How Teachers Unions Lead the Way to Better Schools

Amy B. Dean

by Amy Dean

Diane Ravitch upends the “bad teachers” narrative.

Part of what I object to is the assumption that somehow the problems in American education are all tied up with teachers. The teachers are causing low performance, and if we could just find the ideal teacher evaluation system, we would be the highest performing nation in the world. I think that’s a false narrative.

I have a concern: Teachers are getting pummeled. Too often, they are being demonized in the media and blamed by politicians for being the cause of bad schools. Right-wing governors, power-hungry mayors and corporate “reformers”—all ignoring root issues such as poverty and inequality—have scapegoated the people who have devoted their lives to educating our children. Moreover, these forces are seeking to destroy the collective organizations formed by educators: teachers unions.

The stakes for our country could not be more profound. The labor movement and the public education system are two critical institutions of American democracy. And they are two that go hand in hand. Teachers unions have played a critical role in advocating for public education, but you’d never know it from mainstream media coverage. Therefore, there is a great need to lift up this tradition and highlight the efforts of teachers to collectively push for top-notch public schools.

To figure out how we can push forward on this issue, I talked with Diane Ravitch, one of the country’s leading education historians and public school advocates. A professor at New York University, Ravitch is a former Assistant Secretary of Education and the author of several books, including 2010’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.

Lesson From Chicago: We Need Resources and Accountability to Avoid a Two-Tiered Education System

by Amy B. Dean

Amy B. Dean

The Chicago teachers’ strike may be over, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel may have replaced the Chicago schools CEO, but the underlying issues that caused the rift between teachers and public schools officials haven’t gone away. Because our education system is such a vital public asset, we cannot resolve these issues in the context of a crisis. In the strike’s aftermath, though, we have an opportunity to begin tackling them.

There are two key issues that need to be addressed going forward: resources and accountability.

If we’re serious about fixing the long-term problems in the schools, we should take a careful look at each of these, determining how they should shape the roles of all players in the system — be they administrators, teachers, parents, or politicians.

Why Do People Hate Teachers Unions? Because They Hate Teachers.

by Corey Robin

Like Doug Henwood, I’ve spent the last few days trying to figure out why people—particularly liberals and pseudo-liberals in the chattering classes—hate teachers unions. One could of course take these people at their word—they care about the kids, they worry that strikes hurt the kids, and so on—but since we never hear a peep out of them about the fact that students have to swelter through 98-degree weather in jam-packed classes without air conditioning, I’m not so inclined.

Forgive me then if I essay an admittedly more impressionistic analysis drawn from my own experience.

Rahm’s Wedge

by Harold Meyerson

Harold Meyerson

Put aside for a moment the particulars of the Chicago teachers’ strike and look at the broader picture. Rahm Emanuel is only one of a number of Democratic mayors and governors who are going after public-employee unions. In Los Angeles, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is also at loggerheads with the city’s teacher union. In San Jose, a Democratic mayor and city council scaled back the city employees’ pensions (and so did city voters when they were asked to ratify that decision). In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo has tangled with a number of public-sector unions. The battle between management and labor seems to have spread to the very center of the Democratic Party.

To some degree, this is a predictable response to the fiscal crisis states have faced during a severe recession—something’s got to give, and a number of chief executives have said it’s union benefits. Nonetheless, a number of the chief executives who’ve taken on unions are from jurisdictions with lots of rich folks on whom they’ve declined to raise taxes—Cuomo most conspicuously. More worrisome, a number of these chief executives—Emanuel and, again, Cuomo—took office plainly spoiling to take the unions on. In this, they were surely channeling the views of financial and media elites, who consider unions an impediment to efficiency in education and government, and some of whom see union-smashing as the key to reducing the size of government generally.

“The Corporate Vision for American Education”

By Jack Rasmus

Jack Rasmus

Both K-12 and college education systems in America were once the envy of the world. But that system is now in a state of continuing decline, with a halt to the decline nowhere in sight.

At the college level, the central problem is runaway costs. College administrators have become intent on acting as corporate CEOs, spending more and more money on providing CEO level pay and benefit packages for themselves and their growing management bureaucracies; expanding physical assets (buildings, facilities, programs); recruiting more and more wealthy foreign ‘customers’ (students) to cover rising costs; and raising the price of higher education services for US students at an annual rate of more than 12% despite four years of economic crisis and absent economic recovery.

The short term solution to accelerating higher education costs by policymakers thus far has been to burden college students with ever-escalating student loans; and for K-12 education, it has been to raise property taxes and to require more out of pocket payments by families of students for what was once fully publicly provided services.

Corporate America wants inexperienced teachers in the classroom

by Bob Simpson

It’s true! The big money people want to put the rookie squad into our classrooms. Corporate funded attacks on public education and teachers’ unions have portrayed higher paid, more experienced teachers as the villains of the current financial crisis. It’s good-bye, Mr. Chips  and sayonara, Ms. Frizzle.

