Teacher Voice and Unions: Rivals or Partners?

I'm a member of a teacher voice group, and a member of a union.  Well actually more than a member - an activist.  I value both experiences a great deal.  I struggle to bring them together.

The Teacher Leader Network Forum (TLNF), the granddaddy of teacher voice groups, has been a valuable community for me to talk to teachers across the country, and broaden my perspective on education policy and its impact on the classroom.  At the same time, as a union activist, I have my hands on levers to make that policy perspective influence local and state policy.  I see the two things working together, but I also feel a tension between teacher voice and teacher unionism.

The emergence of a plethora of teacher voice groups such as VIVA (Voice Ideas Vision Action), Teach Plus, Educators for Excellence, and the Center for Teaching Quality(sponsor of TLNF) throw that tension into higher relief.  These groups tend to be nimble, low budget, and high tech - and very effective in developing a big picture perspective in participants.  The question becomes are they alternatives to the unions or are they complementary?

Unions theoretically are supposed to bring the voice of workers to the table.  They suffer some disadvantages in that task in education.  They are huge, expensive bureaucracies which become caught up in issues of institutional sustainability which often can obscure their original intent and purpose.  Their orientation to economic issues, while essential to public policy, obscures important professional issues, weakening impact and credibility.  The focus at the state and local level on the nuts and bolts of unionism, on the legalistic aspects of contract negotiation and administration, obscures the big picture.

In the best of both worlds, the union would cultivate the capacity of members to see the big picture, then marry that perspective to the nuts and bolts of policy making via collective bargaining agreements and legislation.  Unfortunately, engagement of a high capacity membership is not perceived to be in the best interests of the union bureaucracy.

In the best of both worlds, teacher voice groups would help teachers not just become adept at persuading the powerful, but actually become powerful themselves.  Unfortunately, the messiness of power is often treated as "unprofessional," as if we could somehow surf above the fray, pure and innocent and virtuous.

What if we thought of unions and teacher voice groups as complementary, rather than mutually exclusive?

I just heard of an effort to bring together a union and a teacher voice group in partnership.  Paul Toner, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, invited VIVA to build a teacher voice network in the gateway (smaller) cities of Massachusetts.  Toner regards VIVA as a partner who can build the capacity of the union by engaging teachers with interests beyond the traditional bread and butter issues of industrial unionism.  VIVA, for its part, partners with an organization with a robust capacity for making real impact in terms of access to the levers of power that can make the vision real.

There is a risk for both: an engaged membership may make uncomfortable demands on the union; the teacher voice group may have to descend from the ivory tower into the impure realm of political sausage making.  But the potential results in terms of great public policy, as well as the health and well being of both institutional partners, seem well worth the risk.

Rights: Use'm or Lose'm

It is one thing to have rights, another to have a mechanism for exercising those rights, and yet a third to actually exercise them.

On the first and second points, there is an active national effort to destroy our limited rights to "petition the Government for a redress of grievances" (expressed in the first amendment) and due process (as in the fourteenth amendment aka just and sufficient cause.)  We as teachers typically exercise those rights through our unions and through an orderly grievance process spelled out in collective bargaining agreements, rather than avail ourselves of remedies available through the legal system. 

Yes, as teachers and public employees we labor under restrictions that do not apply to the general public, but historically we have had certain rights and protections pertaining to our chosen profession.  State by state, those rights and protections are being systematically stripped away, a death by a thousand cuts.

Both the rights (expressed through collective bargaining) and the mechanism for expressing those rights (a system of grievances and arbitration which sits outside the court system) are being abrogated.  My view is that this allows deferred compensation such as pensions to be treated as a piggy bank by unscrupulous politicians.  The disempowerment of workers facilitates our rightward lurch towards a capitalist/fascist dystopia.

On the third point, for those of us who have not yet experienced the cataclysm which is North Carolina, Wisconsin or Michigan, rights mean nothing whatsoever if they are not actively enforced.  Every act of meek submission to authority is another nail in the coffin of teacher voice.

Too many of us view teaching as apolitical, on the excuse that conflict will hurt our students.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  As government employees OUR JOBS ARE POLITICAL!  That is reality.  It goes against our natures, as the sort of human beings who enter a service profession, to embrace conflict.

The bottom line is that the conflict has embraced us.

It is not our fault.  It becomes our fault if we don't push back by whatever means are at our disposal.  Yes, some of those means are political.  The venues can be corrupt and scary.  Activism and leadership require courage - the courage to live with the consequences of your inevitable mistakes.

Those who would destroy our profession, "destroy the village to save the village," fail to realize that every act of disempowerment promulgated against educators, students, and citizens is a distraction from our core mission and a disruption of school culture and community.  Culture and community are critical to a successful education system. 

I don't believe we should be blaming teachers by complaining about their passivity.  This is a symptom of an increasingly dysfunctional and totalitarian political culture.  Rather, we should acknowledge the harsh realities of citizenship and government employment, and as compassionate leaders help nurture engagement. 

Could Ike Have Foreseen the Education-Industrial Complex?

In his farewell speech in 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously warned of the dangers of the new military-industrial complex.  What he perhaps did not foresee was how that complex would become a paradigm for policy making outside the field of defense.  In the excerpt below I changed a few words, such as “military” to “education” and “federal contract” to “foundation grant”, and am struck by how Eisenhower’s prescient warning rings true for education in 2012.

"This conjunction of an immense education establishment and a large education industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the education-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge commercial and education machinery with our peaceful methods and goals, so that we may prosper together.

Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-education posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.  In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government.

Today, the solitary teacher, toiling in her classroom, has been overshadowed by task forces of researchers in foundations and testing fields. In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a foundation grant becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation's scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

The structure of the military-industrial complex has become a meme. It has recreated itself in the schools and universities of America.  A shadowy, revolving door world of government and quasi-government agencies, think tanks, foundations, corporations, universities, political and advocacy groups, and private contractors, form the ecosystem of education policy.  Oh yes – and unions, to be fair.  We need to call this out – it is the Education-Industrial Complex.

A self-reinforcing scientific-technological elite, detached from the everyday realities of the work, performs vast social engineering experiments behind closed doors in a cloud of group-thinkand acronyms.  Fueled by the endemic soft corruption of revolving six figure sinecures, as members pass easily from government to foundation to university, etc., this elite presumes to manipulate the masses of citizenry for their own good.

I have seen this with my own eyes.

It will take an “alert and knowledgeable citizenry” to deal with the consequences.  But where will that citizenry come from if their education is being engineered by people whose interests are money, status, and power, rather than democracy?