Speakout Columns
Unions are part of the solution
Mar 5, 2009 4:40 PM
There has been a lot of debate in the news lately about “reforming” education. Some of it is open and honest debate, and some of it (Daily News, New York Post, anyone?) is the same old tired union-bashing the big bosses have been pushing for a century.
The general line of attack goes something like this: Union bosses are strong-arming the legislators into protecting the interests of teachers at the expense of students, sometimes without their membership’s consent. Only when we can constrain the malfeasant tendencies of Big Labor can the benevolent Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein truly reform the system and make teachers accountable.
But those who attack the unions’ positions, sometimes even their very right to exist, are really attacking the working knowledge of teachers themselves. If the union leadership is resisting some reform, it’s because many TEACHERS think it is a bad idea. Too many times people think of union leadership as somehow separate from union membership. What union leadership does is give a collective voice to teachers because our individual voices have much less power than someone like the mayor, chancellor or a billionaire philanthropist.
Thus, the level of effectiveness of any particular union or union movement can never really be chalked up to its leader. Strong leaders come from a strong membership. Until we coalesce around prescriptions that we know will work for our students, not those concocted by uninformed or disingenuous noneducators, we won’t speak with the united voice necessary to take strong stands that protect teachers and students. This allows those in charge to exploit our disunity to further agendas that have little to do with providing a quality education to our diverse community of students — namely, busting unions so there is no organized political opposition to: privatization, the reduction/elimination of pension and health care benefits, a narrowed curriculum that serves private business interests, etc.
And yes, it is those in the education community, namely teachers, who protect the students. Teachers know more than politicians and businessmen about how things play in their classrooms. I will never for a second submit to the idea that the suits know what is best for students, while teachers are the ones looking out only for themselves. That is exactly backward; otherwise, we wouldn’t be teachers — and they wouldn’t be who they are. I’m not in this for private profit, and they aren’t educators.
There are also those who say unions are just trying to avoid teacher accountability. But however poorly many of the New York City schools generally performed before Bloomberg/Klein came into office (and many did), students more or less got the grades they earned and it was an open and transparent process. Now, in a secretive atmosphere meant to obscure Department of Education accountability, the pressure to meet graduation and credit accrual requirements at any cost has led to grade inflation, and more and more students are graduating without any real academic skills.
This is not a process that teachers want, and our desire for political action is partly rooted in the fact that teachers know that the current testing craze is driving the obfuscation of learning, and that the truth must come out. It takes teachers, through their unions, to push back against those in power, and advocate for strong educational practices that lead to strong student achievement.
So while we can work to make the UFT more progressive, we have mitigated to some degree the worst ideas of Bloomberg/Klein. One need only look as far as Washington, D.C., and other urban areas around the country to realize how much worse it could be and what an overwhelming national political force teachers’ unions are up against.
I don’t know where we’ve gone wrong as a society that we somehow perceive teachers, acting in concert to protect their profession and their students, as the enemy. It’s not easy overcoming a privately owned media that sets the parameters of the debate to further the interests of the private sector, which puts profits before people. But if teachers work in a unified and proactive way to defend their profession and students, there will be no debate. It will be understood that “unions are not the problem, they are part of the solution.”
Jason Norman is a teacher at the International School of Liberal Arts in the Bronx. A version of this column first appeared as a post on the Bridging Differences blog on the Education Week Web site, www.edweek.org.
