Category Archives: Workers

Education, Howard Zinn, Workers

Meditating on Teacher Unions and Tenure Post-Vergara

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[Reposting from Truthout as a response to the Vergara ruling in California to dismantle tenure. See also Adam Bessie’s A Tale of Two Vergaras: Of Stardom and the End of Teacher Tenure.]

Howard Zinn would have turned 90 a couple of days ago [24 August 2012]. I have to imagine after reading and re-reading most of Zinn’s works that if Zinn were alive today, he would remain baffled at how America is a country antagonistic to unions and tenure, especially teachers unions and tenure.

Zinn was a radical historian, activist, and in my opinion, most of all a teacher. And it is at the overlap of Zinn as historian/activist/teacher I find his People’s History of the United States an invaluable place to ask, Why tenure and unions?

On Democracy and Equity in the U.S.

The unique and powerful quality Zinn brought to history is that his volume is a people’s history. Zinn confronts directly that the truth embedded in any history is shaped by perspective.

Traditionally, the so-called objective history students have been and are fed in formal schooling is from the point of view of the winners, but Zinn chose to examine the rise and growth of the U.S. from the point of view of the common person—what I will characterize as primarily the viewpoint of the worker. I am most concerned about the contrast between the political and public message that the U.S. has somehow left behind the oppressive corporate world of the robber barons (see Zinn’s Chapter 11) and have left behind the horrors fictionalized in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. These idealistic beliefs are similar to Americans claiming we have achieved a meritocracy instead of the fact that Americans should still be working toward a meritocracy.

Still in 2014, Americans appear to be anti-union and anti-tenure, again notably in terms of how that impacts teachers. This sentiment is disturbing to me as it signals an anti-worker sentiment in the U.S.—a country that claims to embrace ideals such as equity, democracy, and hard work.

This contradiction is connected, I believe, to the exact problem confronted by Zinn as a historian: Americans’ anti-worker sentiments (expressed in anti-union and anti-tenure discourse and policy) can be traced to who controls the public narrative—the CEO elite.

If the American public considers for a moment why unions and tenure exist (as well as what tenure means), most Americans would reject the CEO-skewed messages about both.

The American worker (unlike many workers in other comparable countries throughout the world) remains shackled to working in ways that dictate any worker’s essential humanity; work in the U.S. is not a matter of just pay, but of health insurance and retirement—essential for basic human dignity. The dramatic abuses of the meat packing industry in The Jungle may appear more extreme than working conditions in 2014, but bosses and management hold a powerful upper-hand over the American worker still.

Unionization as a concept, then, came out of and remains an act against the inherent inequity and tyranny in the workplace when the powerful few control the working many. Unionization is an act of democracy, an act of equity.

To reject unions is to reject democracy and equity.

These foundational facts of why unions do not reject that specific union policies have failed. It is certainly legitimate to confront individual union policies and outcomes (I have and continue to do that myself), but this discussion is about the broad anti-union sentiment in the U.S. that reveals anti-worker sentiments.

Tenure is more complicated, but certainly grows out of the same commitment to democracy and equity—especially for teachers.

The tenure argument is often distorted because the term itself, “tenure,” is misrepresented as “a job for life” and rarely distinguished between tenure at the K-12 level and the college/university level.

Tenure is an act of democracy and equity, as well, because it creates power for workers as a guarantee of due process and, for teachers, it secures a promise of academic freedom.

Are there failures in how unions and tenure have been and are implemented in America today? Yes.

Should those failures be addressed? Yes.

But the broad anti-union and anti-tenure agenda being promoted by the CEO elite and embraced by the American public is a corrosive rejection of equity and democracy.

When unions and tenure are not fulfilling their obligations to equity and democracy, they both must be confronted.

But unions and tenure remain needed and even necessary mechanisms in America’s search for equity and democracy—both of which are being eroded by the American elite indebted to and dependent on the inequity that drives American capitalism.

Although speaking directly about Americans’ embracing war, Zinn makes an important point for this discussion:

We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

Without, then, the democratic and equity-based purposes of unions and tenure, the American public remains “ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives.”

Zinn also personified a message of rejecting neutral poses, of democracy as activism. Writing about Sacco and Vanzetti, Zinn shares questions raised by Vanzetti, questions still relevant today against the knee-jerk and self-defeating anti-union and anti-tenure sentiments persistent in the U.S.:

Yes, it was their anarchism, their love for humanity, which doomed them. When Vanzetti was arrested, he had a leaflet in his pocket advertising a meeting to take place in five days. It is a leaflet that could be distributed today, all over the world, as appropriate now as it was the day of their arrest. It read:

“You have fought all the wars. You have worked for all the capitalists. You have wandered over all the countries. Have you harvested the fruits of your labors, the price of your victories? Does the past comfort you? Does the present smile on you? Does the future promise you anything? Have you found a piece of land where you can live like a human being and die like a human being? On these questions, on this argument, and on this theme, the struggle for existence, Bartolomeo Vanzetti will speak.” (A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, Howard Zinn)

[1] As a life-long resident and worker in South Carolina, a right-to-work state, I want to clarify here that I am not now and have never been a member of a union, I never had my pay or any sort of public school tenure negotiated for me by a union, but I have been awarded tenure by my private university during my most recent decade-plus as a professor.

