’ social identities
\nformed, and how do workplace politics (including unions) feed into
\nthat? To the extent that teachers see themselves as either technical
\ntest-preppers or astructural “facilitators,” they’re ignoring real
\nneeds of students, and the context of those tendencies are important.
\nEven the reformy-ish-ist folks believe that, or they wouldn’t argue so
\nhard for “reconstitution,” “reconstruction,” and other proposals to
\ndisrupt local school culture. So we all agree with school culture. We
\nall agree that teacher unions matter. Does anyone else see a huge
\nresearch opportunity rather than a place for pat answers? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[11,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-policy","category-union"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-qv","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1643\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}