Great, Mike. And drafting a resolution no less. Resolutions are fine.
Teachers’ unions function in important ways, defending the social safety net and bargaining rights for teachers, which puts them squarely in a category of activism and advocacy along economic lines. This, however, necessitates compromise and collaboration with the State in this process of bargaining, which then carries over into all matters of capitulation to the State’s, or Capital’s, vision of education (i.e., choice, accountability, competition, testing, and core curriculum).
In addition to the procurement of collective bargaining rights, the large teachers’ unions should also consider a different part of their legacy, which was important to early trade union organization. Teachers’ unions, and other unions in general, have failed to create a discourse that is an alternative and a challenge to neoliberal views of education reform. The unions have failed to adequately educate their members on the various issues at hand, they’ve failed to create a political machine that is an alternative to the major parties, and have failed to create a radical culture to oppose the business or corporate mentality pervasive in public education reform.
My critique of unions lately, for whatever it’s worth, has been based on the premise that the national organizations, NEA and AFT, are too vested in the preservation of their own large executive and bureaucratic structures to be concerned with the daily needs of the rank-and-file membership. Impose term-limits on the leadership, diminish their huge salaries, encourage more regional control and activism, and perhaps the wishes of individual members will be more likely addressed.
Look at the AFT: they are currently in very close alliance with the Gates Foundation, receiving monies from them, to pursue ventures in education reform and policy. The AFT is under the impression that communicating with Gates will change him and their ways. That’s not likely going to happen, especially when money has already changed hands.
Perhaps it’s my background. I grew up in WV and was schooled at an early age about the atrocities at Blair Mountain and the life or death struggles of the coal miners to unionize and resist with every fiber of their being the pitiful lot in life decided for them by corporate interests and their government cronies.
Perhaps it was the fact that I lived through the AIDS crisis, caring for friends in their 20s and 30s while they died horrible deaths and I saw first hand that the only way to change things was active, militant resistance. I participated in ACT-UP and saw how speaking truth to power required steely commitment and a willingness to suffer in order to bring about necessary change.
Maybe it was growing up in the 60s and watching children my own age being sprayed with fire hoses and bombed at Sunday school.
Whatever the reasons I look at the AFT, the NEA, the professional organizations (NCTM, NCTE, IRA, etc.) with disdain and contempt. The lie of maintaining “a seat at the table” is clear from those outside looking in: one seat against 29 others who all work in lockstep against you is nothing but a milksop to keep you silent and compliant.
What is it going to take to wake American teachers up and to get them to loose their tongues and feet? I fear that nothing less than massive firings, the endings of thousands upon thousands of careers, the closing of massive amounts of public schools, and the impoverishment of millions of middle class teaching families will be the catalyst that finally sets things off. Rebuilding after the utter destruction of public education will not be possible; once lost we will never regain what we once had in this country.
We will look back at this time some day and wonder “Why did the unions actively participate in their own destruction?” and “Why did we sit back and allow the evil destruction of our once-beloved public schools?” I pray that I am wrong but I don’t think I am.
Great comment, I appreciate your thoughts. When looking at all of these very powerful examples throughout labor’s complicated history, it pains me as well to see so much being given up and squandered and negotiated away in deference to the power and needs of Capital, which has a big interest in profiting from education. I’m not a member of ANY union, so it seems unlikely that I can even participate in the conversation. So, it seems the large organizations on the national level will continue to exploit the rank and file while giving up on so many hard fought victories from the past.