Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, published an article in the New York Times yesterday in which he lamented the “learning loss” caused by the pandemic and called for a new national effort, like No Child Left Behind, to instill rigor and accountability, which he says will raise test scores. Time to bring back tough love, he wrote.
I have a hard time criticizing Mike Petrilli because I like him. When I was on the board of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation/Institute, I got to know Mike, and he’s a genuinely good guy. But when I left the board of the TBF Institute in 2009, it was because I no longer shared its beliefs and values. I concluded as early as 2007 that No Child Left Behind was a failure. I wrote an article in the conservative journal EdNext in 2008 about NCLB, saying “End It,” paired with an article by the late John Chubb saying, “Mend It.”TBF sponsored charter schools in Ohio—a move I opposed because think tanks should be evaluating policy, not implementing it; also, during the time I was on the board, the charters sponsored by TBF failed.
By the time I left, I had concluded that the NCLB emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing was a disaster. It caused narrowing the curriculum, gaming the system, cheating, excessive test prep, and squeezed the joy of teaching and learning out of classrooms.
Furthermore, the very idea that Congress and the U.S. Department of Education were stigmatizing schools as failures and closing them was outrageous. I worked in the US ED. There are many very fine career civil servants there, but very few educators. In Congress, the number of experienced educators is tiny. Schools can’t be reformed or fixed by the President, Congress, and the Department of Education.
NCLB and Race to the Top were cut from the same cloth: Contempt for professional educators, indifference to the well-established fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income, and a deep but misguided belief that punishing educators and closing schools were cures for low test scores. Both the law (NCLB) and the program (RTTT) were based on the assumption that rewards and punishments directed at teachers and principals would bring about an educational renaissance. They were wrong. On the day that the Obama administration left office, the U.S. Department of Education quietly released a study acknowledging that Race to the Top, having spent billions on “test-and-punish” strategies, had no significant impact on test scores.
And as icing on the cake, Mike Petrilli wrote an article in 2017 about the latest disappointing NAEP scores, lamenting “a lost decade.” That “lost decade” was 2007-2017, which included a large chunk of NCLB and RTTT. In addition, the Common Core standards, released in 2010, were a huge flop. TBF was paid millions by the Gates Foundation both to evaluate them and to promote them. The NAEP scores remained flat after their introduction. Please, no more Common Core.
I wrote two books about the failure of NCLB and RTTT: The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010) and Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America’s Public Schools.
Mercedes Schneider and I both wrote posts commending Mike Petrilli in 2019 when he wrote about the “dramatic achievement gains” of the 1990s and early 2000s before NCLB kicked in. He attributed those gains to improving economic conditions for families and declining child poverty rates. I wanted to give him a big kiss for recognizing that students do better in school when they are healthy and well-nourished.
So, what did No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top produce? A series of disasters, such as the Tennessee Achievement School District and Michigan’s Educational Achievement Authority, both gone. A landscape of corporate charter chains, for-profit charters, for-profit online charters, and now vouchers, in which red states commit to pay the tuition of students in religious schools and fly-by-night private schools. A national teacher shortage; a sharp decline in people entering the teaching profession.
Please, no more tough love. No more punishment for students, teachers, principals, and schools. Let bad ideas die.
This post is one of Jan Resseger’s best, most trenchant analyses of the robust and evil plot to defund public schools. She explains how the federal government—through No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top—drove federal Test-and-Punish practices and laws into the states. Even though those two vast federal programs failed, they remain alive in the states. Their “success,” if you can call it that, was in discrediting public schools and promoting privately-managed charter schools and vouchers.
The transformation of education from a civic obligation to a consumer good accelerated the passage of voucher legislation. Meanwhile the rhetoric of “saving poor kids from failing public schools” has quietly disappeared. Red states are lifting their income limits on voucher eligibility to make them available to all students, rich and poor. Despite research showing that vouchers are worse for poor students than the public schools they left, red state legislators are undaunted. Despite evidence that most vouchers are claimed by students already enrolled in private schools, red states continue to expand them. In effect, the rationale for privatization is no longer to fund a better alternative to public schools, but to hand public money to a clamorous interest group: private school parents.
