Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity by Jonna Perrillo (review)

For well over a century, public school teachers have wrestled with an intractable dilemma. Torn between responsibilities to students and their professional interests, they have rarely been able to strike a satisfactory balance between the two. When their students are the minority poor, the hard choices become even harder. Jonna Perrillo’s Uncivil Rights: Teachers, Unions, and Race in the Battle for School Equity traces the struggle of public school teachers in New York City to reconcile labor rights and civil rights, professional standing and community service, offering a nuanced and historically sophisticated analysis that underscores how difficult the road to true educational equity has been and how fraught it will be in the future.

Perrillo grounds her arguments about race and teacher power in New York in the bitter rivalry between the city’s two foundational education unions, the socialist Teachers Guild (TG) and the communist-influenced Teachers Union (TU). In the course of their ideological battles between the 1930s and the early 1960s, the TG and TU also carried on a debate about the nature of the obligations teachers owe to minority students and parents.

TU members believed deeply in the idea of the teacher as an ally and champion of the marginalized and oppressed. They led the fight for fair portrayals of African Americans in textbooks, increased hiring of African American and Puerto Rican personnel, and mandated transfers of experienced teachers to ghetto schools. TG members advanced a more cautious agenda. They too viewed themselves as activists for racial justice in the city’s school system, but they combined civil rights advocacy with an emphasis on teacher professionalism.

Often these two agendas were compatible and even complementary. But over time, as TG members began to demand the rights and prerogatives of professionals—control over workplace conditions, teaching methods, and discipline standards—their goals as union-ists began to conflict with those of black and Puerto Rican students and their parents. This conflict, of course, was difficult for TG members to acknowledge publicly. But as Perrillo shows, what was good for teachers was not always good for those they taught.

Perhaps the most illustrative issue was that of forced teacher transfers to black-majority schools. Many TU members taught voluntarily in such schools and believed that experienced teachers from “white” schools should be required to work there in the interest of educational equity. But TG members, while acknowledging that ghetto schools often served as dumping grounds for the inexperienced and the incompetent, nonetheless opposed involuntary transfers, citing their rights as professionals. While they considered themselves racial liberals, Perrillo notes that “when asked to put their social beliefs on the line, teachers chose not to work in minority schools” (1). Improve the physical environment and learning atmosphere in minority schools, TG members asserted, and they would be willing to teach in them.

This position, of course, removed the onus of responsibility for change from individual teachers and placed it squarely on the city’s central Board of Education. During the 1940s and 1950s, as teachers fought for their professional rights, it was possible to argue that they had no real control over the state of education in minority schools. But with the emergence of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in the early 1960s as a potent vehicle through which to obtain those rights, it became much more difficult for teachers to avoid the issue of their own complicity in a racially inequitable public school system. With teacher professionalism came teacher responsibility.

The UFT represented mass teacher unionism. In 1961, it became the official bargaining agent for all New York City public school teachers. Although members of the TG and TU had been active on the political Left, many in the newly constituted UFT were more conservative or even apolitical. Their concerns lay with more traditional labor issues—wages, benefits, and working conditions. As the UFT fought successfully...