Inside Public Education: Why Teachers Need Unions

In light of the recent Chicago teachers strike, it’s time to discuss the prevalence, purposes, and problems of organized labor in public education. Most Illinois teachers belong to teachers’ unions.  Many don’t like the connotations of the word, “union,” so we changed that to “association.”  But make no mistake: a union by any other name would still smell like the teamsters.  I was a member for thirty-two years, and the list of my union activities is extensive—local president, grievance chair, and chief negotiator or bargainer for ten different contract negotiations.  That doesn’t include the association newsletter I edited for thirteen years or the countless contacts I had with colleagues over contract issues. 

So it should come as no surprise that I believe teachers’ unions are beneficial and mostly make public schools better.  Ah, you sharp reader, you—you noticed that “mostly” in there, didn’t you?  Well, nothing is all good or all bad, and teachers’ unions have problems just like anything else.  Don’t lose the “good” right after the “mostly,” okay?

Why have teachers’ unions at all?  Educators regularly claim that teaching is a profession, like medicine and law, which is one reason many dislike the idea of unions—they just seem so unprofessional.  Doctors and lawyers have organizations, like the AMA, but they don’t do “unseemly” things like negotiate contracts or go on strike.  The reality, however, is teachers are much more like everybody’s favorite punching bag, Department of Motor Vehicle workers:  public employees who are paid with tax dollars and regulated by local, state, and federal governments.  This is the number-one reason why teacher unions are necessary.  I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but as a boss, you and school board members (who represent you) leave much to be desired.  The only reasonable way I’ve found to interact with you about my working conditions is through collective bargaining laws and unions.

“So,” I can hear you thinking, “what’s so bad about me as a boss.  I’m a nice person, and I’ve always been supportive of teachers.”  That’s almost true—you’ve been supportive of the teachers you liked.  The first problem with you as my boss is that you can be fickle.  One year, you love my assertiveness and high standards; the next, I’m abusive with unreasonable expectations.  No matter what, there will be some who think I’m brilliant and some who think I’m incompetent.  And if you’ve been following this blog, you know that I think this variation comes from a crucial teaching quality—using personally unique approaches to achieve collectively created standards.  (See ”Art of Teaching”).  You, Ms. and Mr. Public are also thus making it inevitable that we will have some methodological differences on the best way to teach your children.  And even if we agree on methodology today, it doesn’t mean that we haven’t reserved the right to change our minds completely tomorrow. 

My union, then, is the support, the refuge, the rock that I can depend on to support what I’m doing.  Sure, the union doesn’t really know what I’m doing, but it takes my word that I’m doing my best because I’m a member and pay my dues.  Not exactly the purest, most idealistic relationship, but the union is composed of other teachers, so they know how it is.  You non-teachers think you know my job since you attended school.  As we’ve discussed (See ”My Manifesto”), most of you wouldn’t second-guess your accountant or cable guy, but you’ve got no problem telling me I should teach differently.  You know the cliché, “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”  That’s you right there.  Just because you went through sixteen-plus years of school doesn’t mean that you know how to do my job.  But that doesn’t stop you from thinking you do.  Unions help cushion teachers from the blizzard of outside Snowflakes so they can develop their individual strengths.

Another reason you lack as a boss is that you’re frugal.  No matter how many pleasant-sounding chestnuts you spew—“Our teachers are priceless;” or “They don’t pay you nearly enough;”—the day your property tax bill arrives and you see how much goes to schools, many of you suddenly see us as overpaid, part-time workers who go home every day before four and don’t have to work summers.  Money definitely changes everything, and our critics have been very good at exploiting this is recent years. 

For example, during the strike, Chicago teachers were lambasted as being “among the highest paid” teachers in the country, averaging $76,000 per year.  People, that’s not even close to being among the highest paid in the area, much less the country.  Check out these average salaries taken from the 2011 Illinois State School Report Cards (See http://iirc.niu.edu/ to find your school):  Glenbrook #225—$100,401, Hinsdale #86—$102,677, Niles #219—$103,154, New Trier #203—$103,670, Deerfield #113—$106,030, and Maine #207—$108,336.

The idea that teachers make over $100,000 has freaked out many in this area.  All it takes to enrage some people is a property tax bill in one hand and newspaper article listing teachers’ salaries in the other.  Money is such an emotional thing that reason rarely shows up when cash is the topic of discussion, as evidenced by much of the venom heaped on Chicago teachers during the strike. 

My union has my back during these irrational times when we have to negotiate salaries.  The progress we have made in the last thirty years is the direct result of collective bargaining laws which only came into being because our unions learned how the system worked, collected the cash to participate, and started lobbying like the business lobbies had been doing for the past two centuries.  We don’t always trust that the school boards you elect to negotiate with us will be reasonable (by our standards, of course) when it comes to paying us, so unions help.

