A Window into the Hearts and Minds of Teacher Unionists

Over at The Chalkboard, Joe Williams asks a number of questions about the meaning and purpose of teacher unionism in American education. We won’t pretend to answer all of the issues he raises in his post, because, as he says, it is really long, and it covers a lot of ground. But the last issue he raises deserves an answer. Why do we need teacher unions and collective bargaining for teachers, he asks, if, after forty years of unions and collective bargaining, the educrats in charge of our schools still treat teachers in a disrespectful way? Why do we need teacher unions and collective bargaining for teachers, if the educrats in charge of schools seem more intent than ever upon sucking the meaning and purpose, let alone the joy, out of teaching?

Part of the answer is simple. Joe seems to think that teacher unions and collective bargaining should be a “cure all” [his words]. We do not believe that there any “magic bullets” in education, least of all in the form of a teacher organization which is a single actor on an educational stage full of scores of actors, many of whom act contrary to the interests and the educational visions of teachers.

Rather, the question that needs to be asked is this: Would teachers and the important work teachers do be more respected and more valued if teachers did not have powerful organizations of their own? Would teachers and the important work teachers do be more respected and more valued if the educrats in charge of schools did not have to sit down and bargain with teachers, but had a free hand to do as they pleased? That counterfactual, we think, virtually answers itself, especially for those of us who have worked as a teacher in American schools for any length of time. Moreover, it seems almost axiomatic that without teacher unions defending it, American public education – free, universal schooling of, by and for the American people – would have been largely eviscerated over the last two decades by the ultra-conservative true believers in a laissez-faire market. That, in and of itself, explains a great deal of vituperative rhetoric directed at teacher unions by those same forces: they understand what stands between them and their goal.

Yet Joe is asking a sincere question here, and trying to do so in a way that respects the ideals and life work of teacher unionists. Reading his questions, it was clear to us that he does not really grasp what motivates a teacher unionist, and how we see the world. Perhaps the best way to provide a window into the motivation of a teacher unionist, into our hearts and minds, lies in the stories of how teacher unionists are made. Begging the reader’s indulgence, I will share a little bit of my own experiences.

Like many teachers, I did not originally plan on a career in K to 12 education. I came from a family of teachers – both of my parents taught in New York City public schools, and four of my five siblings are educators – but my passions were politics and the life of the mind, and as I approached thirty, I was working on a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Toronto. Early in the 1980s, I interrupted my dissertation writing and returned to New York to do political organizing on the democratic left, on the soon to be proven wrong premise that the radical programs of the Reagan administration would create a massive popular movement of opposition. My political hopes dashed, I needed to find a way to support myself until I could complete my dissertation, and teaching seemed a natural choice. In September 1984, I went to work as a Social Studies teacher at an inner city high school in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

My plan was to complete my dissertation, and to find a job in political philosophy at the university level. But somewhere in that first year of teaching, after I had gotten over the shock of just how hard this work was and how much skill it required, I began to fall in love with educating and caring for my students. My students won my heart, and gave my life a fuller and deeper purpose; I knew that the work I was doing was meaningful and important, for it could change for the better the lives of young people that had been abandoned by the larger society because they were youth of color, mostly poor, mostly female and largely recent immigrants. I still worked on my dissertation during the summer vacations, finishing it four years later, but by then the die were cast. Teaching inner city high school students became my life’s vocation: I was now a teacher of kids that others had given up on before they even had a chance to prove themselves.

The year I began teaching the New York City Board of Education also began a renovation of the school building in which I worked. They gave a group of fly by night construction companies the free run of the place. The construction workers worked through the school day [when they were not “chatting up” the female students], and disrupted classes without warning with drilling and hammering. [I still remember the ‘gotcha sequences’ of my eighth period American history class that first year: when I prepared a normal lesson, the workers would let loose with jackhammers outside my classroom window; when I prepared a lesson students could do silently in their seats, you could hear the birds chirping in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens across the street.] The school was constantly filled with dust and debris of a then unknown nature, and there were days that it was so thick, one could barely see down the first floor hallway. Staff and students began to suffer respiratory problems and allergic and asthmatic attacks.

By the end of my second year of teaching, everyone who worked in the school, from the principal to the stock man, had had enough. Since I had more political experience and organizing skills than others in the school, I ended up leading efforts to get this problem under control. When the school and its classrooms were completely filled with debris on the eve of the start of my third year, we went to the White Lung Association [an occupational health and safety organization founded for workers harmed by exposure to asbestos]. With their help, we reached out to a politically connected law firm [former Congressman Herman Badillo was one of the lead partners], and within hours we had a court order [from a soon to be retired judge who could do the right thing without fear of retribution] closing down the school. When the other schools opened for the first day of school the next morning, our doors were closed.

