Kentucky Teachers Strike as Union Leaders Sit on Hands

The continuing waves of job actions across the country demonstrate the irrelevance of AFT and NEA top-heavy and top-down misleadership.  As Kentucky teachers and parents plan an execute sick-outs to shut down schools in protest of a toxic package of state legislation to rob schools and crush teacher voices, the union misleaders continue to urge teachers to go to work and, instead of striking, to send a delegation of beggars to the state capital to "lobby" corporate legislators.   Teachers are not having it.

From Nation of Change:

Don’t call what Kentucky teachers just did a “wildcat” labor action, at least not when you’re speaking with Tim Hall. Hall, a classroom teacher at Shawnee High School in Louisville, answered my phone call as he was driving to the state capitol in Frankfort to protest the latest slate of education-related bills being considered in the legislature. He and hundreds of other teachers in Jefferson County Public Schools, the state’s largest school district that includes Louisville, called in sick, prompting the district to close schools for over 100,000 students. 

Hundreds of those teachers joined Hall at the state capitol. It was the third time in a week and the second day in a row that enough JCPS teachers called out sick to trigger a full district shutdown. The sick-out spread to four other districts that also had to close. But neither the state teachers’ union nor the local union for Jefferson County had anything to do with organizing the action. In fact, union leaders urged teachers to show up for work, preferring instead to have districts send small teams of teachers to lobby state lawmakers. 

Yet Hall bristled at using “wildcat” to describe what JCPS teachers were doing. “I don’t like that word,” he said. “I think our concerns are reflective of teachers not only in JCPS but also across the state.” 

The Kentucky teachers’ actions are the latest in what has become a wave of teachers using their collective power to influence legislation in state governments, but the sick-out in Kentucky is also a sign of how teacher protests are evolving. 

Teachers who once saw labor actions as effective tactical responses to attacks on their financial well-being are now understanding that their labor power is part of a broader strategy to even the playing field in a political landscape that is increasingly unequal. And there’s strong evidence they’re having an impact. 

Teacher strikes are evolving 

The teachers, joined by parents and other public education activists, organized the sick-out action on social media sites including the Facebook page for JCPS Leads, which Hall helps facilitate. Teachers went back to work at one point, but then extended their protest to a fourth, fifth, and then a sixth day to ensure controversial bills were killed in the legislature. 

The roots of this year’s labor action are in last year’s statewide strike when teachers closed schools across the Bluegrass State to protest a new pension bill that would have put retirement earnings for new teachers at greater risk and shortchanged retirees and senior teachers. This year’s sick-out is different. 

First, teachers have a much broader array of targets for their protests. “We want a whole package of bills voted down,” Hall explained. 

Once again, a threat to teachers’ pensions, House Bill 525, has stirred the teachers’ ire because it would reduce the participation of educators on the state employee pension board. But two other bills go beyond wage-and-benefits grievances: House Bill 205 that would establish a statewide school voucher program giving tax breaks to those who donate to private school scholarships for special-needs and low-income students, and Senate Bill 250 that would take school principal hiring decisions away from local, site-based committees, which include teachers, and give the district superintendent sole responsibility for the hiring process – the bill applies to JCPS only. 

Hall sees all three bills as attacks on democracy. “They’re about taking away our ability to collaborate on how our schools operate,” he said. By removing educators from the pension board, ramping up a statewide voucher program, and undermining teachers’ influence on principal hiring, teachers are being pushed further out to the periphery of decision making, he explained, and in turn, are less able to make their voices heard as advocates for their schools and their students.

Also, there’s a good reason why Jefferson County teachers are taking it upon themselves to lead the labor action and go it alone in speaking out for their colleagues elsewhere in the state. Not only is JCPS the only district affected by the bill to change principal hiring; JCPS is also the only district currently under threat of state takeover. Proponents of charter schools and vouchers are generally seen as the most ardent backers of the takeover effort. 

And Hall and other teachers see all three bills as efforts to further undermine their participation in governance of their schools and usher in more state control and privatization of schools. 

A movement about democracy 

In taking their demands beyond economic grievances to include issues of governance and local community voice, the Kentucky teachers are joining a strong new trend in the teacher movement. 

When West Virginia teachers walked off the job last year and started what’s become known as RedForEd, they generally made wages and benefits the core of their grievances. But in their labor action this year, West Virginia teachers expanded their protests to include issues with privatization, specifically, to fight new legislation that would take public money from traditional districts and use it for charter schools and for private and religious school tuition. 

Also this year, teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, made opposition to the unchecked growth of charter schools and their lack of transparency and accountability a centerpiece of the unions’ demands. 

Education journalists and “experts” have noticed this trend and described it as mostly a battle over funding for public schools vs. charter schools, voucher programs, and other forms of privatization. But that misses the broader argument teachers make that all education mandates that stem from top-down authority and big money interests are meant to rob teachers of having a voice in how schools are governed. 