In 1987-88 the typical primary or secondary teacher had 15 years of experience. But  by 2007-2008, the typical teacher had 1-2 years of experience. Not only that, but 50% of teachers leave the profession within 5 years. Veteran educator Larry Cuban has estimated how long it takes to actually learn the job.

“Only by the end of the fourth or fifth year of teaching do most newcomers become competent and confident in figuring out lessons, knowing the ins-and-outs of classroom management, and taking risks in departing from the routines of daily teaching.”

Brad Juppe of the US Department of Education is blunt:

“The crisis is upon us. The mode of experience being one to two years should be the most alarming thing we have come upon.”

Education, Jobs, and Wages

by Jack Metzgar

Jack Metzgar

Most people are surprised when I tell them that only about 30% of Americans over the age of 25 have bachelor’s degrees.  This is especially true of professional middle-class folks who went to high schools where almost everybody went to college immediately after graduation and whose friends now are almost all college graduates.  But it’s also true of people from working-class and poor backgrounds, who seem to think they are “abnormal” or “below average” because they haven’t graduated from college.  They’re not.  They are, in fact, the ones who are “typical.”

It’s even more surprising, however, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports that in 2010 only 20% of jobs required a bachelor’s degree, whereas 26% of jobs did not even require a high school diploma, and another 43% required only a high school diploma or equivalent.  And according to the BLS, this isn’t going to change much by 2020, since the overwhelming majority of jobs by then will still require only a high school diploma or less.  What’s more, nearly 3/4ths of “job openings due to growth and replacement needs” over the next 10 years will pay a median wage of less than $35,000 a year, with nearly 30% paying a median of about $20,000 a year (in 2010 dollars).

Put these two sets of numbers together, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Americans are over educated for the jobs that we have and are going to have.  It’s hard to imagine why anybody would call us “a knowledge economy.”   It’s also hard to see how “in the 21^st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,” as President Obama famously said in his 2010 State of the Union Address.

Night of Outrage: Thousands Protest NYC School Closings

by Michael Hirsch and Micah Landau

The Brooklyn Technical HS auditorium was packed for the Feb. 9 meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy. Photo by Dave Sanders

In one of the angriest demonstrations yet against Mayor Bloomberg’s failed education policies, thousands of teachers, parents, students and community members turned out to protest school closings at a Feb. 9 meeting of the city’s Panel for Educational Policy at Brooklyn Technical HS.

Despite virtually unanimous opposition, the panel approved the Department of Education’s bid to close 18 schools and eliminate grades from five others. The decision marked the largest number of school closings ever approved in a single meeting. Bloomberg has closed 117 schools since taking control of the school system in 2002, while opening 396 new schools that rarely serve the same high-needs students.

Some 500 UFT members, community allies and elected officials rallied at a press conference across the street from the meeting before entering.

“The entire city is sick and tired of the way the school system is being treated,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew told the crowd. “Enough is enough!”

Mulgrew also took aim at the PEP. “It doesn’t even do justice to the words ‘kangaroo court,’” he said.

The panel, dominated by mayoral appointees, has never rejected a proposal to close a school.

State Sen. John Sampson, who was among the 28 local elected officials at the press conference, gave the DOE an F for failing students and schools.

“It’s time not only to shut down Tweed, but to remove everyone in Tweed,” he said.

The UFT had initially planned to march to nearby PS 20, where it would hold an alternative “People’s PEP,” but, after police barred those assembled from marching in the street, Mulgrew led the crowd into the PEP meeting.

UFT  President Michael Mulgrew (center) and New York State NAACP President Hazel Dukes (right of Mulgrew) are among those leading the pre-meeting protest. Miller Photography

Inside the capacious Brooklyn Tech auditorium, the rage was palpable. The police were out in force, with NYPD officers standing in a phalanx near the stage and along the sides of the auditorium

Standing on a chair in the heart of the crowd, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “We have come here tonight to speak truth to power. The only thing that needs to be closed is the Department of Education.”

His words, not amplified by a microphone, echoed in waves through the auditorium as the crowd repeated them using the “people’s microphone.”

The more than 100 speakers, including many parents, almost all slammed the closings.

New York State NAACP President Hazel Dukes demanded that the DOE keep schools open.

“You’ve hired consultants who know nothing about our children,” she said. “Use that money instead to give schools the resources they need.”

Ernest Uthgenannt, the chapter leader at Grace Dodge HS in the Bronx, had intended to defend the importance of his school’s CTE programs at the “People’s PEP,” but instead told the New York Teacher that they offer “an alternative path” to students who may not be inclined to pursue higher education and in many cases “provide the motivation to get through the academic classes that are necessary to graduate.”

