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1.

Understanding the Assault on Public Education

Throughout the world, teachers, parents, and students are experiencing wrenching changes in how schools are run, who teaches, and what may be taught. Students are being robbed of meaningful learning, of time for play or creativity—for anything that’s not tested. Hostile politicians blame teachers for an astounding list of social and economic problems ranging from unemployment to moral decline. In all but the wealthiest school systems, academic accomplishment has been reduced to scores on standardized tests that for-profit companies develop and evaluate. Parents, citizens, teachers, and students—education’s most important stakeholders—have little say about what is taught, while corporate chiefs, politicians in their thrall, and foundations that receive funding from billionaires who profit from pro-business education policies determine who teaches and how. Children from affluent families face intensified competition for high grades, high SAT scores, a resume that will ease passage into a prestigious college and a well-paid career. Children whose parents have little formal education and who attend under-resourced schools experience intense pressures to succeed on standardized tests and school days that consist mostly of test preparation. I’ve written this book for teachers who are committed to social justice and democracy, in our society and in our schools. From my work with teachers and college students who want to teach, I see the hope and idealism this new generation brings. Most teachers I work with focus on making change through their teaching. They consider what they do in the classroom the way to change the world. Another group of teachers and school professionals, often those who work with immigrant students and teachers of color who have gone into teaching to be of service to the communities in which they live, see themselves as advocates for students, families, and communities that experience prejudice and limited social opportunity. And I’m seeing more and more teachers who want to make their unions more democratic, proactive, and militant. I’ve also observed that these three groups of teachers often don’t collaborate and may not see one another as allies. One goal of this book is to explain why it’s essential to create a movement that brings these groups together and how that might be done.

While we have to understand the powerful forces arrayed against us, we also need to keep in mind that every major improvement to education occurred because social movements—ordinary people banding together to make change—made others see issues differently. We can reverse the assault on public education if we create a new social movement of teachers that knows how to learn from and work with parents, communities, activists on other social issues, and other labor unions.

A Global Project Transforming Public Education in Ways the Rich and Powerful Dictate

It may seem as though many policies, like closing schools that have low test scores, are irrational or just ignorant. Politicians’ lack of knowledge about education and animus toward teachers are both factors, but a far more onerous, chilling agenda drives the collection of policies destroying public education as it has existed for more than a century. The rhetoric of improving educational opportunity for those who have been excluded from prosperity has been used throughout the world to defend transformation of schooling that amounts to destroying what has existed for a century, to make drastic alterations in what is taught, how schools are funded and run, and who teaches.

We need—always—to introduce criticisms of the current reforms by affirming an unequivocal recognition of inequality, current and historic, and of our commitment to providing all children with a high-quality education. At the same time, we confront the reality that policies that are touted to “put children first” and “make services work for poor people” actually increase inequality for the vast majority of children who most need improved schools. Sometimes I am told that such a vast, well-organized project could not exist without the US public knowing more about it and that what I am describing sounds like a conspiracy.1 Conspiracies are, by definition, secret. Yet the global project of wealthy, powerful elites to transform education has been quite public for more than a quarter century. Alas, we in the global North have been wearing blinders for decades. Evidence about the real aims and actual effects of “free market” reforms has been available for decades—if we looked in the right places, that is, at prospectuses from corporations developing new products and reports from the World Bank. The record is quite clear that lofty-sounding slogans mask the drive of transnational corporations to refashion education to fit their vision of a new global economy. For the elites who control corporations, media, and government, public expenditure on educating workers beyond the skill level needed for low-paying jobs is wasted. Since most jobs being created require no more than an eighth-grade education (think of Walmart’s “associates”), only a handful of people need to acquire the sophisticated thinking and skills to manage and control the world’s productive resources. Minimally educated workers need only minimally educated teachers. Oversight of lowered expectations for educational outcomes can be achieved through the use of standardized testing. Therefore, a well-educated (and well-paid) teaching force, it is argued by elites establishing educational policy, is a waste of scarce public money.2

Financial and political elites, working through international organizations, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, began this project forty years ago when they imposed school reform on countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia as a quid pro quo for economic aid. The project was first introduced in Chile, under Pinochet’s brutal military dictatorship (supported by the United States), when schooling was privatized under the tutelage of Milton Friedman.3 The project has emerged differently in the more industrially developed nations and though specifics of this social engineering differ in significant ways from one country to another, the same footprint is recognizable. Make public education a “free market” open to entrepreneurs; create a revolving door of minimally trained teachers; reduce the curriculum to basic math and literacy content that workers will need to compete for low-paid jobs; control teachers and students with standardized testing; and weaken public oversight by breaking up school systems and replacing them with privately operated schools.

