The End of Public Education?

The death bed regret of Milton Friedman was that he could not list among his many accomplishments the total destruction of teachers’ unions in this country. Little did we expect to discover that one of the candle-bearing acolytes at his theoretical bedside was no less than Barack Obama, a future Democratic president brought into office with considerable assistance from those very unions. Yet, what we are currently witnessing in the calls for charter schools and the attacks on teachers, first, as stubborn adherents of unionism, and, second, as a bunch of incompetents is fast becoming a hallmark of the Obama administration. We have now reached a crossroads where it is difficult to determine whether public schools are under attack in order to destroy teachers’ unions or teachers’ unions are under attack in order to destroy public education. A fine distinction, no doubt, for the privatization movement which has amazingly—and irrationally—survived its having given birth to the greatest economic crisis since 1929.
Friedman did not see in American public schools a hallowed democratic institution that guaranteed free schooling for our children; rather he saw in the public schools a last remnant of socialism. This may seem bizarre, given that the idea that children should be educated at the expense of their communities goes back not to some New Deal innovation or Marxist agenda but is a centuries’ old icon—from the urban school teeming with immigrants to the one-room little red school house ringing its bell on the open prairie. For Friedman, however, any institution or enterprise which bore the adjective “public” was a lingering cancer in the body politic. Even more frustrating for the Chicago guru, however, was that the teachers’ unions (and their defined benefits pensions) maintained their viability in spite of thirty years of union busting inaugurated with Ronald Reagan’s crass destruction of the air traffic controllers’ union.
When one reflects upon the complex history that propelled this country into a thirty-year period of frenzied privatization and deregulation, leading it to tear up much of the progressive legislation it had taken a good part of the twentieth century to achieve—issues of race, of social malaise, of stubborn sectionalism, of declining empire—one cannot leave out the fact that even prior to the Reagan counter-revolution, it has been as American as apple pie for policy makers of both parties to wage a thinly veiled campaign against the notion that anything good can come from government sponsored or subsidized institutions.
Public schools, health facilities, libraries, transportation have been intentionally under-funded lest the average American fall prey to the notion that publicly provided services can be as good, or, heaven forbid, even better than profit-driven services. “You get what you pay for.” Unless you put out cold cash, you can’t expect very much. (Of course, it might occur to the more sophisticated citizen that he does pay for public services through taxation, and thus the unrelenting campaign by the right wing to lower or eliminate the tax “burden”—unless those tax dollars are earmarked for “defense,” which, through some magical transubstantiation, government manages to give us the largest cornucopia of state-of-the-art, shiny, futuristic weapons of death the world has ever seen.) It is a not so subtle education process, and the lessons become more severe as one goes down the class ladder and crosses what, in our still highly segregated nation, are the clear lines of demarcation separating white from black and brown citizens. White, suburban schools are clearly better funded than inner-city schools. Mass transit, which suffers generally from under-funding, the premium being on automobile and gasoline sales, particularly suffers when its mission is to transport the poor and working classes to their low-paying jobs.
There is considerable irony in the threats teachers’ unions are now confronted with from practically every quarter. They, after all, have paid their dues. Before looking back to how we came to this pass, however, it might be worth while to point out that, fat as they are portrayed, a remnant aristocracy of labor, they have already made considerable concessions. The United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 of the American Federation of Labor, long the largest local in the A.F.L-C.I.O., and long led by the infamous Albert Shanker, is command central for teacher unionism. It long ago began to come to terms with pressure to soften its demands. Following the tumultuous 1968 school strike over community control, the New York State legislature enacted (classically, by one vote, cast by a teacher) the Taylor Law which outlawed strikes by teachers and other municipal employees, with a stroke of the pen depriving the unions of their most powerful weapon. By now, there are five “tiers” in the union’s pension plans. With each succeeding tier, the terms under which a teacher can retire have become less generous. A new teacher will have to work longer for fewer benefits than a teacher who began her career in the 1960s. Almost all of the “Tier One” teachers are gone from the system. And, although in the relatively affluent 1990s a mayor who was committed to improving the city’s schools finally brought teacher salaries more in keeping with the salaries being earned in the white suburbs, those wage scales only came after a period of decades through which most teachers were forced to work two and sometimes three jobs in order to maintain their families. It would be difficult to caricature teachers as leaning on their shovels when they were so underpaid that (the once taboo) “moonlighting” was draining energies from such tasks as lesson planning, grading papers and the high-energy requirements of creativity in the classroom. Nevertheless, the prospect of paying a senior teacher with longevity and the equivalent of a Ph.D. a wage of around $100,000 a year and the promise of a defined benefit pension (and a potential annuity) elicits the full range of dark emotions, particularly during a time characterized as the Great Recession. For the spiritual descendants of Milton Friedman, certainly, it is irksome, to put it mildly, that an essentially moribund union movement can still throw up a barrier to its complete eradication from the American labor landscape in the form of the stubbornly viable teachers’ unions.