Teachers are making RedForEd a fight not just for funding but also for political power. 

Teacher strikes work 

There’s evidence that the teachers’ change in strategy will work. 

Last year’s RedForEd protests clearly affected state legislation where the protests occurred. According to a new analysis, in four states where teachers walked off the job, state legislatures responded by increasing baseline state funding for schools by 3-19 percent. 

This year, teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland led to calls from local governments for moratoriums on new charters and increased regulation of the industry. In response, California state lawmakers acted with “lightning speed” to enact new laws that require more transparency in charter school operations. 

How successful were the Kentucky teachers? As of this writing, on the final day of the legislative session, two of the three bills teachers targeted in their protests appear to be dead – the bill restructuring the state pension board and the bill creating a statewide school voucher program. The bill targeting the principal hiring process in JCPS appears to have passed in both chambers and will likely be signed by Governor Matt Bevin. 

Two out of three is not a bad batting average in a “red state” where Republicans hold a trifecta of strong majorities in both branches of the state legislature and the governor’s seat. And should the dead bills come back to life, Hall assures me, or similar bills spring up, teachers will return to the capitol. 

“We’re tired of being unsupported and messed with,” he said. “Teachers want to have fair ways for us to ensure the public education system continues to provide access to well-supported schools for all kids.”

Retired Teacher's Thoughts on Union Misleadership

Denis Ian served for 34 years as a high school teacher. 

by Denis Ian

Teacher unions are being destroyed from within and without. And it’s been happening for a long while.

The same “reform" forces that wormed their way into the the curriculum discussions and redesigns also used their wealth to purchase political influence. And their worming was not confined only to state elected officials, but extended to national union leaders and major inner city unions as well. Think Weingarten and Garcia.

If these union leaders could be captured by funding temptations and empty promises of continued influence, well, then the take over of public education would get a whole lot easier. And that is precisely what has happened from without.

The AFT and the NEA leadership are hand-maidens to the reformists. Of course, they peacock their independence for their membership, all the while acquiescing on issues that will alter the lives of the teachers they represent … high stakes testing, teacher evaluations, and curriculum design. Think Weingarten and Garcia.

The leadership of large, inner city unions seem especially easy to seduce. Michael Mulgrew, the NYC UFT union boss, has embraced the Common Core … and all of the attending slop that rode in with that lousy reform. And he did it for Judas money. For small, temporary gains that, in the end, will only rot out the lives of his rank and file, but seal the deal for decades to come. Short term gain, long term pain.

Of course, these union leaders have been seduced by powerful temptations. How else to explain the quick and early endorsement of a pro-reformist like Clinton … when Bernie Sanders seemed to be the overwhelming great fit for unions across the nation? Well, because … because there are expected rewards for those leaders should Clinton win. And, of course, that was always a more likely outcome. 

These leaders make the case that they are important and influential “players” … and that is a necessary role to play in order to stay on the inside of the issues.

But it is now clear that they have become quite comfortable on the inside … and they have lost touch with those who looked to them for leadership. To the rank and file, the they have become a disconnected elite. “Animal Farm” swine. A union upper-crust with a broken stethoscope … unable to listen to the heartbeat of those who brought them to office.

This divide and conquer strategy would make Caesar grin.
But there’s more.

Teacher unity is also being fractured from within.

For some reason, the outside threat posed by these never-ending reforms … reforms we all see as profession-wrecking … does not seem quite lethal enough to some.

There are more than a few who do believe the future belongs to the reformers … and they’d prefer to be rewarded for their early cooperation. So they have hopped on the charter school band-wagon … sermonizing us all how wonderful these new situations are for disadvantaged kids … when in reality that are advantaging themselves.

They are slurping up what they can in this moment of union and educational chaos. They’re educational junk-yard dogs … surviving and prospering under hallelujah rants of curing sick students of long-term educational maladies … just like traveling evangelical charlatans under canvas tents. Think Weingarten and Garcia.

These reluctant tacit approvers of charter schools rationalize their system-wrecking decision to go the charter route because … because they are “social justice” champions. As if no other teachers have ever been champions for disadvantaged students in the past.

I think this “social justice” crusade is a cover … a ruse … so that themselves don’t come under fire for super-screwing … along with the reformers … the classroom teachers left behind in now even more poorly underfunded classrooms.

Lots of teachers have no allegiance to some ideology that seeks to resegregate kids in our schools. Thousands of teachers see their mission as educators … teachers of knowledge … and not as social Gandhi’s. They do not see the classroom as a bully-pulpit or as a town square. They see their involvement with children as mentors and wizards of learning and nurturers of curiosity. They do not see themselves as coaxers of would-be social activists. They do not see students as tools for a personal agenda.

