Teachers Reach Out Beyond the Union Hall

Fallen leaders remind us of what we have lost and what we have gained. Clearly, former United Teachers of Los Angeles president Helen Bernstein’s death April 3 deprives Los Angeles of one of its most forceful educational leaders. Yet her death illuminates the value of teacher union leadership in the quest to reform public education. Perhaps more than any other group, they have the capability to break the gridlock of educational interest groups to bring fundamental change.

Teachers’ unions are virtually the only educational organizations that have a presence in the classroom as well as in the capitol. They have a unique, although underused, ability to look at the results of policies and to forcefully advocate change from the inside. Increasingly, those at the forefront realize that teachers cannot thrive if schools are doing poorly or if public education can’t meet the demands of our times.

A growing number of teacher unionists, who understand that public education’s vulnerability is also their own, have begun to see their roles in institutional terms, representing teaching as well as teachers. More than a decade ago, Albert Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers who died in February, signaled that teachers needed to lead the reform movement, not block changes.

Public education faces a transformation as profound as what took place during the Progressive Era of the early 1900s when the country transformed from a nation of farms and villages to one of cities and factories. The political cleavage line is no longer between those who think the schools are doing a good job and those who don’t. The line now separates those who think the institution is capable of educating America’s children and those who think it is not.

The history of American labor is littered with unions and associations that didn’t change with the times. Typically, unions last only until there is a change in the underlying institution or its production technology. An institutional change of such magnitude spells real danger but also real opportunity.

Bernstein saw the need for change and the opportunity to forge a program of reform in which teachers could craft changes in their own schools. She worked tirelessly to gain teacher support for the LEARN program, this in the face of opposition from influential unionists. After her term as president of UTLA, she became the director of the Teacher Union Reform Network comprising 21 leaders from Miami to Seattle.

While teacher unionism has lost Bernstein and Shanker, their legacy is a growing number of leaders, including current UTLA president Day Higuchi, who have a vision of education’s future and value results over doctrine.

In Seattle, teachers’ association president Roger Erskine has fostered a school-level indicator system so that both educators and parents can gauge the progress of reform.

In Toledo, retiring teacher federation president Dal Lawrence created a peer review system in which experienced teachers judge the fitness of beginning ones and intervene when experienced teachers show conspicuous signs of incompetence. Districts around the country have adopted similar measures.

In Rochester, New York, association president Adam Urbanski has led a decade-long battle to make the collective bargaining contract an instrument of educational reform.

The leaders of these changes understand that for teachers to be influential, union leaders have to go beyond preaching to the choir in the union hall. Their strength lies in their ability to gather support for teacher-driven reform from sources outside of trade unionism: among business people, foundations and with public education’s severest critics.

The emerging unionism is not a denial of in-your-face activism, but more an extension of union organizing. The signal success of teacher unionists in the 1960s and ‘70s was not salary increases; it was getting an occupation organized. Teachers had always been spoken for. Now they speak for themselves, organizing teachers around educational quality, their own schools and their careers.