The Debate: what are the unions doing on NCLB?Sept 26 2007The union executives who control the NEA and AFT, are on the other side, opponents, not potential allies of school workers, students, parents, and community people, and should be treated as such. We need clearer ideas about what is going on in school (like NCLB) and society (war and inequality), organizations to take action, and ethics to test and judge new leaders. But..... Holy cow. George Sheridan says (1) I am a liar, (2) am marginalized (3) wrongly conflate strategy, tactics, and objectives. Maybe we can boil the debate between George Sheridan and me to a pedagogical question. What do we want people to learn, and how do we want them to come to learn it? And then, what do we want people to do? What is urged?
I want people to learn to take responsibility for their own lives, to take action in concert with others to bring an end to the educational and social rule of the few over the many, and to think analytically about how the central issues in life, (1)work, (2) the struggle for rational knowledge, (3) love/sensuality/aesthetics and (4) the fight for freedom, can influence our work now, and in the future.
I want people to help build an organization that can represent an ethic of equality, against exploitation, for internationalism, against racism and sexism, for reason. Justice, after all, demands organization--and independent systems of communication.
I want people to learn how the processes of capital work to pit us one against another, and against ourselves--and to unravel who is a friend, and who is not, in order to act toward a better world. I want people to reject the corrupt and dishonest mis-leadership of the education unions, and the political parties, which divide people and don't unite us, in favor of broad, democratic groups.
George appears to want people to rely on CTA NEA to tell them what to do, with some limited critique of the inner workings of both. To do? Go vote. Write a note to your legislator.
George usually is the unofficial voice of official NEA or CTA here, so it is useful to see what he has to say.
Let us work within George's own statements. First, if if the Rouge Forum and I are marginalized, why would, as George says, NEA fear us so much that they attack the Abolish-NCLB petition Susan Ohanian and the Educator Roundtable circulate, just because they thought I was involved in it?
Of course, if we review George's language, we see that NEA was only "leery" of the Educator Roundtable petition. In truth, NEA attacked it, and Susan Ohanian as well.
That should be enough on what NEA says and does about NCLB. But wait, there's more.....the fact is that while I did sign the petition, as I will support any honest person who is involved in struggling for justice in schools, I had nothing to do with writing it.
The Rouge Forum endorsed the Educator Roundtable petition after considerable discussion, because most RF members believe the call for abolition of NCLB is central to it, and because the discussants believe Susan Ohanian (and others working with her) plays a key role fighting for justice in schools and out. Her history says she is to be trusted.
Even before the Educator Roundtable petition, the Rouge Forum fought the NCLB, stood for its abolition, from the early days when NEA helped demand the core of it by taking out full page ads in the NYTimes, along with the Business Roundtable and the US Chambers of Commerce(see September 10, 2000). The Rouge Forum petition against the tests was up on the Rouge Forum web site long before any other similar petition, years before, and it remains a good short description of why the NCLB came to being, who it would hurt, and what might be done. Here is a link
What George does not say about marginalized dishonest people is the reality that the executives of NEA, like the $450,000 a year Reg Weaver, are about as marginalized from rank and file teachers as anyone can get, that Weaver and his fellow NEA bosses lie constantly about their goals, strategy and tactics (which always blend one into another), and that they deny the very reason people join unions, that is, workers and employers have only contradiction in common. Few people could be more marginalized and dishonest than the execs who run NEA and AFT.
Of course, if I am so marginalized, why would the voice of the CTA NEA on this list bother with what I have to say at all? Well, perhaps it is because teachers, other school workers, and parents are organizing beyond the bounds of NEA, recognizing the reactionary nature of NEA leadership, and struggling to push them aside in the fight to abolish the NCLB. So, it is useful to NEA to try to wreck that fight, as they tried to wreck Susan Ohanian's admirable efforts.
NEA and CTA executives who control the union now do not, and will not, oppose NCLB at its heart, nor act for its abolition. That's true. Not a lie. Voting NO (actually a posture to tinker with it) on a bill is not a call to abolish the NCLB. It is a maneuver to cut out parts of the bill, and influence other sections. What is key for NEA and will be key for CTA as well in the rewrites of NCLB will be merit pay, pensions, and similar bread and butter issues, not the core reasons NCLB exists, nor the NCLB attacks on kids, "child abuse for the empire," as I described it a decade ago, and as others recognized too.
This narrow kind of unionism, which appears to serve the members (at the expense of kids, parents, and education itself), really does not serve the members. It weakens us as it divides us from the key sources of our power, solidarity with others, sets us up for future losses.
CTA has danced all over the issue of NCLB, but done nothing to organize a real fight against it. I am looking at the September 2007 issue of the California Educator, the printed voice of CTA. If you count the glossy front and back covers, it is 40 pages long. The magazine is littered with ads for banks, promos for fifth rate universities (even worse than SDSU), Broad Foundation U (University of San Diego), articles featuring elected CTA leaders giving awards to each other, a series of articles on technology (one on the use of technology in the Hayward strike) and one short piece on NCLB.