Education, education reform, Workers

This Week in “Please Shut Up”: Arne Duncan

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This Week in “Please Shut Up” should have been aimed at George Will and that he really needs to shut up about rape.

But, instead, let’s look at Secretary of Education Arne Duncan who has held forth on the Vergaras ruling in California:

The ruling was hailed by the nation’s top education chief as bringing to California — and possibly the nation — an opportunity to build “a new framework for the teaching profession.” The decision represented “a mandate” to fix a broken teaching system, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said….

Duncan, a former schools chief in Chicago, said he hoped the ruling will spark a national dialogue on a teacher tenure process “that is fair, thoughtful, practical and swift.”

At a minimum, Duncan said the court decision, if upheld, will bring to California “a new framework for the teaching profession that protects students’ rights to equal educational opportunities while providing teachers the support, respect and rewarding careers they deserve.”

“The students who brought this lawsuit are, unfortunately, just nine out of millions of young people in America who are disadvantaged by laws, practices and systems that fail to identify and support our best teachers and match them with our neediest students. Today’s court decision is a mandate to fix these problems,” Duncan said. (as reported by Michael Martinez)

Now, let’s consider the context. First, Arne Duncan has no education or experience in teaching as a profession. But, Duncan has a long list of political appointments:

In 1992, childhood friend and investment banker John W. Rogers, Jr., appointed Duncan director of the Ariel Education Initiative, a program mentoring children at one of the city’s worst-performing elementary schools and then assisting them as they proceeded further in the education system. After the school closed in 1996, Duncan and Rogers were instrumental in re-opening it as a charter school, Ariel Community Academy. In 1999, Duncan was appointed Deputy Chief of Staff for former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas.

CEO of Chicago Public Schools Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed Duncan to serve as Chief Executive Officer of the Chicago Public Schools on June 26, 2001….

Duncan was appointed U.S. Secretary of Education by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate on January 20, 2009. [all emphasis added]

For the record, having no background as a teacher and then having spent his entire professional career as a political appointee depending on his privileged connections, Duncan has no appreciation for teaching or for workers’ rights.

And thus, this week, we must implore: Arne Duncan, please shut up.

Workers

Unions? We Don’t Need No Stinking Unions

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I have lived and worked always in the state of South Carolina.

SC is a high-poverty state (see here and here) with a racially diverse population (ranked 12th highest). And, like many comparable states across the Deep South, SC is a right to work state.

Combined, these characteristics of my home state confirm, I think, my claim about the self-defeating South. However, when it comes to the Great American Worker, the entire U.S. shares that self-defeating nature.

Often that self-defeating quality is represented by political and public attitudes—antagonistic and aggressive—toward workers’ unions.

Current SC governor, Nikki Haley, who is now running for re-election, has taken a seemingly unnecessary stand against unions:

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley didn’t mince words when she spoke about unions at an automotive conference in Greenville this week. The state loves its manufacturing jobs from BMW, Michelin and Boeing and welcomes more, she explained, but not if they’re bringing a unionized workforce with them.

“It’s not something we want to see happen,” she told The Greenville News.“ We discourage any companies that have unions from wanting to come to South Carolina because we don’t want to taint the water.”…

She also warned auto industry executives at the conference to keep their guards up. “They’re coming into South Carolina. They’re trying,” Haley said. “We’re hearing it. The good news is it’s not working.”

“You’ve heard me say many times I wear heels. It’s not for a fashion statement,” she continued. “It’s because we’re kicking them every day, and we’ll continue to kick them.”

And a reader’s letter in The Greenville News represents how the public in SC feels about unions as well as Haley’s stance, arguing in part:

What would happen if unions made an inroad into the Upstate? They would start organizing like mad to try to increase their strength. As more and more employers started having to deal with union demands by raising wages and adding costly benefits, they would need to increase the costs of their products and services. The cost of living would go up for everybody.

I think Gov. Nikki Haley has the right idea.