In much of the world this framework of “free market” policies is called “neoliberalism,” a term unfamiliar in the United States. This new term signifies a key shift in the thinking of elites that control the world’s resources—and governments. In the United States, “liberalism” is associated with development of the welfare state, government policies like Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The term “neoliberalism” refers to quite a different political stance, drawing on the ideas of the first liberals (like Adam Smith), who developed theories about how “free markets” operate.4 I am often asked about the intentions of the individuals who support neoliberal reforms, especially politicians who may identify themselves as liberals or progressives. Are they misguided? Ignorant? I think since we can’t know what’s going on inside of someone’s head, there’s little benefit in focusing on intentions. Instead we should examine ideology.

As with “neoliberalism,” “ideology” is a term that can be confusing to people in the United States. Other economic and political systems have ideologies, but not us in the United States—right? If we use “ideology” to mean shared political beliefs about how a society operates, its spoken and unspoken rules, then every society has a dominant ideology to explain why its political and economic systems are good and fair. Analyzing ideology rather than intentions helps explain why people who seem to care, genuinely, about poor kids embrace reforms that do harm. They buy into neoliberal ideology, primarily the belief that the “free market” and “choice” will solve the problem of educational inequality.

Persistent inequality, in society and education, is at the heart of neoliberalism’s appeal, not only to the wealthy but also to many poor and working people. Public education in the United States has not, historically, served poor and working people as well as it should, and we need to acknowledge that in order for our case about what’s wrong with current “deforms” to be credible to people who should be our allies. We also have to be forthright in stating that while teachers and their unions did not create educational inequality, they have been too complicitous in maintaining it, from the very start of mass public education.5 On the other hand, many policies in the ’60s and ’70s that could not have been enacted without support from teachers, teachers unions, and organized labor did, in fact, help reduce inequality in school outcomes. One example is high-quality early childhood education. Another is school lunch programs. At the same time that we note the successes, it’s essential to understand that much more was needed. Some of the ’60s reforms were, in hindsight, problematic, like using standardized test scores to measure whether federal money was well spent. This history shows us that education cannot on its own reverse deeply rooted causes of school failure, like poverty, racism, and unemployment, but schools and teachers that are better supported can make strides in closing the gap.6

Teachers Unions and Social Justice: Making the Connections Real

There’s far more to neoliberalism’s global assault on teachers and teachers unions than I can summarize in this book. However, teachers committed to working for social justice need to understand a few key issues. The neoliberal project in education has generated opposition wherever teachers and parents have the political freedom to resist—and in some places where they do not. The architects of this project aim to eliminate spaces in schools for critique, social justice teaching, and voices of parents and community—that is, when the voices are not a chorus supporting neoliberal goals. The elites who are orchestrating school “deform” understand (unfortunately, more than do most teachers) that despite their all-too-glaring problems, teachers unions are the main impediment to the neoliberal project being fully realized. Even when unions don’t live up to their ideals, teacher unionism’s principles of collective action and solidarity contradict neoliberalism’s key premises—individual initiative and competition. Neoliberalism pushes a “survival of the fittest” thinking. Labor unions presume people have to work together to protect their common interests.

Unions press for collective voice and intervention to counter the employer’s absolute control. Working together, employees possess a strength much greater than they have as individuals. Without a union, employees have no protection and no rights except those the employer grants. Especially in an occupation like teaching in which there is so much disagreement about what constitutes ideal practice, a supervisor has tremendous power to decide whether an individual is doing the job well. At its best the union brings individuals together to create a collective definition of professional conduct and responsibilities.

Another reason unions are a threat is that they can exercise institutional power. As organizations they have legal rights. Because unions have institutional roots, they are a stable force. And a union is able to draw on a regular source of income, membership dues. These characteristics give teachers unions an organizational capacity seldom acquired by advocacy groups or parents, who generally graduate from activity in schools along with their children.

I know from my work as a teacher educator that what I’ve written about the unions’ potential is often a hard sell to teachers and parents, so I want to clarify that I am explaining what gives unions their potential strength, not excusing what they don’t do or do wrong. It’s important to say, loudly, that the potential of teachers unions is not being realized and that they need to be transformed. Often union officials tell reformers not to “wash our dirty linen in public.” However, this dirty laundry has already been paraded to great advantage by our enemies. The only way we will persuade teachers and the public that unions can be different—better—is by coming clean about problems.