Teaching has become a cover activity for feel-good identifications for youngsters … a how-to manual for challenging “the system” rather than a construct for improving the intellectual skills that will enhance their lives more than becoming crafty rally professionals.

If we separate ourselves over social ideologies, well, then our profession is doomed. It’s why these “pop up” charter schools … run by social activists get a “pass” when other charter schools get the severe scrutiny they deserve. They are bad stuff.

Every charter school is a siphon that slurps up funding from regular public schools … the schools that have served us so well for so long. 

Those charter dollars should be used to repair our most needy schools. Instead … we are resegregating ourselves back in time all the while insisting we are moving the social clock forward. We are lying to ourselves.

This is how we have lost our union ethos. Our solidarity identity. And our political clout.

And this is why there are knives sticking out of our backs.

Denis Ian

TeacherMatch: Matchmaking Towards a Corporate Hell?

 

by Ken Derstine at Defend Public Education!

July 6, 2015
Last updated: July 16, 2015

TeacherMatch: Matchmaking Towards a Corporate Hell?

by Ken Derstine at Defend Public Education!

July 6, 2015
Last updated: July 13, 2015

In Philadelphia, all new applicants to the School District of Philadelphia must create a login and apply through a corporate portal called TeacherMatch.

All across the country, school districts, such as Chicago, are outsourcing their hiring of personnel to a private firm called TeacherMatch. This hiring method takes away community control of who staffs schools and gives the control to a private corporate entity.

In their About page, TeacherMatch would have us believe that four teachers just happened to spearhead “the design and implementation of a comprehensive hiring and professional development plan involving thousands of teachers.” They were so successful “that the U.S. Department of Education used it to shape their multi-billion-dollar school improvement program.”

There is no hint on the website of who the funders of TeacherMatch are, but it is full of “great teachers” corporate education reform jargon. And doesn’t their logo “Because Teachers Matter Most” sound like the preppy talk of StudentsFirst? TeacherMatch is a collaboration with the Northwest Evaluation Assocation that describes itself as a “global not-for-profit organization” which “offers educational products and services”. Once again, nothing about who the funders are for NWEA but its website describes it origins.

Back when NWEA was established in 1977, paper-based testing ruled. So founders Allan Olson, George Ingebo, and Vic Doherty pioneered new ways to measure student growth using an empirically-derived scale based on Danish mathematician Georg Rasch’s Item Response Theory model. Their solution—our NWEA RIT (Rasch Unit) scale—accurately measures student growth term-to-team and year-to-year.

NWEA built from this model and developed MAP, Measures of Academic Progress in 2000. The MAP led to protests at Garfield High School and a boycott of the MAP in Seattle in February of 2013 that was the beginning of the Opt Out Movement.

If you look at the TeacherMatch Advisory Board, it includes Charlotte Danielson, head of Framework for Teaching, which is “a comprehensive and coherent framework that identifies those aspects of a teacher’s responsibilities that have been documented through empirical studies and theoretical research as promoting improved student learning.”

The Framework is used by the Gates Foundation-funded Measures of Effective Teaching, or MET. The Gates Foundation has given at least $335 million to “promote effective teaching” including $45 million for MET.

In its November 19, 2009 press release for these grants the Gates Foundation stated:

Important partners in this effort are the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) and their affiliates in the participating communities.

"This process has been a thoughtful, deliberative, collaborative way to understand—and then design and implement—systems that improve teaching and learning. These districts, working with their unions and parents, were willing to think out of the box, and were awarded millions of dollars to create transparent, fair, and sustainable teacher effectiveness models,” said Randi Weingarten, President of the AFT.

“Collaboration and multilevel integration are important when it comes to transforming the teaching profession,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel. “These grants will go far in providing resources to help raise student achievement and improve teacher effectiveness. Our local NEA affiliates are working daily to help improve the practice of teaching,” added Dennis Van Roekel, President of the NEA.

The foundation will work with the Intensive Partnership sites to ensure that their successes, challenges, and lessons learned are shared widely with school districts and policymakers around the country. Progress will be tracked through common indicators and communicated regularly. 

Just as corporate education reform has based itself on the premise that schools in the United States lag behind the rest of the world, the Gates Foundation has based MET on the premise that teacher quality is “bleak” despite continual evidence to the contrary.

When MET was announced to study “effective teaching” in its November 19, 2009 press release  the Gates Foundation said,

The MET project will enroll 3,700 teachers from a number of school districts around the country and will gather a variety of data, including videotaped teacher observations, student surveys, teacher surveys, and supplemental student assessments. As with the Intensive Partnerships, the MET project represents a real opportunity for teachers to inform the national discussion on education reform. 