This reader’s letter as well as the apparent lack of awareness about its self-defeating perspective is perfectly satirized in this cartoon:

Ten Reasons We’re Against Unions! by Barry Deutsch
Ten Reasons We’re Against Unions! by Barry Deutsch [click to enlarge original link]
While SC political leaders and the public are drawing a line in the sand about unions intruding in the state, Northwestern college football athletes, led by quarterback Kain Colter, have taken unprecedented action to unionize, as Strauss and Eder detail:

A regional director of the National Labor Relations Board ruled Wednesday that a group of Northwestern football players were employees of the university and have the right to form a union and bargain collectively.

For decades, the major college sports have functioned on the bedrock principle of the student-athlete, with players receiving scholarships to pay for their education in exchange for their hours of practicing and competing for their university. But Peter Ohr, the regional N.L.R.B. director, tore down that familiar construct in a 24-page decision.

He ruled that Northwestern’s scholarship football players should be eligible to form a union based on a number of factors, including the time they devote to football (as many as 50 hours some weeks), the control exerted by coaches and their scholarships, which Mr. Ohr deemed a contract for compensation.

“It cannot be said that the employer’s scholarship players are ‘primarily students,’ ” the decision said.

How the public responds across the U.S. to college athletes unionizing must be framed against patterns over the last decade that include a disturbing cultural attitude toward workers, notably against teachers’ unions, tenure, and striking (see the 2012 Chicago strike for example).

Examining how workers are portrayed in the media, how workers are valued (or not) in the U.S., and the prospect of becoming a worker for graduate students, I have framed being a worker within the rise of disaster capitalism and concluded:

Finally, in the wake of disaster capitalism in New Orleans and Oregon, pop culture, specifically The Big Bang Theory, is a crucible of not only the role of workers in the U.S. but also the attitudes about the worker that series highlights. Penny, the stereotypical “girl next door,” is the object of an on-going, clichéd joke of a waitress who longs to be an actress. The larger and central jokes of the series, however, are the four academics living across the hall from Penny. It seems in this TV world, all work is funny.

What a TV sit-com never addresses, however, is that in the real world, the gap between Penny as waitress and college professors is shrinking, or better phrased, merging. The state of the American worker is beginning to share with waitressing some disturbing characteristics that cheapen all workers. As Greider (2013) details about the restaurant industry, workers of all types are becoming less often protected by unions, receiving fewer or no benefits (paid sick days, vacation days, health insurance, retirement) with their positions, being paid less than previous generations, and generally suffering under a dynamic whereby the businesses have more or all of the power in the business-worker relationship.

In the real world, Penny and one of the academics, Leonard, would not be wrestling over the education gap between them, but would be sharing the consequences of part-time work in a hostile economy toward workers regardless of those workers’ qualifications since Leonard would be an adjunct (like Professor Beth) while Penny would remain a waitress—and both would be unsatisfied as workers because their situations do not live up to their ideals.

Yet, most Americans will always be workers, and to be a worker should be an honorable thing worthy of poetic speeches and artistic black-and-white film tributes. Being an American worker doesn’t need to be a condition tolerated on the way to something better, and it shouldn’t be twenty-first century wage-slavery that is a reality echoed in the allegory of SF: “one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself.” As the last paragraphs of Cloud Atlas express, however, the wage-slavery of workers in the context of assembly-line and disaster capitalism is a condition Americans have chosen (or at least been conditioned to choose), but it is also a condition workers can change—if workers believe it is wrong, “such a world will come to pass.” (Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism?, pp. 21-22)

A question that remained with me as I drafted the piece above is just why the majority state of people in the U.S.—being a worker—does not inform the pervasive antagonistic attitude toward workers. The public in the U.S. appears just as self-defeating as the South when we are confronted with workers’ rights and collective workers’ voices.

The opportunity before us with the possibility that college athletes may unionize and transform not only their circumstances but also all of college athletics has a less appealing parallel for me, however: The tension between the NFL players’ union and NFL owners in 2011 and how the public responded to that unionization when compared to the rising calls to end teachers’ unions and tenure.

American disdain for unions is grounded in a traditional faith in rugged individualism, but it also seems linked to a good degree of self-loathing informed by a cultural worshipping of the wealthy and famous.

Stated directly and without the political baggage of the term “union,” what are the problems with due process and academic freedom (the central elements of tenure for teachers secured by unionization)? Who prospers from workers without full benefits, strong wages, and safe working conditions? Who maintains control when workers do not have equitable voices in their work and compensation?

Writing about the term “totalitarian,” Ta-Nehisi Coates confronts the power of words (to which I would add “union”):

Words exist within the realm of politics. In politics, words are sometimes perverted by the speaker. It’s worth considering which words come under attack for perversion (“racist,” “homophobe,” “bigot”) and which do not (“democratic,” “bipartisan,” “anti-American”). I am always skeptical of people who seek to curtail their use, instead of interrogating their specific usage. Some people really are racists, and other people really are misogynists, and others still actually are homophobes. Instead of prohibiting words, I’d rather better understand their meaning.