Jan Resseger begins:
The federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), passed in 2002, embodied school reform premised on the theory of test-based accountability—the requirement of high-stakes standardized tests for all students and the application of sanctions for schools unable to raise test scores. The idea was that if you threatened schools with closure or threatened to turn them into charter schools or threatened to punish teachers if their students’ overall scores were low, you could make the teachers work harder and somehow raise an entire school’s test scores. It was an experiment whose proponents believed all children could be made proficient by 2014.
By 2013, those of us who support our nation’s public schools knew the experiment had failed. Even the Congressional supporters of No Child Left Behind knew it had not worked; they created waivers for the growing number of school districts unable to guarantee all students would be proficient in 2014. In 2015, when Congress reauthorized the federal education law as the Every Student Succeeds Act, the new law reduced federal punishments, while it still required the states to test students every year and create plans to turn around low scoring schools. Test-and-Punish school reform did not end, however. Its remnants remained in the state policies that had been mandated by NCLB and Race to the Top and had been enacted in state laws.
Today after two decades, it is clear that overall test scores have not risen; neither has the stated goal of corporate school accountability—closing achievement gaps—been accomplished. Diane Ravitch explains that test-and-punish school accountability, “overlooks the well-known fact that test scores are highly correlated with family income and are influenced more by home conditions than by teachers or schools. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of public schools were closed because of their inability to meet high test score goals. All of the closed schools were in impoverished communities. Thousands of teachers were penalized or fired because they taught the children with the biggest challenges, those who didn’t speak English, those with severe disabilities, those whose lives were in turmoil due to extreme poverty.”
State politics has now, however, made it even more difficult to push back against the forces attacking public schooling. The federal legislation was designed to drive a test-and-punish agenda into the state legislatures. No Child Left Behind began by mandating testing and sanctions. Then Race to the Top bribed states to enact their own sanctions for low-scoring schools and punish teachers by tying their evaluations to their students’ test scores. And ESSA continued requiring testing all students and required states to devise turnarounds for the lowest scoring schools. While under No Child Left Behind and the early days of Race to the Top advocates across the states could collaborate nationally to push back against the federal policy itself, the school reform battle in recent years has devolved to the state legislatures which enacted the federal requirements idiosyncratically into their own laws. Right now we are watching the state takeover of the public schools in Houston, Texas and Oklahoma’s threatened takeover of the Tulsa public schools, at the same time we are watching the consequences ten years later of the closure in 2013 of 50 public schools in Chicago’s poorest African American neighborhoods.
Test-based, punitive school reform has also dangerously discredited the nation’s public schools. The school accountability movement created the concept of “failing schools,” persistently condemned the schools in urban America, and accelerated the drive for school choice and privatization. Twenty years of school reform has culminated in the vast expansion of school privatization in the form of vouchers. This year, 12 states—by my count, and I may have missed some—have enacted or significantly expanded state-funded private school tuition vouchers at the expense of public school funding: Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, and Wisconsin.
Please open the link and finish reading this important post.
Ed Johnson is a systems thinker and advocate for public education. He lives in Atlanta. He has studied the work of G. Edwards Deming, an international expert on systems thinking, and knows that those who promise instant success by breaking up public schools are perpetrating a hoax. He knows the history of 50CAN, funded largely by Jonathan Sackler of the notorious family that profited by selling opioids. He knows that charter schools are distractions from the hard work of systems improvement. After more than three decades of charter schools, it should be clear that they do not produce “achievement now.”
He writes:
Part 2 of the The King Center’s Strategies for Beloved Community Education is set to be presented online on Tuesday, September 5, at 6:00 PM EST. Visit https://thekingcenter.org/for details.
As with Part 1, available for viewing on YouTube here, Part 2 will feature an “expert panel” in facilitated discussion.
Thus, the simple question, asked without prejudice, is, why?