When the court ordered tests of the school building were done, the results came back positive for high levels of loose [the technical term is friable] asbestos fibers in the dust and debris, in a form in which it could be easily breathed in and ingested. Some combination of the construction companies and the Board’s Division of School Buildings had submitted falsified tests, claiming that there was no asbestos in ceilings and walls which were full of it, and work was then done in those areas without any of the proper precautions and procedures. To give you just one example of what that meant for those of us teaching and learning in the school, an entire section of the asbestos containing ceiling in the cafeteria had been removed while students and teachers sat there eating lunch.

[Two years later, a citywide scandal broke the news that the tests for asbestos required by the federal AHERA law had been falsified throughout the city, and a number of officials in the Board’s Division of School Buildings eventually went to jail for the forgeries. Not, unfortunately, the top rogue, who let his underlings take the fall. I remember him well, because in the interval between the initial court order and the actual performance of the court ordered tests, he brought a group of non-English speaking janitorial workers into the building, without any protective equipment, to ‘dry sweep up’ all the asbestos dust and debris. Court order in hand, I called the police on the Board of Education, and had the building emptied and closed, while this official fumed, cursing and threatening me. Few moments in my twenty something years of teaching and union work in New York City schools have provided me more satisfaction.]

For three months of what we called, tongue in cheek, our ‘diaspora,’ our school building was closed down under court order for a complete asbestos abatement cleaning. Our staff and students were temporarily assigned to other sites around the city. In November, we returned to our now clean and safe school building.

The UFT had not anticipated this development. Not surprisingly, it had had the idea that issues like occupational health and safety and asbestos were the concerns of miners and assembly line factory workers, not teachers. But once the problem at our school forced the issue to the fore, the union quickly grasped what was at stake, and moved into action. Randi Weingarten, then the UFT’s counsel, negotiated a protocol with the Board of Education to cover the resumption and completion of the renovation work at our school, starting with the novel idea that work should be done when classes were NOT in session; this protocol became the basis for a set of regulations which govern construction work in any school to this day. The union hired experienced industrial hygienists, and developed a Health and Safety Committee in each borough, with staff trained to respond immediately to a whole series of potential health hazards in schools. It negotiated health and safety language into the collective bargaining agreement.

Is this a “cure all” which sent us forth into a health and safety utopia? Not at all. The Department of Education being the Department of Education, the UFT’s Health and Safety Program is never short of work. But now we have a set of regulations, and a system of checks and balances, which allows the UFT to act in an expeditious way when a hazard is identified in a school, and to resolve that problem quickly. And both the staff and the students in New York City public schools are far better off for it.

There are some lessons which I drew from this formative experience, lessons which define my understanding of what it means to be a teacher unionist.

First, our interests as teachers are inextricably linked to the interests of the students we teach. It is hard to imagine a tale of such criminal malfeasance taking place in an American school serving a well-to-do student population. Since we urban teachers take on the task of educating and caring for those on whom society had placed very little premium, we find ourselves sharing in some of the conditions of their lives. The story of asbestos is only one of many examples that could be provided here: I tell it because it is my story, and the story of teachers with whom I worked.

I think about this reality often when I read how Joel Klein and Internet education pundits opine that public school teachers and teacher unions care only about themselves, and not about their students. It is easy to make such snap moral judgments from a safe distance in comfortable surroundings, when you have never stood in the front of an inner city classroom, day after day. From the standpoint of teachers who have given over their adult professional lives to serving the students most in need, such moralizing rings awfully hollow. Walk the walk, and then the rest of us might be prepared to listen to your talk.

Second, this struggle reinforced for me a truth I had always known. If I was going to make teaching and urban education my life’s work, there was a limit to what one teacher could do alone, especially in a place as vast as New York City. Teachers had to be organized, for the good of our students as much as for our own good, and I needed to be part of that organization. Our hopes for our future lay in collective action. With this episode behind me, I ran for the union Chapter Leader in my school, and began my many years of involvement in the UFT.

A moral vision of a better world means little if you can not realize it in practice. Teachers bring such a moral vision to our work with the young people we educate, but good intentions are not enough. We must have a means for making the world in which our students learn a better place, even if only in the most modest ways. Teacher organization and teacher power are the means to that better world.