Some people demonizing unions and unionization really are being self-serving, really are seeking ways that workers can be treated as interchangeable widgets (not unlike college athletes) while the owners reap a disproportionate profit on their backs, sweat, and labor (consider how Walmart has sought to bust unions and reduce their workforce to part-time without benefits, resulting in those workers often being on welfare).

Ultimately, Coates comes to workers in the totalitarian state:

But the central idea—that the communist party, and thus the central committee, and thus the politburo was the sole representative of workers—has a chilling moral closure. Who could be against the workers? And if the party is the true representative of the workers, why do we need other parties?

I must echo: Who could be against the workers?

That haunts me, baffles me, leaves me cynical because of all the qualities that divide people in the U.S.—race, class, religion, sexuality, gender—that almost all of us are and always will be workers—a state that should be something of honor and dignity—is the one quality that should unite us.

College athletics stand before the entire U.S. as the crucible of a few benefitting on the backs of many—many without a voice. And that crucible also reveals to us the potential power of a collective voice, an acknowledged voice among the majority who do the labor that generates the profits.

As Coates warns, “words are sometimes perverted by the speaker.”

“Union” is one such word, and when it is spoken by those in power, be certain the motivation is not in the best interests of the workers.

There would be no billionaires today without workers. In fact, powerless workers are nearly essential for maintaining the inequitable state of the U.S. in which billionaires thrive while more and more workers become trapped in multiple part-time jobs, absent benefits or job security.

The Northwestern college football players have my solidarity, but I also wonder why we all are not seeking that same solidarity among every worker in the U.S., a solidarity that could attain the American Dream that has been perverted into an American Winter:

In case it’s not clear, “American Winter” comes from a specifc, biased and unapologetic viewpoint, but it’s also the kind of argument that’s needed right now. Watching the 50 year old John, 3 years unemployed and father to a young son with Down’s Syndrome, weep on camera because he had to borrow money from his parents to pay the electric bill, it’s bracing and raw. When Paula goes to the food bank for the first time, and is overwhelmed by the fact that her situation has forced her to take such measures or when single mom Jeanette tries make a promise to her young son Gunner that they will find a place to live, it puts a new perspective on those who are traditionally associated/stereotyped as being on social services. Everyone in “American Winter” has been working, are raising families, and doing everything they can (Dierdre gives blood and goes scrapping on weekends just for extra money) to make ends meet. They are not the vultures of the system that certain political segments like to paint as living on taxpayer money. (Review: ‘American Winter’ A Devastating Portrait Of The Erosion Of The Middle Class)

That recovered American Dream could be built on workers unionized for the right to work—the right to work for wages that dignify their work and their lives, the right to work as a part of their right to live fully and freely, the right to work in a physically and psychologically safe environment, the “right to work” not perverted by a political elite bragging about using high-heeled shoes as the boot on the throat of the Great American Worker.

See Related

Remembering Howard Zinn by Meditating on Teacher Unions and Tenure?

[NOTE: The title is an allusion to a line from Blazing Saddles.]

Workers

Workplace: Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism?

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Academia and the American Worker: Right to Work in an Era of Disaster Capitalism?

Abstract

Why do educational degrees of any kind, especially advanced degrees, matter if there are only part-time service industry jobs waiting for graduates? In this article, the reduced labor market experienced by graduate students seeking tenure-track positions as professors is couched as one example within a much larger context that includes the following: contradictory political and public messages about American workers, the de-professionalized working conditions of K-12 teachers (teaching as a service industry), and the increasingly antagonistic mischaracterizations of tenure and unions expressed by politicians, the public, and the media.

See Also

The public school teacher as “privileged worker”, Shawn Gude

Teaching, Workers

Conditions of Teaching Are Conditions of Learning: On Students

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I’m not prone to New Year’s resolutions, but I have decided that with the arbitrary designation of a new calendar year, I have a way to focus on new commitments, specifically in how I interact in the virtual world. So when I read a derogatory comment on one of my blog posts (describing my post with “stupidest” and then making a word choice error or typo), I resisted the urge to comment, but posted how painful it was not to do so on Facebook.

Many of my wonderful former students commented, leading to two threads and many comments that genuinely made my day and evening—justifying my decision not to interact with the person leaving the comment.

From that exchange, I wrote Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters because I began to think about my 18 years teaching high school English as well as how I both failed my students and served them well (by the way, my former students tend to be stunningly kind and recall our days and years together with a fondness that makes my heart enlarge like the final scene of How the Grinch Stole Christmas).

