What should teachers’ unions look like 20 years from now?
Teachers unions are under attack and, in fact, they might be entering their most perilous time in decades. At the same time, as teachers in West Virginia have shown us, good organizing can always find a way forward.
This seems like a good time to consider what our unions could and should look like twenty years from now.
Today’s contributors are Brian Guerrero, Nikki Milevsky, David Fisher, John Borsos, Jennifer Thomas, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, and Shannan Brown. You can listen to a 10-minute conversation I had with Jennifer, Brian, Nikki and David on my BAM! Radio Show. You can also find a list of, and links to, previous shows here.
Readers might also be interested in two resource collections I’ve developed:
Brian Guerrero is a Teacher on Special Assignment for the Lennox School District in Lennox, California, president of the local Lennox Teachers Association, and a member of the Instructional Leadership Corps, a collaboration among the California Teachers Association, the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, and the National Board Resource Center at Stanford:
Teachers unions are, at their core, Labor Organizations. This is true today and it will be true twenty years from now. We negotiate contracts and working conditions, salaries, and benefits, on behalf of and at the direction of our members. We grieve contract violations and make sure members are fairly represented and receive due process. We safeguard that teaching remains a viable, dignified, and desirable profession and that teachers have a say in decisions that impact their classrooms and students. We are the collective voice of teachers and other educators, and students and schools are better for the environment we help create…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
The mostly white city of Gardendale, Ala., will end its fight to form its own school district and break off from the heavily black school system of surrounding Jefferson County.
The decision—which comes two weeks after a federal appeals court ruled that Gardendale couldn’t form its own district—draws to a close a yearslong legal battle. That ruling reversed a lower-court decision that would have allowed Gardendale to proceed with its plan, even after the judge concluded that race was the main motivator for the split.
As part of their push to break off from Jefferson County, the city formed a school board and hired a superintendent in 2014.
The campaign came to a halt last week when Gardendale’s mayor and school board president sent a letter to the Jefferson County board of education, informing the district that it will not appeal the court of appeals decision.
A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that the mostly white city of Gardendale, Ala., cannot detach its students from a racially mixed county school system by forming its own district, reversing a lower court decision.
The 11th Circuit U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that U.S. District Court Judge Madeline Haikala must rescind the part of her 2017 order that allowed Gardendale to form its own system.
Last spring, Haikala granted Gardendale permission start its own system, with conditions, despite the fact that she concluded that race was the main motivation for the split. Advocates for racially mixed schools argued that Haikala’s ruling rolled back decades-long efforts to desegregate schools in the South.
Lawyers representing the black families in the 36,000-student Jefferson County system argued that the decision could lead to resegregation of a district with a history of intentionally separating white and black students. In their appeal to the 11th Circuit, the legal team —which included the NAACP Legal Defense Fund —agreed with Haikala’s findings of racial motivation, but disagreed with her giving Gardendale a plan for starting its own system in spite of her conclusion…
Read the full article here: May require an Education Week subscription.
Education Week could not immediately reach Gardendale schools Superintendent Patrick Martin for comment on the 11th Circuit ruling. Gardendale had also appealed Haikala’s ruling, in part because the city disputed her finding of racial motives.
Education and the Media – Education Week — Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist known for her deep dives exploring race and the resegregation of the nation’s public schools, has been named a 2017 MacArthur Fellow, the so-called genius grants awarded in an anonymous process.
“I’ve known for about a month,” Hannah-Jones said Wednesday, one day after being named among 24 in the 2017 group announced by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. “You basically get a call out of the blue, and then you can only tell one person. I told my husband.”
The foundation said Hannah-Jones’ work chronicles “the demise of racial integration efforts and persistence of segregation in American society, particularly in education.”
“She combines analyses of historical, academic, and policy research with moving personal narratives to bring into sharp relief a problem that many are unwilling to acknowledge still exists and its tragic consequences for African American individuals, families, and communities,” the foundation continued…
It had been three years since the Supreme Court had declared “separate but equal” in America’s public schools unconstitutional, but the decision was met with bitter resistance across the South. It would take more than a decade before the last vestiges of Jim Crow fell away from classrooms. Even the brave sacrifice of the “Little Rock Nine” felt short-lived—rather than allow more black students and further integration, the district’s high schools closed the following school year.
The watershed moment was “a physical manifestation for all to see of what that massive resistance looked like,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
“The imagery of these perfectly dressed, lovely, serious young people seeking to enter a high school … to see them met with ugliness and rage and hate and violence was incredibly powerful,” Ifill said.
Six decades later, the sacrifice of those black students stands as a symbol of the turbulence of the era, but also as a testament to an intractable problem: Though legal segregation has long ended, few white and minority students share a classroom today.
The lack of progress is clear and remains frustrating in the school district that includes Central High. The Little Rock School District, which is about two-thirds black, has been under state control since 2015 over the academic performance of some of its schools. The district has seen a proliferation of charter schools in recent years that opponents say contributes to self-segregation.
Ernest Green still remembers the promise of the era that put him and the eight other students on the front line. After reading about the May 17, 1954, Brown v. Board of Education decision in the local newspaper, he recalled: “I thought to myself, ‘Good, because I think the face of the South ought to change.’… ”
U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. only served in his job for about a year. But in that time he’s helped lay the groundwork for implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, the first reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in more than a decade.
And he’s traveled to more than 30 states, used his bully pulpit to argue for equitable access to education, and butted heads with education groups and Republicans in Congress over a wonky—but important—spending provision in ESSA.
In a sit-down interview, King and I talked about everything from the Obama…
Sen. Jeff Sessions expressed skepticism during his confirmation hearing to be U.S. attorney general on Tuesday about executive branch guidance that has not gone through the full notice-and-comment rulemaking process and said he would be “dubious” about asking courts to defer to such guidance.
The Alabama Republican, who is President-elect Donald J. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Justice, was asked about such guidance by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, who did not specifically cite the controversy over the Obama administration’s informal guidance on respecting the restroom choices of transgender individuals, but Lee appeared to have had that issue in mind…
(This is the first post in a two-part series)