In that latter NCLB article, politician Miller is urged not to attach merit pay to NCLB. Nothing else. The slogan is "erase, rewrite, and reauthorize." That's a shift from an earlier media frame, a hollow talking point, but it is quite clear here that the effort is to hit merit pay, not the crux of NCLB.
Despite what I think are commendable rank and file efforts to overturn NCLB and their own union's positions in CTA, as in Visalia and Oakland, anyone who really thinks the CTA leadership actually opposes NCLB and/or is now wagging the NEA dog fails to understand how NEA works. The line-up for NEA jobs goes top down, not bottom up.
And, by the way, the California Educator article on the Hayward strike says nothing about NCLB, but does tout a pay raise. I am all for strikes and job actions and pay raises, and was under the impression that Hayward took up the NCLB issue, at least at the outset. If they did, good for them, and bad on CTA for not covering it. If they did not, then I suspect those school workers fell into the trap of taking pay, and giving up significant control of their work days in exchange, a la the failed UAW. If that is the case, then their struggle may have mostly contributed to creating their own oppression in slightly masked ways.
CTA, rather than fight NCLB, fights its own members who try to fight it. That surely true in Visalia. NEA and CTA did all they could to sabotage an Abolish-NCLB petition and card campaign that originated there. For the full story on that, see the upcoming Substance News.
Or, to come from another angle, consider what NEA could easily do, but does not do---two related examples. (1) The NEA could post on its web site the student/parent opt-out of NCLB test rights that exist in most states and urge teachers to circulate the link---and then ferociously defend any educator harassed in any way because of their legal activity. Or, (2) the same could be done with opt-outs in regard to the NCLB clauses giving names of youth to military recruiters. NEA could urge similar action on the state affiliates. But the NEA execs don't do that.
Instead of even that kind of limited online action, today (9/25) AFT is touting another sham form of opposition to NCLB, much like the NEA hustle. It's called, "Grade NCLB," and offers educators a chance to toss a spitball comment on the web site. For what purpose? To "Fix NCLB." Like NEA, AFT wants the essence of NCLB, without some of the spare parts they may have a hard time foisting on members.
(Later in the day AFT announced that its online updates would only be circulated to select AFT leaders, cancelling their weekly communications to members).
The slogan George Sheridan seems to support on behalf of NEA is "NCLB is not working." That means nothing. Indeed, it is not even true.
NCLB is working just fine. It sorts kids by class and race using racist forms of bogus science, sorts school workers according, mostly, to the income of the parents of the kids in the school, and their race or first language, regiments what people know and who they come to know it through curricula restrictions and high stakes exams, and creates dutiful servants and witless patriotic volunteers for Iraq.
Surely you see this, George. It came up in nearly every meeting we had with California teachers. They say the creativity, love of freedom, spontaneity, curiosity, is being beaten out of teachers and kids as well, resulting in children who say, "tell me what to do and I will do it."
One group of kindergarten teachers compared themselves to concentration camp guards. That is NCLB working, not failing.
I see NCLB's success in university classrooms where preservice teachers demand to learn how to teach kids how to pass the tests (tests that they themselves took), and faculty members,deans, provosts, et al, just fall in line. Why? Well, that is too complex for anything but a short answer: fear and opportunism. At the university level, opportunism has to be seen as key. In the k12 world, it's fear, but one goes with the other.
Fear, however, was a key theme in every meeting we had on our California tour. NEA and CTA have done nothing about that. Indeed, the unions contribute to it by failing to negotiate real academic freedom clauses, failing to defend good teachers relentlessly harassed on the job. I met one San Diego teacher on Friday who described at length how SDEA fends off her, and her coworkers', calls for help by telling them nothing can be done.
School workers function in a milieu of threats and fear. What kind of education system can be founded on that, other than one that respects a Master/Slave relationship? Fear is a matter of hour to hour life in schools. NEA and CTA could swamp daily administrative intimidation with massive resistance, but NEA execs have learned to live with it, and tell educators who have the bosses' thumbs in their eyes to write another postcard to their congress-people.
Many, but not all, school workers we met with also say they see a connection between NCLB, inequality, racism, and war. Where is that in NEA publications? Well, it is nowhere, because those obvious connections would be unhealthy for NEA bosses in that they are involved in US imperial adventures, through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, though not as deeply tied up in it as AFT executives. But NEA bosses know they profit from the empire, that is a source of much of their big pay, and they are not going to kill the golden goose.
Those who actually believe the people who wrote NCLB are people of good will, and who in turn believe that the NCLB is really a drive for social and educational equity, when the sponsors of NCLB are often those who profit from inequality, segregation, and ignorance, and when it is abundantly obvious that doing school reform outside of social and economic reform will not work--- those people are either incredibly stupid or dishonest. Among those I include the executives on NEA and AFT. Not George. George errs. But the NEA executives constantly say they accept the goals of NCLB and the honorable intentions of its authors, because, flatly, they lie about everything important.
George, in his closing, asks where the evidence is that direct action produces results. Where do the health benefits and wages of teachers come from? School workers, like all workers, do have a limited history of militancy, eradicated over time by NCLB, textbooks, and education classes.