The reason my exchange with former students spurred a blog about teacher autonomy and classroom experience is that, upon reflection, I believe when I was at my best as a high school teacher, I was functioning at an autonomous level—doing what I knew to be best for what any one of my students needed (especially when that meant listening to them while they struggled under the weight of crying about a boyfriend or girlfriend)—and when I was at my worst, I was complying with mandates I felt were at least misguided.

So as I blogged about the need for listening to teachers’ voices, for honoring classroom experiences not solely but initially, I was making a case about the conditions of teaching—a case that I failed to connect to the conditions of learning and how teacher autonomy is inextricable from student autonomy.

While I remain, frankly, stunned at the antagonism expressed when I call for teacher autonomy and voice, I am equally dismayed that we tend to render both teachers and students essentially invisible and mute.

Two comments on pieces of mine, then, need to be highlighted.

On my teacher invisibility post included at The Answer Sheet, StudentsLast added: “If teachers are invisible to policy makers, what then are students? Non-existent?”

To which I must respond, yes.

And responding to Classroom Teaching Experience and Whose Voice Matters, Martha Kennedy highlighted:

Something I have never seen brought into this conversation is the fact that many people look at teachers through the lens of their own experience in school. I don’t think most people liked school. Judging from my university students, the teacher is viewed as an adversary, classes are obstacles, it’s all just “hoops to jump.” I think as long as this is true, teachers will have a hard time with “the public.” There’s also the fallacy that if a kid hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught. Judging from my students, many don’t even really understand WHAT the teacher is teaching. This is a larger problem since the advent of NCLB where students are taught to pass exams. Students are conditioned to find a discrete answer to every question. This pretty much steals from questions their intrinsic interest.

The first point above is extremely important: How often are the actions of teachers inculcating in students negative associations with not only school but also teachers? How often are those actions the result of misguided mandates imposed on those teachers? How might all teachers embrace their autonomy so as to avoid these conditions in the classroom?

So as I return to my blog post about honoring teacher voice and classroom experience, I must emphasize that calling for a reconsideration of how we view teachers, how we honor (or don’t) teacher autonomy, and whose voice matters, I must stress that the conditions of teaching are the conditions of learning.

And how teachers feel as well as how students feel about those conditions matters in ways that must not be ignored, must not be marginalized against a normalized rational view of the world.

As we become more and more entrenched in “an age of infinite examination” where teachers and students are “never finished with anything,” we must begin to ask new questions and then seek different answers. And as we seek ways in which teachers and workers can embrace a new solidarity, let’s not forget our solidarity with the students in our care.

Education, Education Week, Workers

1st Anniversary Repost: Writers Reflect on Chicago Strike (EdWeek)

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Writers Reflect on Chicago Strike

Education Week

Stephen Dyer (Expanded)

Andrea Kayne Kaufman (Expanded)

Missing the Forest for the Trees (Expanded below)

The Chicago teachers’ strike has sparked even more debate over the role of unions and the importance of teacher quality in public education. Yet, arguments and policy associated with teachers’ unions and teacher quality share one serious problem—missing the forest for the trees.

Carefully examining the debates themselves, in other words, pulling back from the trees to consider the forest, offers an opportunity for the public, educators, and policy stakeholders to reframe those debates and thus improve the likelihood education reform can achieve what it has failed to accomplish over the past thirty years.

Debates about teachers’ unions and teacher quality share a pop culture problem, captured in the documentary “Waiting for ‘Superman’” and the feature film “Don’t Back Down.” In both, unions are portrayed as powerful as well as detrimental to needed educational outcomes while the influence of “bad” teachers is linked to those same protective unions.

If we pull back, however, from these repeated and enduring narratives (the public eagerly accepts them both in pop culture and the mainstream media), the evidence fails to support the claims.

For example, the union narrative—that unions are primarily to blame for school failures—falls apart once a few facts are examined. Unionized states tend to have higher test scores than non-union states (such as my home state of South Carolina, a right-to-work state that regularly is ranked at the bottom of traditional test data). But this fact is not pulling far enough back itself.

Unionization, poverty, and measurable student outcomes are so deeply interconnected that focusing solely on union influences on student outcomes misses the central obstacle facing public schools, teachers’ unions, and political leadership—poverty.

Next, the teacher quality debate exposes a nearly identical pattern if we focus on how to hold teachers accountable (arguments such as value-added methods of teacher evaluation) instead of asking whether or not teacher quality is a genuine problem in student outcomes, and if so, to what magnitude does that problem exist.

Like union influence, teacher quality is nearly inextricable from poverty and student test data.

The current education reform debate, then, captured by the Chicago teachers’ strike, represents a self-defeating problem of focusing on the trees (solutions and policy) without consider the forest (problems, goals).

