Re-booting Unions and Professional Organizations in Education

Let me preface my focus here with full disclosure.

I was born and have worked exclusively in South Carolina, a non-union (right to work) state. Thus, I have never been a member of a teachers union and have existed in a culture that is decidedly anti-union.

As a result, relatively early in my career, I was drawn to professional organizations for the sort of professional support that I believe also exists in part with unionization. In my field of English/ELA, that profesional community included the National Writing Project/Spartanburg Writing Project and the National Council of Teachers of English/South Carolina Council of Teachers of English.

I now approach three decades as an educator, and one of the consequences of aging is the danger of ones skepticism slipping into cynicism. Thus, I stand with one foot in my natural skepticism and another in cynicism—while leaning hard toward leaping fully into the latter.

Why? Because, turning now to Marilyn Price-Mitchell's question, I recognize that unions and professional organizations are failing public education, public school teachers, and public school students precisely because both unions and professional organizations are—like politicians, the public, and the media—failing to address equity in both society and in public schools.

While this will overlap some with Rawls' argument addressing the failure of logic among education reformers who call for higher teacher quality while bashing teachers unions, I'd like to focus here on the need for unions and professional organizations to re-think their missions, to re-frame that mission on the bedrock of equity, and then to re-boot their message against the political, public, and media discourse that seeks to dismantle public institutions, such as public schools, in order to move the U.S. further into a corporate state of the Haves (1%) and Working-for-the-Haves (99%).

The equity agenda of unions and professional organizations in education must address the following:

• Identify and clarify for the public the enormous and powerful inequity that exists in U.S. society and then is reflected in the measurable outcomes of schools. Unions and professional organizations must support all educators as public intellectuals who can and should teach not only in the classroom but also in the public sphere. Without union support, educators will be stripped of academic and scholarly freedom, and in effect, silenced. U.S. public school teachers and all educators and scholars must be afforded intellectual and academic freedom in order to inform through their expertise. This is a primary and essential role for addressing equity by our unions and professional organizations.

• Expose and reject in all ways the current accountability/standards/testing movement as inherently inequitable. Standardized testing remains a mechanism for labeling the fact of inequitable lives for children, and standardized tests are not valid proxies for student learning, teacher quality, or school quality. Instead of fighting for a seat at the Common Core State Standard movement and the concurrent rise in high-stakes testing, unions and professional organizations must reject this movement as inequitable.

• Confront the real teacher quality issue facing our schools: The inequitable distribution of experienced and certified teachers. The problem facing public education is not that we must identify "bad" teachers or that the best teachers need to be teaching more students, but that traditional and current practices allow and perpetuate social inequity to be replicated in schools through affluent and middle-class children sitting in the classes of our most experienced and certified teachers while children of color, children from poverty, multi-language learners, and special needs students disproportionately are assigned to inexperienced and un-/under-certified teachers (including TFA recruits).

• Promote policies that create working conditions for teachers that honor their autonomy and professional development by rejecting schemes designed to label, rank, and cull teachers in an authoritarian atmosphere. Social and educational equity must exist in democratic contexts; authoritarian and hierarchical contexts do not foster equity or democracy.

So, as to the question spurring this post, yes, unions (and professional organizations) can and should affect equity, but this is not the case now and will not be the case as long as unions and professional organizations function as they currently do.

Where unions fail is when they persist in the "seat-at-the-table" mentality, when they fall victim to the celebrity competition being promoted by the corporate reformers (trying to out-Gates Bill Gates, out-Rhee Michelle Rhee) instead of rising to the call for expertise in the public sphere.

Where professional organizations fail is when they persist in serving the needs of teachers to implement bad policy (the fatalistic collapse at the feet of the CCSS movement), when they sell their organizational souls to textbook and testing corporations.

To call for equity requires unions and professional organizations to stand against inequity, to lead educators' voices and actions against inequity.

For now, unions and professional organizations are failing as long as they follow.

Politicians often manipulate the public by confusing an important distinction: Politicians claim the U.S. is a meritocracy instead of imploring the public to continue pursuing a meritocracy.

In the union and professional organization debate, we stand at the same problem because unions and professional organizations can address equity, but first we must admit they aren't and then find ways to make the changes needed to establish equity as the foundation of both.