teacher's unions

The popularity of the narrative that unions are bad for jobs, bad for business, and bad for taxpayers is one of the best tricks the right wing ever pulled on the poor and working class. In this post, I want to discuss the attitude that surrounds unions in general and teacher's unions in particular. I also want to focus on one subset of the kind of improvements that unions tend to negotiate, class sizes in this case, and talk about how this issue has effected my teaching practice.

The myths surrounding teacher's unions discussed by both Ravitch (2010) and Gorski & Zenkov (2014) are as follows: unions obstruct 'common sense' fiscal and administrative decisions in order to provide teachers with cushy quality of life benefits. Unions actively protect the interests of teachers who are unfit for service by making it difficult or impossible for administrators to fire them. Unions contribute to the budget crisis by demanding financial accommodations which are not in line with fiscal realities. These myths are not specific to teacher's unions. I used to work in a fabrication shop in Brooklyn, and there were always stories about the Local 1 in Manhattan (the arts and entertainment union for theatrical carpenters, set dressers, etc.) where one worker is payed $120 per hour to push the button that opens and closes the curtains on Broadway shows. These myths are curious because they are naturally populist (they serve the narrative of lazy, shadowy mobsters getting rich while making it harder for the 'common man' to work) while being aggressively anti-proletariat.

All of these myths are easily disprovable bunk. Tenure for teachers is not a guarantee of job security, but rather a requirement for documentation that fights against arbitrary or politically motivated dismissals (Gorski & Zenkov, p. 98). The benefits that unions fight for do cost money, but those costs are shown to produce specific academic benefits for students, and must be contrasted with the financial burden of a consistently undereducated and underserved working class (Ravitch, p245). Back to my shop in Brooklyn, we had a saying that went "never time to do it nice, always time to do it twice" (i.e. there was never room in the budget for high quality materials and proactive staffing at the beginning of a project, but always room for overtime when we had to rush to fix a poorly done first attempt). Finally, the kinds of benefits that unions push for tend to observably benefit students just as much as teachers (Gorski & Zenkov, p. 99).

This leads me to a quicker discussion: the size of my classes affects my teaching probably more than any other factor. My first teaching job, as a long-term substitute in Las Vegas, involved teaching high school art in a portable trailer to classes of between 45-50, most with limited English fluency. In this case, I was a very bad teacher. as Ravitch notes, "if a teacher has a large class, his or her job becomes an exercise in management and control rather than instruction" (p.244). My one-on-one time with students is the most important part of my instruction. Art thrives on individual differentiation, unique cultural/subcultural interests, and directed mentoring. These practices are impossible in a situation where I have (at most) one minute of class time per child. Teacher's unions protect the existence of these kinds of 'quality of life' benefits that make authentic teaching possible.

References

Gorski, Paul C., and Kristien Zenkov, eds. The big lies of school reform: Finding better solutions for the future of public education. Routledge, 2014.

Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to America's public schools. Vintage.