“I’m afraid to think of what might happen to some of these kids if their CTE programs are taken away,” Uthgenannt said, noting his school’s CTE programs are among the last remaining in the Bronx. “They might decide not to come to school at all.”

Uthgenannt said that the DOE placed Grace Dodge in the “transformation” model, a three-year process, in August. “How do they change their minds in four months? What kind of planning is that?” he asked.

Another chapter leader, Mavis Yon of General Chappie James Elementary School of Science in Ocean Hill-Brownsville, told the New York Teacher about the overwhelming — and overlooked — social issues confronting her school, where 98 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

Yon said that her school community’s pleas to the DOE for additional “wrap-around” social services at their school fell on deaf ears.

“There are kids who need glasses, but their parents can’t afford them,” she said. “If you can’t see, you can’t read. You just can’t.”

She warned, “Until the DOE realizes you have to educate the whole child, they’ll have similar results.”

Harry Rivas, a freshman at Manhattan’s Legacy HS and a leader in the fight to save it, said that “if you close down the school, you close down the students with it.”

Of the coming four years, Rivas said, “We’re not going to be able to get the support and help we need. And we’re not going to be able to get the proper education we need.”

Natasha Capers, an alumna of PS/IS 298 and the vice president of the school’s PTA, asked the panelists when they will “stand up and do what’s right for New York City children?”

Students “need time, they need love and they need a proper education,” none of which they are getting from the DOE, she said.

Harlem Sen. Bill Perkins condemned “the slow death of space being taken away, piece by piece” from three schools just blocks from each other in his district. These schools would now be squeezed or closed to make room for new co-located schools, he said.

“The DOE often says they are providing these new schools to offer choice,” Perkins said. “If you live in this part of the city, you will have no choice as a result of them giving all of our public schools away.”

Educators from schools labeled “persistently lowest achieving” also turned out in force at the meeting after the mayor threatened to close 31 of these schools and remove half of the staff in each.

Brett Green, a music teacher at Grover Cleveland HS, which had been in the federal “restart” model, said that Chancellor Dennis Walcott, in a recent visit to the school, promised the school community, “I can see your progress. I will do what I can to help your school. It will not close.”

The mayor’s vow to close the school, Green said, has left students, families and teachers “demoralized, to say nothing of being thrown into complete and utter turmoil.”

At the end of the long night, true to form, the mayoral appointees voted to approve all the closings, while the representatives from Manhattan, the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn dissented. The Staten Island representative voted in favor of the closings, except for PS 14 in her borough, on which she abstained from voting.

Michael Hirsch and Micah Landau are on the staff of the New York Teacher, where this report originally appeared.

There’s One Big Worm In Checker Finn’s Apple

by Leo Casey

On the Fordham Foundation’s Flypaper blog and in the electronic pages of the Hoover Foundation’s Education Next, Checker Finn is bemoaning the state of the American work ethic, and blaming American education for this sorry state of affairs.

This narrative of American cultural decline, with the public school teacher playing a starring role as villain, is a trope that appears frequently in conservative circles dedicated to waging ‘culture war’ on issues of race, gender and sexuality.  In his piece, Finn cites a forthcoming book by paleo-conservative Charles Murray on the decline of ‘industriousness’ in the America’s white working class. (Murray is best known as the author of The Bell Curve, with its theory of a genetically based African-American intellectual inferiority; apparently, the industriousness of American workers of color is not worth discussing.) Finn links to a chapter from Murray’s book, just published in the Wall Street Journal,  in which he characterizes the declining rate of full-time employment among male white workers as a cultural failing of the workers. Amazingly, Murray has no discussion of the impact of the current economic downturn, the deepest and longest since the Great Depression, on working class employment, and no mention of the effects of four decades of globalization, during which corporations exported decent paying industrial jobs abroad to countries with very low labor costs enforced by authoritarian regimes. No, in Murray’s hands, the decline of full-time working class employment is entirely a cultural flaw, a loss of the Puritan ethic of hard work, to be found in the workers themselves.

Parents and teachers march for public schools

Save Our Schools

By Duane Campbell

An estimated 2000 – 3,000  parents, teachers, and public education supporters marched in Washington, D.C. and in  eleven  support rallies in other cities including Sacramento, California  on July 30. The events were organized by parent groups and other pro public education groups and supported by teachers unions.  The rally, although small by Washington standards was at least 20 times larger than the Tea Party rally held in Washington this week in support of the Tea Party’s proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution to balance the budget.

There was limited media coverage of the Save Our Schools rallies.  The Save Our Schools March was organized by a wide variety of local groups and education advocates.  Speakers included Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, José Vilson, Deborah Meier, Monty Neill, Cornel West, and Pedro Noguera, among others.  Schools around the country are suffering from severe  budget cuts and teacher lay offs  imposed by the economic crisis and the  resultant decisions of legislatures to cut budgets.