In a discussion about a charter teacher who acquiesced to practices that were objectionable, some readers asked why she didn’t complain or take action. This reader explains why teachers must sometimes accept the intolerable:
You are exactly right-easier said than done! Charter Schools are a company, a business. If you work for an employer then they expect loyalty. Imagine if people working in chicken processing plants, common around here, complained about the inhumane treatment of animals-you get fired. If you work for Hewlett Packard and complain about the outsourcing of jobs to other countries because there are unemployed people here-you get fired. If you have a job driving a truck and complain about the fact you are expected to be on time no matter how many hours you have to drive even if safety is compromised-you are fired.
The rules are such that if you need a job to feed your family, have an indoor place to live and any sort of so called benefits and you take a job doing something you find repugnant and complain-you get fired. In many areas of the country there are no other jobs or the job qualifications and educational background of a teacher are not valued by future employers.
I feel it isn’t so much that the Charters count on teachers being too timid to speak up, and while there are a few teachers who are choosing to remain ignorant so they do not have to deal with the moral conflicts, the Charters are just doing business as usual in the USA. We are being scapegoated as teachers and the public is apathetic for the most part or too lazy to find out the facts. The crisis in education is also competing for attention with the Presidential Election, the Olympics and Kim Kardashian. The people blaming teachers are counting on the fact that our American culture has an attention span of 3 minutes, our national literacy levels are low, people are dealing with the basic levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs dealing with poverty and until they SEE how this all directly affects them, humanity remains uninvolved. Sort of a reverse NIMBY-if it doesn’t affect me and is happening “Over there” it is unimportant; but the real problem is how America communicates information through talking heads who are seen as authorities and are many times idiots, by local elected officials who may or may not know what they are talking about etc… We have so many in business, politics and government who are willing to lie and distort the facts that humanity quit listening. We have so many dis-enfranchised voters, apathetic voters, people who don’t vote because it is inconvienent or they are too busy, thousands of military overseas whose ballots never make it to their state on time to be counted, laws enacted to prevent or make it harder to vote for some, an illiteracy rate that makes reading a ballot impossible for so many adults, incarceration rates and felony laws that remove huge numbers from the voting public FOREVER and a lack of public transportation is many many areas that even if you want to vote you have no way to get there!
Charters are counting on all this; the people who own them are counting on all this.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, this is why we had unions in this country. For this exact reason. Because against management, our labor and unity was all we had. The real question is why the workers of this country allowed the labor movement to be systematically dismantled underneath us, so that we would return to these Gilded Age conditions.
The writer above sees the beat of our society and has hit the nail on the head. And it’s not because they have a hammer, so all they see is nails. They see it for what it is. Now, add the fear factor of a Romney / Ryan ticket, a duo w/ right wing corporate backing, that would take America back to the days of Herbert Hoover.
I am a retired public ed. teacher and, like many tell me, it’s easy for me to be critical, call for a total opt out of testing, call for total revolt, etc. I now provide consulting services to DOEs in two states. I, too, have to deal with a lot of new directions in policy that I don’t agree with. However, I can choose to leave. Across America there are teachers, truck drivers, and others who must hold their opinions to themselves at the risk of losing their job. The writer points this out very well. I agree with Diane Ravitch that teachers must stay in the classroom and do what they do best for the sake of our children’s future. And I feel that there will be a time when one must decide if what they are doing, living their passion for teaching, can continue with increased constraints on their capabilities in the classroom. Will teachers’ aspirations for treatment as professionals be realized in our current crisis in public education? Will they be compensated for their dedication as professionals? Not just a “living wage” as Randi Weintgarten suggests, but a wage commensurate with abilities and commitment seen in abundance in our public schools.
It appears that most teachers and their unions are being forced by the economics of a purposeful and partisan withholding of sorely needed state and local funding for public schools to enter into compromise and cooperation with moneyed venture capitalists with little legitimate research to back their privately held, mostly for-profit vision of what true learning is and the importance of the role of highly trained and experienced teachers in the classroom. As an unregulated structure of charter schools grow, allowing both public and private corporate takeover schemes to fill in public school districts’ de-funded budget holes, it tears away that much more from the fabric of our public schools and the communities they serve.
This is being done, more often than not, with the approval of not only the federal government, but by many state and local governments as well. Add to this the NCLB and RTTT mandates, and, as many teachers have said to me, a perfect storm of total takeover of the commons, public education, by private interests is growing. And teachers are left with weakened unions and an increasing compromise of their profession.
May I suggest that we all read “Wisconsin Uprising” – what an inspirational book – but particularly relevant to this discussion is the second section Moving Forward: Lessons of Wisconsin which outlines various strategies that unions in “right to work” states have taken in non-majoirty unions and the various ways they have been successful organizing and winning.
Grassroots activist moved the Chicago teachers union, the MOVE caucus in NYC seems to be moving in a similar direction – I think teachers are currently fighting back and that we will see them do so in greater and greater numbers – but first they will have to overcome the leaders like Randi Weingarten who seem more than willing to compromise with the Billion Dollar Boys’ Club!
There’s something to this, but I think I’d find it more convincing if it were laid out in more concrete terms. It seems to me we should be considering not just whether charter administrators have too much coercive power to get employees to “tow the line”, but also whether the “line” in question consists of good practices. Obviously a lot of employees (including teachers) wish they didn’t have to do, or had the freedom to do, different things at work, but it doesn’t automatically follow that what they want is necessarily a good idea.
There’s something to be said for staff consistency, especially in support of kids, as long as the consistency is around good practice.
Public school teachers must work together to form a more perfect union. As one responder mentions: how is that our teachers’ unions have not been maintained as a strong voice and source of protection of workers’ rights? If teachers’ unions across America should continue to be forced, by broken public funding and political policies, to collaborate with the very forces working for the demise of unions, a massive alliance of public school teachers will be necessary to rebuild that more perfect and stronger union. And this will require the resolve and determination from all.
The same situation is true in public schools. Principals have so much power, they can destroy teachers’ careers on a whim, so they don’t dare speak out for fear of retaliation.
In terms of teacher abuse, there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between charters and public schools except principals are defended to the hilt by the latter to the point of abusing the court system.