From Margaret Haley who helped to form the AFT, and was also active in NEA, forward to the recent Detroit wildcat strikes, education workers fought back, on the job and off. Haley organized for books, supplies, wages, class size caps, and a just tax system, almost a century ago. Before her death, she said she felt she didn't make the reality of the class struggle clear enough, but her work stands as an example of what could be done. The Rouge Forum, in many ways, starts where she left off.
The early days of the battles for collective bargaining, usually led by the urban AFT, involved direct action strikes. The NEA picked that up as AFT began to challenge NEA for membership, and NEA continued that tack long after AFT abandoned it, in favor of Al Shanker's view of unity with business and government in the national interest (also appropriated later by NEA execs).
In any case, there are at least two reasons why teachers are among the last working class people (people who have to sell their labor to live) with health benefits.
One is historical: the fact that teachers organized the collective value they created, took direct action (strikes, building seizures, etc), usually with parent and kid support, and forced concessions out of their employers. At least in the strikes I helped lead, school workers put forward demands that tied them to kids, like real class size caps, free books and supplies, etc. Early on, teachers had the outlook of also demanding a restructuring of the tax system--Tax the Rich!-- so working class parents and community people would correctly see an alliance, not just another effort to pick their pockets.
This historical reason for teacher pay and benefits (the opposing interests of workers and employers) is now opposed by NEA execs. Count the strikes in the last decade. That's no mistake. Both NEA and AFT gutted their organizing staffs over the last twenty years, leaving very few people who actually know what organizing, and striking, is.
The second reason school workers are paid relatively well, in comparison to other workers, is that the ruling classes are willing to pay, for now, for one section of the working class to instill habits of voluntary servitude (and witless soldiering) into another section of the working class. I suspect that payoff will vanish over time, unless there is school worker resistance on a broad scale. The divide and rule moves of NCLB attaching wages to test scores will work if educators do not recognize that those teachers in poor districts will get hit first---and suburban school workers better move to defend them immediately or they will just be next.
Besides, the massive debt the US is incurring as it expands its wars for oil and regional control, will play out in inflation, and a squeeze on public money, positioning the powerful to necessarily intensify the attacks on school workers.
The central issue of this matter may be in the slogan George Sheridan quotes, "NCLB is not working." The implication of the slogan is that we are all in this together, working on a common project for a society that is reasonably democratic, interested in educating kids, treating school workers fairly well. That may be the biggest of the big lies.
We are not all in this together. We live in the midst of a full scale international attack of the rich on the poor. In this battle, announced or no, some of the rich may throw off their histories and join the poor, and some few members of the poor will betray their brothers and sisters and work for the other side, for the rule of the few who would exploit not just the labor, but the minds, of the many. Reg Weaver and the executives of the NEA and AFT, Barbara Kerr and her successors in CTA, chose which side they are on a long time ago.
NEA's (and AFT's) leadership is hopelessly corrupt and dishonest. Even if that was not true, and it is, the unions are structurally unfit to meet this crisis, dividing people rather than uniting us. Those union executives form an organized opposition, purportedly within the ranks of school workers, to not only action against wars, regimented curricula, and racist high-stakes exams, but also to bread and butter issues like wages and benefits. The union bosses' actions will further weaken the power of educators, unless we throw them off.
As I noted at the outset, we need organizations which recognize and act on the very real class war that is going on, organizations not trapped by the divisions of unions, groups that can unite parents, kids, and school workers without the litmus test of who pays dues.
We need an ethic of equality, anti-racism/sexism, internationalism, democracy, opposition to mysticism, that can be used to set up a future life, and to test leaders today. I am hardly alone in realizing this.
We need action that demonstrates the fact that we are responsible for our histories, if not our birthrights. One core reason for mass direct action is that it can be sustained, is real power connected to reason, which does not evaporate with the whim of a politician who is waiting for the next, better, bribe. Direct action is hands-on education. People learn we can comprehend and change the world, together.
Writing legislators who comprise the executive committees of the rich, is asking others to think and do for us, and cannot be sustained. People learn to be helpless, to enrich their enemies and isolate their friends. Worse things could be done than voting, but recognizing that voting may serve as a hobby, and not a solution to real problems, is important to defending whatever hope is left in schools.
People send their kids to us, educators, partly because of the trust and good will that our predecessors sacrificed to create. They also send their kids to us out of hope. There is no hope whatsoever within the NCLB, nor within the opportunist leadership of NEA and AFT. Hope needs to be fashioned on a real analysis of things as they are, and how they can change.
We can overcome this crisis with class consciousness, organization, action, and ethics. Kathy Emery has likened this to the long term organizing that made the apparent quick outburst of the civil rights movement possible, "getting ready to be ready."
We can win. At issue is how much we will lose, not only in our material well-being, but in our own estimates of what we are, before we choose to take collective control over our own lives, and act in our own interest.
That is no lie.
best r
At 11:10 AM 9/22/2007, you wrote:
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