The solution to education reform is not trying to win the trees arguments, but stepping back and addressing the forest; for example, consider the following:

• What is the broad purpose of universal public education? If we reach back to the founding of the U.S. and consider seriously Thomas Jefferson’s commitment to public education, we can identify enduring goals for public schools, goals linked to a thriving democracy and the need to focus strongly on people and children trapped in poverty:

The less wealthy people, . .by the bill for a general education, would be qualified to understand their rights, to maintain them, and to exercise with intelligence their parts in self-government; and all this would be effected without the violation of a single natural right of any one individual citizen. (p. 50)

The object [of my education bill was] to bring into action that mass of talents which lies buried in poverty in every country for want of the means of development, and thus give activity to a mass of mind which in proportion to our population shall be the double or treble of what it is in most countries.” ([1817], pp. 275-276)

• What are the influences of unions across the U.S., and what are the essential roles unionization should serve in public education as a force for democracy and equity? The education reform debate must separate arguments about the failures of union bureaucracy and the importance of workers’ rights, collective bargaining, and teacher professionalism.

• What is the proper relationship between teacher autonomy and teacher accountability? Possibly the greatest failure of the teacher quality debate has been the absence of a public recognition that accountability policy has removed teacher autonomy while imposing accountability for outcomes beyond the power of teachers to address. No educator is calling for no accountability, but educators are seeking the professional autonomy they deserve while rejecting test-based accountability as not valid. The first step in teacher accountability and education reform is teacher autonomy.

• Who is designing and mandating education policy? What are their experience and expertise in education? Too little attention is being paid to the historical fact that educators have had little to no direct influence in education policy, most powerfully linked to the political process. In the past three decades, political leadership has intensified that reality.

The education reform debate is no longer a partisan political battle because Republicans and Democrats are nearly indistinguishable in terms of education policy. Yet, the reform debate remains a regrettable failure of ideology over evidence.

The Chicago teachers’ strike exposes that political leaders are starting with solutions without defining the problems, and then promoting those solutions without grounding them in the wealth of evidence available to them. Claims about “bad” teachers, protective unions, teacher evaluations tied to test scores, “miracle” charter schools, and the “missionary zeal” of Teach for America recruits resonate until the right questions are asked and the evidence is considered. Then, these so-called reforms fall apart.

We all need to pull back, start with clearly established problems, and then pursue solutions that match those problems in the context of building universal public education that fulfills its role in supporting and achieving democracy and equity.

Teaching, Workers

I Love My Students

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Recently, I was at the window of my allergist, paying for my allergy shots. The receptionist asked me something about enjoying my break, but I noted I was currently teaching a May course. Her response was something like “Sorry.”

I said that I enjoyed my May class and ended with “I love my students.” The receptionist stopped typing my information into the computer and looked up at me, her brow furrowed.

“Are you being serious?” she asked.

“Yes,” I explained, “I love my students, I love teaching.”

She explained to me that another professor came to the same office and only said that sarcastically so she assumed I was also.

This moment came back to me as I watched CNN’s coverage of the tornado destroying a school in Moore, OK. Anderson Cooper, echoing comments made by the media during the Sandy Hook Elementary shootings, interviewed a teacher who had gathered all of her students under their desks during the storm—and no children from her class were injured—and stated that teachers do amazing things every day, heroic things every day, but this women had gone above her duty.

I have now grown tired of this token and blatantly superficial (and insincere) praise of teachers.

Token praise cannot, or at least should not, mask the disdain expressed about not only teachers but also workers in general in the U.S. The reposted blog below, then, remains a valid concern.

Teachers and the Death of the American Worker *

The first decade of the 21st century has been an ominous harbinger for the American worker.

Children and adults in poverty, the working poor, and the working class are increasing; the middle-class is eroding; and the pooling of capital among the 1% is expanding, forming the anchor stalling the progress of the USS Democracy.

In The State of Working America (12th ed), Mishel, Bivens, Gould, and Shierholz identify the disturbing trends that signal the approaching death of the American worker:

America’s vast middle class has suffered a ‘lost decade’ and faces the threat of another (p. 5)….

Income and wage inequality have risen sharply over the last 30 years (p. 6)….

Rising inequality is the major cause of wage stagnation for workers and of the failure of low- and middle-income families to appropriately benefit from growth (p. 6)….

Economic policies caused increased inequality of wages and incomes (p. 7)….

Claims that growing inequality has not hurt middle-income families are flawed (p. 8)….

Growing income inequality has not been offset by increased mobility (p. 9)….

Inequalities persist by race and gender. (p. 9)

Currently, the American worker—like those trapped in poverty and the working poor—have no political party because, ironically, the democratic process in the U.S. has been bought by Corporate America and democracy has been left in that wake.

Public school teachers also have no political party, and since the Chicago teachers’ strike, teachers now more than ever represent the political and public failure to appreciate and recognize the importance of the American worker.