On January 6, 2012, NY Chalkbeat reported on the Gates Foundation second report on MET and said,

Though an overhaul of teacher evaluation in New York has been stalled by the failure of teachers unions and school districts to agree on how to conduct it, both the New York City teachers union and the Department of Education agreed to participate in the Gates Foundation study when it launched in 2009. The union helped recruit teachers to join, and ultimately, teachers from about 100 schools signed up to have their lessons videotaped and analyzed.

“It takes the politics out of what’s being measured,” UFT president Michael Mulgrew said when the union first agreed to participate. “Teachers are very frustrated with the political debate. They are always saying, ‘why don’t you just come into the classroom?’ That’s what this is doing.”

Since then, the politics over teacher quality has grown even more heated.

Last summer, a GothamSchools reader who had worked in a school piloting the Danielson evaluation said it was very hard for teachers to be rated “effective.”

Is this collaboration with the Gates Foundation by thousands of well-intentioned teachers who want to be trained in how to be “effective teachers” leading to a system of corporate control of who can be a teacher and what they can teach?

Also see:

Where Obama’s Race To The Top Leads: Chicago, Philly, Miami Public Schools Privatize Teacher Hiring | Bruce Dixon at Black Agenda Report

Turning Collaboration Into a Bad Word | Defend Public Education
 
The Charlotte Danielson Who Is Getting Rich on the Misuse of Intellectual Property | Schools Matter

Attention All Teachers: Your Union Leaders Are Betraying You

Last year Paul Toner, the ostensible leader of the MA Teachers Association, surrendered his membership by capitulating without a whimper to the first step in the corporate blueprint to replace tenured and experienced teachers with a new generation of untrained neophytes who will cycle through the system after a two to three year stint.  That first step in that process was to establish a teacher evaluation scheme based on student test scores, and to link job security pay to those test scores.  Toner accomplished this feat without a vote by the rank and file--not even an opinion survey.

This kind of open contempt for the teachers he was elected to represent in 2010 signified a transparent betrayal of teachers and children for the self-aggrandizing goal of cozying up to the corporate foundations and education terrorist organizations like Stand for Children (see Jonah Edelman spill the beans on the real goals of Stand on Children).

Now we find that President Toner has surrendered Massachusetts teachers once more in Step 2 of the corporate education deformers' plan to destroy teacher tenure, job security, and due process .  From Barbara Gordon posted Saturday on Facebook:

This week the Massachusetts Teachers Association's Board of Directors voted to put forward legislation that will end the use of tenure and seniority as the primary factors to use in layoff situations. Instead, the primary criteria will be performance evaluations and "the best interests of the students" with seniority being used only for "tie-breakers."  

This was a "legislative compromise" the MTA leadership worked out with educational terrorists Stand for Children, who had a ballot question that did the same thing and more, ready for the November election. The MTA leadership negotiated this compromise without input or approval from rank and file MTA members. Their position is that there is no way we could have beaten Stand on the ballot question so it was better to compromise and lose seniority rights and involuntary transfer rights than to fight and possibly lose those things and more.  

People are shocked and furious. Does anyone have any ideas for anything we can do about this? They are pushing to get this into the legislature and passed by July 3, the deadline when Stand for Children has to submit the final paperwork for the ballot question. 

We know we might lose the ballot question, but we wanted a chance to fight. If the MTA leadership will not fight for us, where are we? What are we paying our dues for?

And this from Tim Scott:

MTA & STAND FOR CHILDREN: As we know, collective bargaining entails negotiating with our employer over our compensation, hours of work and working conditions (broadly). Under these rules, we often need to organize ourselves to take action to ensure that we strengthen our contracts, while not giving away past gains. 

The current MTA leadership has now decided to take us in a new and very different direction and bargain (secretly in the beginning) with Stand for Children - a private anti-union, corporate front group - not only over contractual issues, but fundamental union rights. Instead of organizing members and allies to fight this aggressive assault by a group notoriously hostile to teachers unions, Toner and company chose to take a pathetic and defeatist stance to enter into "negotiations" with Stand, knowing that teachers rights and the the union's integrity will be significantly damaged.

There is one solution to this problem, and it is the same solution to the problem that NEA and AFT have: the replacement of the duplicitous cowardly union leaders who have sold millions of dues paying union members down the river without a word of protest.  But even that will not be enough, for the new leaders must be chosen from those young men and women who will restore the social justice mission that unionism was once based upon, a mission that advocates for children's rights to read and learn and grow, parents rights to have a say in school matters, and workers' rights to the respect and dignity that is afforded teachers and school staff in other countries as a matter of course. 


There is no future for teachers, children, or parents in having Gates and  Broad control the voices of teacher by buying off phony leaders like Paul Toner. If the teaching profession is to be saved for now and the future, teachers must take back their unions and reclaim the mission that made them a movement of solidarity among teachers, parents, and students.  There is no other choice, and there is no greater calling.


In case you missed Jonah Edelman's confession about Stand on Children, here it is: