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Role for Teachers Is Seen in Solving Schools’ Crises

By SAM DILLON

DENVER — Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, convening a two-day labor-management conference here on Tuesday, argued that teachers’ unions can help solve many of the challenges facing public schools.

But as the conference opened, that view was under challenge in a number of state capitals.

Republicans in several states have proposed legislation in recent weeks that would bar teachers’ unions from all policy discussions, except when the time comes to negotiate compensation. In Tennessee and Wisconsin, Republicans have proposed stripping teachers’ unions of collective bargaining rights altogether.

Education historians said the unions were facing the harshest political climate since states began extending legal bargaining rights to schoolteachers decades ago.

The conference, convened by the Department of Education, drew school authorities and teachers’ union leaders from 150 districts across the nation to Denver to discuss ways of working together. To participate, each district’s superintendent, school board president and teachers’ union leader had to sign a pledge to collaborate in good faith to raise student achievement.

Some districts that had hoped to participate could not because relations grew too hostile before the conference.

They included New York, where the schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, and the United Federation of Teachers president, Michael Mulgrew, had each signed the pledge. But recent criticism by Ms. Black of the city’s system of seniority-based teacher layoffs angered Mr. Mulgrew, he said, and late last week he pulled out of the conference.

“I wasn’t going to walk into Denver with the chancellor and say, ‘We’re the hypocrites, here for the conference,’ ” Mr. Mulgrew said.

Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for Ms. Black, said the chancellor was disappointed. “We think there are critical issues we need to work together on,” Ms. Ravitz said.

Chicago, Miami-Dade, Philadelphia and eight others among the nation’s 25 largest school systems were at the conference, alongside representatives of 140 smaller districts from 40 states.

In his opening remarks at the conference, called Advancing Student Achievement Through Labor-Management Collaboration, Mr. Duncan commended several districts and their unions.

Among them were Douglas County near Denver, where, he said, the union helped the district pioneer a new teacher evaluation system. In New Haven, a union contract established an innovative mentoring program. And in Los Angeles, the union contract at the Green Dot charter school network details teachers’ instructional responsibilities rather than their working hours.

The conference comes at a time when thousands of districts are facing their most severe budget cuts in a generation, and union contracts calling for layoffs based on seniority could force many districts to dismiss their most energetic young teachers.

But changing these policies could also prompt some districts to remove more experienced, higher paid teachers to balance their budgets.

Mr. Duncan urged participants to search for solutions to the dilemmas posed by mass teacher layoffs.

“We have to learn to problem-solve together,” he said, underscoring his view that school systems can face challenges most effectively by working with the unions.

But in some states an alternate view appeared to be gaining force.

The Idaho schools superintendent, Tom Luna, a Republican, has proposed legislation that would limit collective bargaining to teacher compensation, and exclude unions from deliberations over the design of education policies. Republican lawmakers in Indiana have proposed similar legislation.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin has gone further, proposing to end collective bargaining rights for nearly all the state’s 175,000 public sector workers, more than half of whom are teachers. That proposal could pass since Republicans command large majorities in the Legislature.

In Tennessee, State Representative Debra Young Maggart, the chairwoman of the Republican caucus, also introduced legislation that would bar teachers’ unions from collective bargaining.

“Teachers’ unions have been blocking education reform, and my bill will deal with the problem,” Ms. Maggart said.

But Sharon Vandagriff, president of the teachers’ union in Hamilton County, Tenn., who came to Denver for the conference, said her union had worked for years with school authorities to overhaul struggling schools in Chattanooga. Across Tennessee, unions made concessions that paved the way last year for the state to win $500 million in federal Race to the Top money, she said, adding that Ms. Maggart’s bill has demoralized many teachers.

“It feels like an attack,” she said.

Some Democrats, too, are adopting a tougher stance toward teachers’ unions.

“We think they have a right to exist and a role to play in education reform,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, an advocacy group that pushes for charter schools. “But we wish management would be more aggressive. When management tries to appease, we end up with contracts that aren’t good for public education.”

Charles Taylor Kerchner, a professor of education at Claremont Graduate University who studies labor union history, said, “This is the harshest time for teachers’ unions that I’ve seen since the advent of legislatively sanctioned collective bargaining half a century ago.”

Next up...

..."the enemy" should take note.

Below is a column that echoes something that has been bouncing around in my mind since the uprising in Cairo, Egypt...to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak.

The article below needs no further introduction...

...this is what I'm talkin' about!

From the Washington Post

Link to Original Story...

Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin

By Harold Meyerson

In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month workers have known in decades.

The coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday, when Egypt's military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories; in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one state government in particular was moving to topple workers' organizations here in the United States. Last Friday, Scott Walker, Wisconsin's new Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining rights of public employees. Under his legislation, which has moved so swiftly through the newly Republican state legislature that it might come to a vote Thursday, the unions representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit list the unions representing firefighters and police.) The only thing all other public-sector workers could bargain over would be their base wages, and given the fiscal restraints plaguing the states, that's hardly anything to bargain over at all.

You might think that Walker came to this extreme measure after negotiations with public-sector unions had reached an impasse. In fact, he hasn't held such discussions. "I don't have anything to negotiate," Walker told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week. To underscore just how accompli he considered his fait, he vowed to call in the National Guard if protesting workers walked off the job or disrupted state services.

It's a throwback to 19th-century America, when strikes were suppressed by force of arms. Or, come to think of it, to Mubarak's Egypt or communist Poland and East Germany.

Now, it's not as if our states don't have fiscal crises to address, and Walker insists that it's Wisconsin's empty till that has driven him to curtail workers' rights. But there are other options. Democratic governors such as California's Jerry Brown and New York's Andrew Cuomo have proposed scaling back public services, pay and benefits without going after workers' fundamental rights to bargain. The right to bargain is clearly a separate question. Newly elected Republican governors, however, may reach the same conclusion Walker did and use the recession-induced fiscal crisis to achieve a partisan political objective: removing unions, the most potent force in the Democrats' electoral operation, from the landscape. "If we just stop and cure the pension problem, we have not gone far enough," Steve Malanga of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal said at the Conservative Political Action Conference last weekend.

The real goal of the American right is to reduce public employee unions to the level of private-sector unions, which now represent fewer than 7 percent of American workers. Walker's proposal not only confines public-sector unions to annual bargaining over wage increases but restricts the increases for state employees to raises in the consumer price index and compels every such union to hold an annual membership vote to determine whether the union can continue to represent workers. It clearly intends to smash these unions altogether.

Which would yield what? Our unions have already been decimated in the private sector; the results are plain. Corporate profits are soaring, while domestic investment, wages and benefits (particularly at nonunion companies) are flat-lining at best. With nobody to bargain for workers, America increasingly is an economically stagnant, plutocratic utopia. Is everybody happy?