Then there are the administrators, all of whom used to teach, but few act as if they remember the experience.  Since I just went on a rant about how you don’t really understand my job, it would be the height of hypocrisy for me to claim that I know what it’s like to be an administrator.  All I know is the dozens I’ve worked with over the years, and the most charitable way for me to characterize them is that they act like humans everywhere:  They like the authority they have, they want things to go smoothly, they don’t welcome criticism from teachers, and they have a variety of techniques at their disposal to get their way. 

Actually, the most effective tool administrators wield is classroom teachers’ basic timidity.  Legions of teachers are stricken by what I call “perpetual compliance.”  Basically, perpetual compliance makes teachers accept any administrative decision for fear that to disagree would displease.  “Oh no,” they cringe when asked to take a stand against some questionable administrative act, “the (department chair, principal, or superintendent) might get mad if I do that.”  Hence, many unfair actions go unchallenged because teachers don’t have the intestinal fortitude to confront the injustice.  Hell, many of us don’t have the intestinal fortitude to call our principals by their first names.  Unions help the few of us not so afflicted to stand up for our rights and to seek equitable treatment from administrators who don’t necessarily want to work in a collaborative, cooperative way.

Obviously, forced cooperation is not only ironic but hardly the best way to get things done.  However, I’ve found over the years that it’s much better than total administrative control; the administrators might be a little surly as they negotiate with teachers to reach compromises and they often undermine any solution reached, but at least we’ve got something on the record as we move toward grievances, arbitration, and unfair labor practices. 

Okay, it’s primarily a negative relationship, but most of the “advances” teaching has made as a career have come through the confrontational, power-shifting battles over who knows best how teachers should be treated.  It would be nice if a school were like a manufacturing plant where most measures of success or failure are more objective.  If I’ve got a soup factory, I can look at my bottom line to see how many cans got produced last year, how much grocery stores paid for those cans, and how much profit I made after all my bills got paid. 

Schools don’t have those kinds of hard statistics on which to rely.  Sure, we’ve got graduation rates and standardized tests (see ”Standarized Tests,” and ”IV” for more on these horrors), but we will never reach consensus on such basic issues as the best way to teach, which curricular areas are most important, or how to evaluate students.  When there is subjectivity in such fundamental issues, concentrating power into the hands of a few is bad policy.  With all the educational fads and U-turns schools have gone through over the years, we need as many skeptical analysts in the game as possible.  Of course there are examples of charismatic, visionary administrators who have single-handedly led school districts to the promised land (like that principal with the baseball bat, right?), but eventually those guys leave, and then what?  That visionary approach might not wear well after a while, and then you could be even worse off than before since now you’ve got that icon’s ghostly mythology to combat every time you advocate the tiniest revision to the utopia he created years ago. 

Schools are not static entities; the truism that you’re either changing and advancing or stagnating and declining is certainly applicable to districts I’ve known.  Unions provide teachers with the needed leverage to have a say at the big table, to force administrative generals to listen to the grunts in the trenches before the next suicidal charge is ordered.  While many administrators claim to want “shared decision making” and “collaboration,” my experience has been that the only sharing or collaboration they want is for all of us to share the administrator’s opinions and to collaborate on the ways to implement them. 

The concept of shared decision making is an interesting one which merits some digression.  The concept is easy to understand:  When decisions have to be made, all those impacted should have some say in what those decisions look like.  Before we decide which textbooks or movies we use, all those who have to use them need to have input into which ones we select.  Decisions like that quickly strain the consensus we had on the wonderfulness of shared decision making:  Do we include students and parents in text selection choices?  Who ultimately decides when there is a difference of opinion?  What characteristics should we use in judging the movies?  Which criterion is the most important, and how do we weight variables that go into our evaluation? 

Shared decision making gets complicated quickly, which is why it is seldom utilized.  My belief is that we need to understand how the choices we make will work and to be sure we include everybody involved in the operational end of the decision before we finalize anything.  No matter how great any decision is, if the people charged with making it work aren’t on board, it won’t succeed. 

Really, all decisions are shared decisions in that eventually everybody will participate in enacting the changes and make our own determinations if we want to go to the trouble of altering our ways to accommodate new ways of doing things.  Unions, then, provide us with a way to force administrators to listen to what we think.  Unions can improve the lot of teachers, but that hardly ever happens voluntarily—we have to keep pushing and insisting the laws which have created this possibility are obeyed.

But this pushing can get out of hand.  Next time we’ll look at the growing pains teacher unions have gone through as their size, influence, and power have grown.