On Teacher Power - and we don't mean the power of union leaders

Teacher unions are being assailed for having too much power. But since I started teaching in 1967, at no point did I think I had any power. Classroom teachers who spend all day teaching are at the lowest rung of power and if I had to name the major focus of my activism it has been towards more power for classroom teachers, sadly to little success. So how come this disparity between an influential and powerful leadership and a disempowered membership? I can't really answer that question fully, but this exchange might offer some clues:

Question posed by FK on ICE-mail after Angel Gonzalez posted an excerpt from a book on teacher power:

How do we get power within a union which won't grant us any? And the UFT has positioned itself as a kind of "reasonable person facing new realities" -- and the public hates teachers anyway. The UFT makes it seem as though we compromise or nothing. The public thinks we are not compromising enough and that we don't do our jobs. Even with national tests contradicting our local ones, people don't challenge Bloomberg. We need leverage from somewhere. The parents aren't enough because they are not an active enough body of constituents. Plus they are scattered around the city and they don't all vote together. We need help, I think, from other unions, at the very least. DC 37 no longer has the power it once did. Who does? Why would they help us -- except that they can see the destruction of a major section of the civil service is almost a foregone conclusion. If we lose security, who's next? Still I don't feel support from neighbors who work for the MTA or Postal service. On an individual basis, they see teachers as the enemy. I feel like the entire city does.

Angel's response

You raise important concerns/questions that face our entire labor movement and many rank&file groups are grappling with. So we aren't alone in the frustration with our sell-out union bosses... It is a cooptation of labor that has gone on for decades and the USA excels in keeping labor in deep check.

Transformation and victories will be a long haul process. In Puerto Rico, for example, it took progressives, thru bottom up organizing, over 30years to take over sell-out AFT local and then in '05, this new FMPR seceded successfully from the AFT . Last year the FMPR had a successful 10 day strike that stopped charter school from rootingin PR....but I'm sure this charter battle will resurrect given the colonial govt's cancellation of all public sector labor contracts....

Anyway, this concept of unionism isn't new....It is called democratic social justice unionism and is juxtaposed to what we have in the uft/aft, bureaucratic business unionism. It can't be changed through the top-down efforts but rather by organizing from the bottom-up .... in our schools...in our communities ....with our rank and file ....

Some tenets of social justice unionism:

• struggles to be democratic on all levels (in its caucus and at the schools-the base structures)
• is a bottom up democracy built from with the rank&file membership
• defines issues of our members & fights with and for them
• union officers get paid no more than what s/he would get at the workplace
• transparency
• accountability of officers to the rank & file through a regular reporting system
• labor & community solidarity - where our issues are defined and explained so that others can understand the importance of our teacher-worker issues as quality of education issues as well. (e.g. good schools need small class sizes and well compensated teachers).
• respect for the constituencies we service (i.e. students, parents, community)
• lots of educational work targeting our membership and communities (we need to counter that Corporate-Govt media misinformation)
• lots of organizing and mobilizing (our rank&file caucuses must grow quantitatively and qualitatively to challenge to business union beast as well as the well financed corporate govt/media.
• and more that I don't recall and am researching....Labor notes and other left literature I am sure has lots. And I am sure Latin America union movement (in Spanish) will have more for us. Unfortunately, today I think only FMPR and Union of Electrical Workers may be the best living models to study.

In Gem, I and others are pushing a social justice union conception, but like everything new, it will take a long process of struggle, discussion, debater and time....GEM has begun to talk about a study group to discuss Steve Zeluck's document called '"Toward Teacher Power" (c. 1980) [copies are being made] which addresses our uft business unionism.

I did 2 youtubes with Rafael Feliciano, Pres. of the FMPR in English which I think are important contributions:

http://www.youtube.com/user/pitirrefili#play/uploads/11/htwt1McsGhM (part 1)

http://www.youtube.com/user/pitirrefili#play/uploads/10/Zk9Na_p-Av4 (part 2)

Bob Peterson of Rethinking Schools wrote an article on Social Justice Unionism which I've been circulating also.

I think that we, as organizers for union change, we need to study and analyze this monster, the uft/aft "service union". We need to know what we are fighting and accordingly propose the organizational alternative. We can't just do those analyses only about the schools, curricula, governance, etc and promote alternative visions and not do the same regarding our "union" [if you can call it that].

We have a long struggle ahead and thanks for sharing your thoughts.

I am taking the liberty of sharing our exchange with ICE-members because I think our dialogue will be important contributions.

Collectively, we can come up with solutions to take us out of this morass that we have inherited.

en lucha,

Angel

Why teachers should be running things

http://avoicecriesout.com/2008/05/31/meidiate-your-way-to-suspension/

What Teachers Make

Taylor Mali makes you proud to be a teacher in this video. If you have trouble viewing, go directly to the link.

LA Teachers Want More Control

This is a very interesting article posted by John Lawhead on ICE-mail and contrasts markedly in the way the LA union approaches things with the UFT approach, which has always been geared to a highly centralized system. There is also a difference between growing the power of a centralized union vs empowering teachers at the school level, something the UFT has done very little.

With governance on the table here, I think there are some very pertinent ideas.
I'll comment with more later with an update, but in the meantime, read this and draw your own conclusions.