Teachers as Workers

Early and mid-twentieth century America may have been a turning point for unionization in a country that lives more by ideology than evidence, but even that assessment may be tinted by the rose-colored glasses of hindsight.

The truth is likely that Americans’ embracing of rugged individualism has always been an impenetrable wall between the American character and the community and solidarity at the core of unions.

Nonetheless, the American public school teacher has over the past decade—during the demonstrable decline of the working and middle class as well as the rise of poverty in the U.S.—gradually become the target of the popular corporate agenda to end tenure and break unions, despite the essential democratic nature of both.

Politicians, corporate advocates, and the media have fed a willing public a steady diet of false but robust narratives that characterize teachers as the sole force behind misleading claims of failed public schools. Any evidence- and experience-based rebuttal to the “bad” teacher claim or the corrupt union mantra has been met with a “no excuses” ideology that chants “poverty is not destiny.”

This corporate agenda has no basis in fact, but the abundant commentaries and scholarship refuting this drum beat have failed to pierce the American public’s self-defeating faith in America the meritocracy.

The political and corporate elite know this, and they have little motivation to set aside their lies since they work, and since they benefit in the end.

And during the teachers’ strike in Chicago, the media and political leaders mischaracterized unions and teachers in Chicago and across the U.S.—more laziness and greediness heaped on teachers, and more evidence that the Democratic party is indistinguishable from the Republican party in terms of education and labor policy.

What is most disturbing ultimately about the demonizing of teachers and in effect all American workers is that most Americans are and will always be those exact workers who are being stripped of their rights, dignity, and access to the American Dream that the political and corporate elite along with the public claim to be protecting.

The Chicago teachers’ strike was yet another referendum on the failing education reform agenda that is destined to strip teachers of their professionalism and to further stratify the education system of the U.S. so that affluent children (mostly white) gain even more advantage in their schooling than they have in their lives over children living in working class, working poor, and impoverished homes (disproportionately people of color).

It was a political lie to claim that the Chicago teachers’ strike was the fault of lazy and greedy teachers supported by their corrupt union. It was a political lie to ignore the central demand of those teachers—a stand against test-based teacher accountability.

But neither the political elite nor the corporate elite will eventually lose in this debate because a public embracing of the corporate agenda and rejection of the striking teachers is a self-defeating commitment that will guarantee what appears inevitable now—the death of the American worker.

Teachers are not alone in this, but public school teachers are great American workers. I cannot fathom how we have come to a day when Americans no longer value something that cannot be more American than workers in solidarity.

* Reposted from Daily Kos, Teachers and the Death of the American Worker (September 11, 2012) 

Bessie, Democracy, Disaster capitalism, Education, education reform, Equity, Meritocracy, Poverty, Workers

Middle-Class Fear: Disaster Capitalism and the Threat of Poverty

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Toward the end of HBO’s documentary American Winter, Brandon is finally offered a job after viewers have watched him and his wife Pam struggle against Brandon losing his job, resulting in their being unable to pay their rent and having to live with Pam’s mother.

When Brandon is told he has the job, his new boss notes Brandon is overqualified, but Brandon eagerly explains that he is thankful for the work and committed to do whatever he can to be a good worker—despite the cut in pay and drop in job status not in his plans as a young man and husband seeking the American Dream.

In a May Experience course (a three-week mini-semester after the traditional academic calendar at my university) built on education documentaries and confronting the connection between education and poverty, two of the most powerful films include HBO documentaries—Hard Times at Douglass High and Little Rock Central: 50 Years Later. Just as these works rise above the generally poor examinations of education found among education documentaries, American Winter is another HBO success, a thoughtful and confrontational exploration of poverty against the backdrop of the American Dream as it is being tarnished by disaster capitalism [1].

The scene above with Brandon and a few other aspects of the documentary give me pause, but first, I want to highlight how the film overwhelmingly succeeds.

The place of American Winter is Portland, Oregon, and the  situation, the wake of the 2008 economic downturn that swept across the U.S. and the world. But the single greatest achievement of the film is the focus on eight families (ironically also the most troubling aspect as I will discuss below) who put “people just like us” faces on the consequences of disaster capitalism and force the audience to reconsider stereotypes of people trapped in the clutches of poverty.

The people of these narratives are overwhelmingly white and entirely from the middle and working classes—simultaneously, literally not “people just like us” (considering the increasing racial diversity of the country) but also the characteristics historically associated with the idealized middle class of the American Dream myth. It is both important and problematic that the families in this film are not victims of generational poverty, but real-world models of people who have embraced and achieved, although momentarily, some elements of that American Dream—education, careers, homes or the promise of home ownership, marriage, children, and, not to be ignored in the background throughout the video, an abundance of assorted material possessions that can be found in living rooms, kitchens, and bedrooms across America.

