Letter from the Editorial Board: An Unhappy Union?

With recent film documentaries like Waiting for "Superman" and The Lottery receiving a lot of public attention, the American media has been increasingly critical of teacher unions, portraying messages that criticize the union's role in slowing democracy or school reform. In both films, teacher unions are portrayed as defending a status quo that sacrifices critical engagement and high performing outcomes of teachers and students for the selfish protection of teachers' economic interests. With these films being shown against a dismal economic backdrop of massive state budget cuts, education, and specifically teachers, are vulnerable targets of those cuts. As a response to the proposed cuts and potential layoffs, teachers in unions from Wisconsin to California have mobilized and protested for their right to participate in workplace and professional decisions regarding their financial security, accountability, and standardized testing. In the midst of these protests, the public perception seems to be that teacher unions ignore the needs of children and stifle the democratic processes needed to improve pubic schools. Is this a fair perception? Are teacher unions inherently an adversary to democracy and school reform?

Teacher unions have a mixed history, which includes an emphasis on professional education standards on the one hand and protection of economic rights on the other. The National Education Association (NEA), founded in 1857 as a professional association, was initially concerned about standards, ethics, and curriculum, while the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, concerned itself with the protection of the wages and working conditions of teachers (Brimelow, 2003). Speaking at the NEA convention in St. Louis in 1904, Chicago teacher, Margaret Haley, argued that teachers should organize to address their inadequate salaries, their insecurity regarding tenure of office, and their overwork in overcrowded classrooms (Haley, 1904). Haley embraced the idea of professional unionism, which called for the simultaneous pursuit of professional development of teachers and improvement of their working conditions. For Haley, a mutually beneficial relationship existed between the principles of teaching and the principles underlying democratic movements for freer expression and better working conditions (Haley, 1904). Haley warned in her 1904 NEA speech that if educators were unable to carry the ideals of democracy to the industrial world, then the ideals of the industrial world would be carried to the schools. This infiltration of industrial ideals in teaching and schools was evident in the organization of the early work of the AFT. According to United Mind Workers, "teacher unions organized teachers as people with jobs and essentially ignored the act of teaching and the process of learning" (Kerchner, Koppich, & Weeres, 1997, p. 40). AFT, specifically, was in the business of teacher job protection that required due process, seniority protections, and an industrialized notion of division of labor that tightly specified teachers' jobs. Any change to teacher work or to the structure of schooling meant changes and potential threats to those protections. Therefore, attempts at school reform could have been met with resistance from teacher unions that were primarily interested in protecting the economic rights of teachers.

In many public schools today, like in the early twentieth century, democratic ideals are often secondary to the more dominant ideals of the economy. Even U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's "Race to the Top" agenda is saturated with economic interests like advocating competition over cooperation, commercial value over public value, and individual rights over collective good (Giroux, 2010). In this environment, many teacher unions seek to prevent teachers from being viewed as automatons that monotonously transfer information to students who will then use the information to become economically productive and profitable. If this factory-like economic model of education becomes the norm and if teachers are not efficient at increasing U. S. global economic competitiveness through student learning many teachers fear the dehumanization of the profession and eventual replacement by 'efficient' machines. Along with protecting the humanity of the teaching profession, many teacher unions also seek to protect the democratic nature of teaching. Through the process of "stripping teachers of their autonomy, decent working conditions, power, and creative tools that ... enable them to think critically and act imaginatively in their classrooms...