2008 – A Pivotal Year to Build on Tom Mooney’s Legacy
A year from now we will have a new president in the White House, and the NEA and AFT will both have new national presidents. If there has ever been a year of opportunity to prepare for new thinking, defusing the increasingly polarized debate about how best to reform our nation’s schools, it is 2008. Whatever the merits or shortcomings of the NCLB law, or the reasons for the resentment it has produced among teachers, the result is that both the NEA and the AFT remain vulnerable to the public perception that they have become the “just say no” organizations.
Teachers’ unions could be playing a very different kind of role, and many within our diverse, decentralized teacher union movement are pressing for a new role as constructive partners in education reform.
Before his death one year ago, AFT Vice President and Ohio Federation of Teachers President Tom Mooney was known as a champion of progressive teacher unionism. He argued that the industrial model of teacher unionism had served a useful purpose by improving pay, working conditions, and ending arbitrary and discriminatory practices, but that a broader vision incorporating a professional and social justice emphasis would be more relevant and powerful today.
Susan Moore Johnson and Morgaen Donaldson echo Tom Mooney’s concerns in a recent “Educational Leadership” article that argues that core beliefs central to industrial era unionism – preserving “teacher autonomy,” “egalitarianism,” and strict seniority – have become barriers to new roles for teachers as instructional leaders, contributing to a generational divide among teacher union members. These priorities of an earlier era continue to shape the unions’ agenda in public education despite mounting evidence that there are better ways to improve teacher working conditions.
Unions, Tom Mooney believed, had to champion programs and policies that improve the quality of teaching and learning. Some of the most important questions: What constitutes good teaching? How do we improve teaching and equalize the distribution of teacher talent? How do we sustain new teachers? How do we build powerful coalitions with families and students? These questions are not being addressed by the most visible teacher union leaders today.
This was not always the case. Visionary national union leaders have understood the danger of teacher unions being seen as the obstacle to improving schools. In the early 1980’s, AFT President Albert Shanker advocated for national standards before the standards movement existed, and conceived of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS). He saw in the privatization movement a tremendous threat to public education and American democracy. NEA President Mary Futrell advocated for a vision of teacher-driven instructional leadership, culminating in the establishment of the NBPTS. She created an NEA foundation to catalyze educational innovation. In 1997, then NEA president Bob Chase declared the “new unionism” to put the union in partnership with district management to improve teaching quality. Public sector, education unions, Chase argued, are more like American craft unions, protecting the quality of the work when external forces pressure to compromise good educational practice.
Two recent publications — Leading the Local, by Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson and Fresh Ideas in Collective Bargaining: How New Agreements Help Kids, by the Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights (CCCR) — underscore that the legacy of progressive unionism is still alive, that union leaders are willing to think anew, and that the vision of teacher union leaders is contested terrain. But these studies also underscore that leading with a reform-minded vision, rather than simply articulating the worst fears and frustrations of teachers, is hard work.
The teacher union movement faces tremendous challenges today. Younger teachers now predominate in the teacher workforce and have very different ideas about what they need from their union. They are facing threats to their control over the classroom and the integrity of their teaching. In the summer of 2008, either the two new presidents of the NEA and AFT will lead with a bold vision, inspiring the next generation of local leaders to navigate the complicated education reform landscape and champion creative solutions to school improvement that speak to the concerns of the younger and the most accomplished teachers, or the unions will remain on the periphery of what is important to those members and the public.
Support for a growing movement for progressive unionism within the next generation of teachers’ union leaders could be the fulcrum on which discussions about public education now underway will turn.