The very factors that make unions stable and potentially powerful also induce bureaucracy and conservatism. Consider the difference between how principals and superintendents are chosen and the elections that must occur in unions. Teachers unions are membership organizations, “owned” by their members, whose votes keep the leadership in power and whose dues keep the organization operating. Yet neither unions as organizations nor union members as individuals are immune to prejudices that infect a society, even when these prejudices contradict the union’s premises of equality in the workplace. The automatic collection of dues from members’ paycheck stabilizes the union financially but also insulates officers from members’ disgruntlement. Contracts offer protection, but they are very complex documents, and the staff’s specialized knowledge and skills in negotiating and enforcing contracts can encourage members’ passivity. When the law gives a union the right to negotiate a contract, it also generally gives the union exclusive bargaining rights, meaning that members can’t replace their union with another one they think will be more responsive, at least not during the life of the contract.

Classrooms, teachers, and unions are affected by social, economic, and political life. The Right has become bolder and government policies more conservative in almost every realm. The communities we work with have been altered too, by more economic hardship and political repression. We must also acknowledge our opponents’ ideological victories in changing how people think about education and government. The social movements that support social justice teaching and union work are weaker now. When I started teaching, we could often use school resources to support social justice work. For instance, when I was chair of my union local’s women’s rights committee, I helped organize a professional development conference that involved the women’s studies program at a local university, along with community groups.

Today, in contrast, teachers and teachers unions have fewer allies and are in many ways more politically isolated. Many teachers in schools struggling with low test scores fear their schools will be shut down. Others, in schools that seem immune from being closed, shut their classroom doors, literally and figuratively, trying to deny the powerful social and political forces that are subverting their hard work with students. Too many teachers have stopped asking, “Is this good for our kids?” because they fear that questioning authority puts their jobs at risk.

The deterioration in teachers’ confidence to stand up for their students, for social justice, and for their dignity as workers mirrors the weakening of teachers unions. If you care about social justice in education, you have a very important stake in not only the continued existence of teachers unions but also in their transformation. Though the popular media cast teachers unions as powerful, the unions are quite weak where it counts most, at the school site. Union leaders are disoriented and confused. When I started teaching, teachers unions might win economic gains without doing much to mobilize members. That is no longer the case. The propaganda campaign we have experienced has achieved its goal of discrediting the unions as organizations and even the idea of teacher unionism among much of the public and teachers as well. Yet we need democratic, vibrant, progressive teachers unions to turn back privatization of schools, which spells destruction for public education. To stand up as individuals for our dignity and our students’ well-being, we need the institutional support a good union can provide. If we fail to make the unions what they should be, most students in our country—and the world—will be trained for a life of menial labor, poverty, or imprisonment.

What I’ve explained so far points to why we need to take back the unions. At the same time, activists who focus their attention on the teachers unions need the vision of teachers whose paramount concern is what goes on in their classrooms. Because of the conservatizing factors I’ve mentioned in this chapter, as well as others I explain later in the book, even progressive unions and radical teacher union leaders feel pressure to narrow the union’s focus, to take up “bread and butter” issues that are more popular with many members than social justice concerns. For teachers to succeed in pushing back on school closings, standardized testing, and a narrowed curriculum, they must also have strong, mutually respectful alliances with communities and parents. School workers who have roots in minority communities are a key resource, and are often overlooked. Sometimes these individuals work as aides and teachers in bilingual or English as a Second Language programs. In some districts, workers who belong to another union can provide crucial personal links with community activists and parents.

As attacks on teachers unions have intensified in the past few years, I’ve been asked by teachers for practical reading about how to improve their unions. Finding no book that I could recommend, I’ve written this one. In developing my ideas for this book, I’ve drawn on my work as a researcher, teacher union activist, professor of education, and career high school teacher. To make the book more readable, I’ve tried to keep references to the absolute minimum. For current updates on research and analysis on teachers unions, you may want to refer to my website.7 All royalties from this book will go to Teachers Unite, an organization that I think embodies the goals of building a movement of teachers, parents, and community activists committed to social justice in education and social movement teacher unionism.

The second section of this book contains articles I’ve written over the past thirty years for New Politics. This material provides additional background about issues that deserve more attention than I could give in this book, which I conceive of as an intelligent activist’s guide to the teacher union universe.

One final note: I often use the word “teacher” to signify members of teachers unions, but I acknowledge in advance that the label is misleading. Teachers unions usually represent constituencies other than K–12 teachers with their own classrooms, including social workers, paraprofessionals, psychologists, librarians, adult school teachers, and substitute teachers. A strong, democratic union values each constituency’s unique contribution and takes care to demonstrate to all members that it is a union of equals.