After years of being blamed for the problems in schools, teachers are now being held up as victims of a broken system. How did the pendulum swing so quickly?
For years, teachers continually heard the message that they were the root of problems in schools. But in a matter of months, the public narrative has shifted: The nation is increasingly concerned about teachers’ low salaries and challenging working conditions.
Teachers, it seems, are no longer bad actors ruining schools—they’re victims of an unfair system, and the only hope for saving kids.
Before, “there seemed to be a lot of teacher blaming going on,” said David Labaree, a professor emeritus at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. “You now see a surprising degree of growing sympathy for teachers.”
Of course, the recent wave of teacher walkouts and protests, which were mainly driven at the grassroots level by individual teachers rather than unions, helped catalyze new feelings about the profession. But other factors played roles as well: Social media offered more visibility into teachers’ lives, from the second jobs some work to make ends meet to their out-of-pocket spending for classroom supplies. Evidence emerged that teacher-quality initiatives centered on student testing—which had become unpopular—haven’t worked. Even the election of President Donald Trump, which spurred a growing wave of activism across the country, has had an impact…
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Earlier this year, the island’s government approved a plan to create “alianza” schools, which are intended to be like charter schools, as well as a “free school” selection program similar to vouchers. The legislation creating both, signed by Puerto Rico’s governor and backed by Secretary of Education Julia Keleher, would create restraints on both programs: In the first year of the voucher-like program, for example, the number of students would be capped at 3 percent of total student enrollment, and then at 5 percent in the second year. Keleher said the programs would help the island’s educational system better meet students’ needs and help transform a long-struggling system.
Bruce Fuller, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley, works on how schools and civic activists push to advance pluralistic communities. He is a regular opinion contributor to edweek.org where he trades views with Lance Izumi, on the other side of the political aisle.
This blossoming spring of teacher uprisings—marching on state capitols, winning hefty pay raises—cheers any citizen who knows that robust societies depend on vibrant schools.
But arid summers may await the nation’s educators, as the Trump-tweaked U.S. Supreme Court seems ready to eviscerate these same teacher associations who battle each day for better schools.
While hearing oral arguments in the Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees Council 31 case in February, justices voiced skepticism over compulsory union dues, the life blood of local associations that mobilize the nation’s 3.2 million teachers.
Still, it’s the wildcat strikes moving across the nation—ignited mostly by young and passionate teachers—that may reshape the future of labor unions…
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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.
In 2011, Arizona became the first state to adopt the most flexible school reform yet, an education savings account (ESA) plan. It provides parents who believe their child is poorly served in the local public school with an annual budget they can spend on a wide variety of accredited alternatives—not just private or parochial schools, but tutoring, online academies, special-needs services, and even computer equipment for home schooling.
More recently, five other states have followed Arizona’s lead: Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, Tennessee, and just this year North Carolina. Initially these programs were designed to better serve learning-disabled children, but with the realization that most of its students could be educated independently for a fraction of public-school per pupil spending, Nevada authorized a plan open to any of that state’s children in 2015.
To date, Democrats in the Nevada legislature have held up funding for about 10,000 applicants, but nearly all of Arizona’s K-12 children are now eligible for an ESA worth 90 percent of their district’s per pupil spending.
With this history in mind, Marty Lueken, director of fiscal policy and analysis at the EdChoice Foundation, and I decided to calculate how much ESAs could help a financially troubled blue state, where the longstanding alliance of teacher unions and liberal politicians has created per pupil costs that are three, four, and even five times what is needed to independently educate. Our goal was to see how much the taxpayers of Illinois, New Jersey, Kentucky, California, or Connecticut might benefit if just a small percentage of public school families were funded to take charge of their own children’s schooling…
Puerto Rico’s Supreme Court has 
By Bruce Fuller, Opinion Contributor
