Unlike Kelly Garcia, fresh out of college I knew a lot about unions.
I grew up in a union household. My mom worked on a factory assembly line and was a member of the United Auto Workers. My dad was a fireman and a member of the International Association of Firefighters.
I started teaching in the fall of 1977, and by the spring of 1978, I was president of our local teachers union and a member of our state union’s board of directors. I moved to Pinellas County, Fla. in 1984 and joined their teachers union, where I was elected vice president in 1988 and president in 1991.
As my term was winding down in 1994, I thought about what I had experienced and learned over the previous 16 years and became convinced we needed a new model of teacher unionism.
Unions are always a reflection of the larger industries in which they reside. A union of freelance software engineers functions differently than a union of Ford autoworkers, or a union of independent truckers. Since today’s public education system took form during the industrial revolution, in the mid-to-late 1800s, today’s teachers unions operate much like the blue-collar unions that were spawned in those early factories.
New organizational structures were developed during the industrial revolution to efficiently manage the increased productivity generated by new machinery, and a rapidly growing public education system soon adopted many of these new structures and management systems. By the late 1800s, public schools increasingly began to resemble factory assembly lines with centralized, command-and-control management systems to generate greater efficiency and productivity through standardization. By the early 1900s, most public school students were moving along educational assembly lines in batches with teachers adding the prescribed knowledge and skills at each grade level.
Since children are not widgets, this production system was ineffective - and at times harmful - for many students. But as bad as these early school systems were for students, they were worse for teachers. They were controlled by politicians who were often more interested in accumulating and using power than educating students, and teachers were often the victims of their political manipulations. Increasingly, teachers rebelled against this unchecked political power, and began to fight back by organizing unions.
Adopting a union model similar to that used by the steel and auto workers made sense for teachers, given schools were organized like factory assembly lines. Teachers embraced centralized collective bargaining to respond to centralized management, and started bargaining for one-size-fits-all rules to counter the one-size-fits-all management practices.
By 1994, I understood the strengths and weaknesses of our blue-collar unionism. While we had blocked management’s ability to abuse their power, we had not empowered teachers and addressed their core desire to be more effective with students. We had turned school districts into unmanageable bureaucracies in which teachers and students were increasingly frustrated and alienated. And, under the guise of protecting public education, we had become the primary defenders of these bureaucracies. In essence, we had become an extension of management. (more…)