For those who carefully followed the career of Al Shanker, all of this is heavily weighted with irony. Over the course of his career as leader of the UFT, Shanker’s main mission was to keep in check the left wing within his rank-and-file. The UFT was itself born in response to the threat posed by the left-leaning old Teachers Union (TU). The newborn UFT had hardly had enough time to organize before the onset of the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam saw thousands of radicalized young teachers enter its ranks. When with a deep collective roar, the amassed delegates to the union’s Delegate Assembly voted to condemn the war in Vietnam over Shanker’s opposition, he acted quickly to reduce the number of delegates each school could send to the Assembly and lengthened the term of shop stewards, called “Chapter Chairmen” (sic) in the UFT, making future such demonstrations far less likely. When the ‘60s bred young teachers entered ghetto schools and found conditions deplorable both within the schools and in the communities they served, particularly in a school system which had come to serve a population that had a majority of “minority” children, when there was even talk of allying the teachers’ union with the Welfare Workers Union and calling a general strike to improve both working conditions and the conditions in which Black and Hispanics lived, Shanker serendipitously found in the Ford Foundation’s Community Control pilot program in Ocean-Hill Brownsville, (shepherded by JFK national security advisor and Vietnam architect, McGeorge Bundy), the perfect means by which to forever purge or immobilize the left within his ranks. The 1968 School Strike drove a wedge between schools and communities, white and black teachers, Blacks and Jews that is still with us. The three-month long strike had been so strident and potentially catastrophic that it came as no surprise that the New York State legislature would bar the union from ever striking again.
Over the forty years since the strike, the UFT, under Shanker and then his protégé, Sandra Feldman and her successors has more or less functioned as a powerful professional organization. Teachers are, after all, basically a conservative lot, and, after 1968 certainly, the radicals, always a minority, were relegated to the sidelines. A constant embarrassment to the union is that in its zealousness to protect teachers’ jobs and tenure, only one or two teachers—out of a total work force of over 55,000—is ever invited to leave the profession, that is, fired. That there are men and women currently standing in front of classrooms who might better be otherwise employed is glaringly obvious. Yet, tenure is almost iron-clad. The union has tried to deal with this through peer mediation and retraining, but such efforts are often ineffectual. Calls for merit pay, which would reward the most successful teachers, are similarly resisted. For the most part, the union insists that all tenured teachers be treated equally. There is some rationale for this, in spite of the layman’s inability to see why poor performers should be treated any differently than they would in the private sector. In theory, at least, a tenured teacher is an individual who has at least a satisfactory higher education, has passed a licensing exam and, typically, a three year long probationary period during which she needs to prove her competence. The rationale further argues (oddly, yet in effect) that teaching is not rocket science and that should anyone pass through the initial hurdles and be found to be less than competent, the blame likely lies not with the individual but with working conditions or lack of professional support. Stiffening this position is, to some extent, the memory, once again, of the ’68 strike, which, on paper at least, had been fought for “due process.”
Teachers’ unions are not easy to love. There is undoubtedly an overdue need for certain reforms and more than a grain of truth in the critiques made by both those inside of the unions and outside observers. Yet none of this is really behind the current movement for charter schools, privatization and the elimination of the unions. Over a forty year career, this writer’s experience in the New York City public schools was that, with rare exceptions, teachers are hard-working, dedicated individuals who love learning and care deeply about their students. Those who work in inner-city schools have special challenges in the form of overcrowding, under-staffing, poor physical plants and lack of adequate teaching tools. One investigator of the charter school movement tellingly found that in a school that housed a charter school, a glaring contrast could be found between the conditions that prevailed among the regular population and those that were found in the charter school it housed where fresh paint, renovated classrooms and lavatories, computers, smaller class size, ample materials and greater guidance made all the difference. If teachers’ unions can justly be criticized for anything, it is for not drawing even greater attention to the need for such accommodations for all students. No, the charter school movement and the attack on public education and public employees’ unions are not motivated by concern for children, rather they are yet another mean-spirited attack designed to place private profit above all else in yet another key sector of American life.