Punctuating these stories are job loss, eviction, homelessness, hunger, sickness, and the frail as well as dwindling safety nets of government, church, and private organizations.

Documentaries, like all forms of nonfiction texts, are never unbiased, and always some political and ideological lens for observing a phenomenon. Too often documentaries are shoddy, careless, and misleading. American Winter wears its ideology on its sleeve, but does so effectively and with a level of integrity that lends it credibility even for those who don’t share its social justice politics.

The families are allowed primarily to speak for themselves, literally and through a patient camera following them as they wilt beneath the weight of joblessness and homelessness—especially when the children speak, cry, and personify the incredible inequity of how burdensome healthcare can be through no fault of those who find themselves sick (for example, Chelsea’s battle with bleeding ulcers leaves her mother Shanon facing $49,000 in medical bills while the family is otherwise destitute).

The film also weaves clear and confrontational statistics throughout the stories of the families. The blunt facts and harsh experiences in this documentary present a different picture than political leaders, the media, and the public tend to embrace and perpetuate: Poverty, joblessness, homelessness, foreclosure, bankruptcy, and seeking out social services are not the consequences of flawed individuals, but the result of systemic inequity in America’s government and economy.

The idealized American Dream may never have been a credible cultural foundation, but American Winter convincingly forces viewers to recognize that democracy and capitalism have been consumed by disaster capitalism. And here are some of the questions the film does raise as well as some of the problems embedded in an otherwise ambitious and even radical project.

“Disaster capitalism” [2] is a term associated with Noami Klein, as she explains:

People spontaneously started using “disaster capitalism” to describe what was happening with what they were seeing around them because it was so clear that this disaster was being harnessed to push through a radical vision of totally unrestricted markets. And Bush didn’t make too much of a secret of it when he announced that his idea of reconstructing the Gulf Coast was to turn it into a tax-free, free-enterprise zone.

What the book is doing that’s new is it is connecting these contemporary capitalisms, which I think most of us can easily see in Iraq and in New Orleans, and saying actually this isn’t just some twisted invention of the Bush White House. That actually there is a history. Every time there has been a major leap forward for this fundamentalist version of capitalism that really doesn’t see a role for the state, the ground has been prepared by some kind of shock.

In American Winter, the disaster is the economic downturn, but in New Orleans, the disaster was natural, Hurricane Katrina. Portland and New Orleans [3] also share a central mechanism of disaster capitalism: A disaster creates the opportunity for a workforce to be erased, the job market then contracts, and a workforce is rebuilt in reduced circumstances for the workers—lower wages, part-time positions instead of full-time employment, an absence of benefits, service positions replacing skill and managerial positions.

The events in Portland and New Orleans are stark examples that the workforce problem in the U.S. is not a lack of skilled and eager workers, but an artificially contracting business model that benefits the 1% with American workers as interchangeable widgets.

While the focus on the plight of the American worker is needed and vivid in American Winter, one consequence of the choice to examine American workers dropping into poverty is that poverty is regrettable and something to be addressed only because it can (and did) happen to the working and middle class—in other words, generational poverty is left at the side of this film and the corrosive myth that generational poverty is the fault of those in poverty remains untouched.

In fact, as the viewers’ sympathy for the eight families increases, it seems entirely likely that people in generational poverty may be viewed even more harshly than before because poverty sits as a middle-class fear in the film. The deficit and demonizing perspectives of poverty are not challenged in the film and may be unintentionally strengthened.

In its purest form, capitalism may be viewed as needing all  citizens having access to some relatively balanced reserve of capital for that consumer market to thrive, but disaster capitalism is a corruption of the distribution of capital, thriving in fact on the threat of poverty as motivation for low-wage, mind-numbing and soul-draining work. Disaster capitalism is hurt less by some having no or little capital than by the absence of poverty, an absence that would lift the necessary threat that maintains a culture of fear and a frantic pace that distracts the 99% while the 1% play.

Many scenes in American Winter haunt me, but few as much as Brandon, reduced and broken, at the end in a scene that likely was intended as one glimmer of light in a truly dark winter for these families.

But Brandon—like many of the children in these families—personifies how disaster capitalism and consumerism have created an existence whereby our humanity is almost entirely anchored to who we are as workers. Our worker self is not a subset of who we are as humans; our worker self is our self.

Ultimately, that is the greatest disaster in disaster capitalism.

[1] Listen to Steve Hargadon interview Adam Bessie and see Bessie/Archer graphic journalism series on disaster capitalism and education reform (G.E.R.M.):

[3] See Sarah Carr’s Hope against Hope, which examines how charter schools replaced the public school system in New Orleans post-Katrina.