From the Los Angeles Times

Teachers draft reform plan
latimes.com

Union's proposal calls for local, grass roots control over schools and gives instructors more breathing room to formulate curricula.

By Howard Blume
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 3, 2007

In this education nirvana, teachers would decide what to teach and when. Teachers and parents would hire and fire principals. No supervisors from downtown would tell anyone -- neither teachers nor students -- what to wear.

These are among the ideas a delegation of teachers and their union officers are urging L.A. schools Supt. David L. Brewer to include in the school reform plan he will present to the school board Tuesday.

If Brewer passes on the delegation's proposals, the union can go directly to the seven-member Board of Education. Employee unions recently have had success in getting the board to overrule the superintendent on health benefits for some part-time workers and on school staffing.

At stake now is the Los Angeles Unified School District's effort to turn around its 34 most troubled middle and high schools. The data suggests the urgency: As many as three-quarters of the students in these "high priority schools" scored well below grade level across multiple subjects on last year's California Standards Tests.

Whatever remedy emerges is likely to become a blueprint for widespread reform efforts. Brewer and his team are working on their 11th draft; the drafts have evolved significantly since September because of resistance inside and outside the school system.

At a meeting Friday between the district and the delegation from the United Teachers Los Angeles, union leaders were pointedly clear about what they want -- local, grass roots control over schools.

"This is what we think makes for a good education," said Joel Jordan, the union's director of special projects, who took part in the meeting. "We don't want to continue what hasn't worked and has demoralized teachers and students."

Rhetorically, Brewer has endorsed local control, but elements of his proposal cut both ways.

The separate plans of the union and the superintendent, as well as a "Schoolhouse" framework offered in January by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, all cobble together widely accepted strategies, such as smaller classes and schools, and better teacher training.

But union leaders said they felt compelled to take on some elements in Brewer's plan. One sticking point is Brewer's intention to use, in upper grades, an approach to instruction similar to the one used for teaching reading to 6-year-olds: emphasizing a unified, paced curriculum that includes periodic tests to make sure students are learning. The goal is to give all students exposure to rigorous academics.

With that approach, under previous Supt. Roy Romer, elementary test scores soared in most schools. But across the district, many English learners and African American students still struggled.

From Brewer's perspective, the problem at middle and high schools is that curriculum directives haven't been consistently followed. To the teacher delegation, the directives themselves are the problem.

"Narrowing the curriculum, top-down management, teaching to the test, expanding pacing plans and periodic assessments -- we think that has been a detriment to education," Jordan said. "The idea of uniformity when trying to meet the needs of individual students is a contradiction."

The union acknowledges that instructors must teach the skills and facts the state requires. But they believe a school's staff and individual teachers should decide how to accomplish that.

The district's view is that its curriculum guides specify "what is to be taught versus how it is to be taught," leaving ample room for teacher creativity, said Michelle King, interim chief instructional officer for secondary schools.

The union's ethos of local control extends to hiring and firing principals, which the union wants handled by a school site council made up of parents, teachers and older students.

Brewer's plan doesn't speak to hiring principals, which is currently the purview of the regional senior administrator.

As for dress codes, the union's six-page treatise states: "There is no research that indicates that teacher attire has any effect on student learning or respect for adults," and "uniforms for students should not be required but decided upon by the school's governing bodies with input from each constituency."

Participants from both sides said they expect no brutal fight over dress codes, but key differences remain over who controls what happens at schools.

Brewer has had difficulty developing a plan with broad support. This fall, he backed away entirely from placing the lowest-performing schools into a separate, mini-school system. That plan was opposed by the union and also encountered resistance from top administrators and from schools principals, who felt their campuses were being labeled "failed" schools.

The superintendent's reform effort was treated dismissively last week by Villaraigosa, who was addressing a faculty gathering at Roosevelt High School on the Eastside. Villaraigosa was urging staff to vote to enter his reform "partnership," which, he said, would be under his stewardship but led by teachers and parents. The lesser alternative, he said, was Brewer's plan.

"In the high-priority program, you're not going to have a say," he told the teachers. "It will be status quo."

Brewer, for his part, has embraced the mayor's partnership as an element in a package of reforms.

Sitting near the mayor at Roosevelt was school board president Monica Garcia, a Villaraigosa ally who, with the other board members, will have ultimate say over Brewer's approach.

In an interview, Garcia suggested that the mayor's statement was not intended to be derogatory: "If by status quo, he means that the provider of the reform is the district, that description is fair."

Garcia said she needed to see more details on how Brewer would find and use money for his reforms. She also said that no single reform style would fit every school.

Local control takes vastly different forms in different places, said UCLA professor Bill Ouchi, a school-reform researcher and management expert who has examined the issue for decades. Ouchi favors the system being tried in New York City, which gives principals near total say over their budgets. These principals sign a five-year performance agreement, on which they must deliver to keep their jobs.

"In none of these schools is there a required school site council," Ouchi said. "A principal might establish an advisory council but it has no governance or negotiating powers." And, he added, there's good reason why: "There's no practical way to hold parents or community members accountable. And there is no way outside of the teachers contract to hold teachers accountable."

Yet Ouchi doesn't fault teachers for wanting control: "They've observed for 30 years the failure of the management of the LAUSD. You can understand why the teachers say, 'Those people have amply demonstrated that they are incapable of running a school, so let us run it.' "

howard.blume@latimes.com