This question was presented to The King Center 24 hours ago along with requesting an immediate reply, so as to avoid assuming why. A reply has yet to come. Given that, I offer the following.
50CAN, which stands for 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now, is the umbrella organization that includes GeorgiaCAN, and we know GeorgiaCAN pushes for school choice and charter schools, do we not?
50CAN evolved from ConnCAN (Connecticut CAN). ConnCAN was funded pretty much wholly by Sackler Family fortunes earned as ill-gotten profits from over-prescribed sales of Oxycontin by the family’s Purdue Pharma. Because of such greed for profits, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide have died, and continue to die, from opioid addiction.
As with similar other organizations and their local operatives—for example, The City Fund and its local operatives, Ed Chang leading reformED Atlanta—it is fairly well-known that 50CAN and its state-level operatives aim to dismantle hence destroy public education as the common good that is foundational to sustaining democracy, so as to transform destroyed public schools into privatized and commodified schools composing competitive education marketplaces. Think Milton Friedman and the “invisible hand of the market.”
It is also fairly well-known that 50CAN, like similar other organizations, has advanced its aim to destroy public education by expressly targeting and catalyzing Black communities to demand school choice and charter schools that will magically deliver “achievement now.”
The usual assumption is that charter schools transformed from destroyed public schools are inherently better than “failing public schools.” This is a lie, plain and simple. It is impossible for charter schools to be inherently better or worse than “failing public schools.” Because entropy is a fact of life, our public schools need improvement, have always needed improvement, and always will need improvement. Reality offers charter schools no grace from the entropy fact of life.
To assert that charter schools are inherently better than “failing public schools” is like asserting members of a certain group of human beings are inherently superior to members of other groups of human beings, based solely on expressions of variation in some few arbitrarily-chosen human physical features said to signify “race,” which is another lie.
Charter schools do, however, appeal to certain retributive justice, behaviorally emulative, and selfish consumerist mindsets for which improvement-thinking has always been meaningless, at worst, and theoretical, at best. 50CAN knows this, and so uses it to catalyze Black communities to demand “achievement now.” “Instant pudding,” the late, great systems thinker W. Edwards Deming (1900-1993) might say.
Consequently, “Our children can’t wait!” has been a decades-long handy refrain that has always begged easy, quick, learningless change but never improvement with knowledge, which requires learning and unlearning.
Unfortunately, systems thinking teaches through a nonviolence lens that the more often easy, quick, learningless change happens, the less improvement becomes possible; then, the less improvement becomes possible, the less sustainable democracy becomes; then, the less sustainable democracy becomes, the more societal dysfunctions develop and emerge, after a time, in Black communities and elsewhere; then, the more societal dysfunctions show up, the more the refrain, “Our children can’t wait!”
It is all a destructively vicious, self-reinforcing feedback loop that 50CAN and similar other destroyers of public education are happy to catalyze in Black communities, in particular, and to support its playing out, if only continually, but continuously, ideally…
Although some are quite capable to look below the performative surface, or show stage, of the proverbial iceberg and down into its greater depths to see and know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was also a profound systems thinker, systems thinking seems generally absent in Black culture; certainly, children labeled “Black” seem never to learn about this deeper and critically important aspect of Dr. King.
All too often the children learn to conserve racism and so-called white supremacy rather than learn to help humanity relieve itself of these scourges. The children learn and internalize racial categorization, the false narrative at the heart of racial violence. It seems the children never learn to internalize an understanding of human variation, the truth at the heart of nonracial nonviolence.
It is quite puzzling that some fight and rail against racism, all the while conserving it and the “race” lie racism needs in order to exist, in truth.
Therefore, a question for The King Center must be, why is The King Center giving a platform to 50CAN?
An organization known to be about making “Beloved Community” a virtual impossibility, in all respects?
Mike Miles was imposed on the Houston Independent School District by State Commissioner Mike Morath. Neither Miles nor Morath was ever a teacher. HISD was graded a B district before the state takeover. The takeover was based on spite, on Governor Greg Abbott’s hatred for a district that opposes him.
Miles thinks he is an innovator, but none of his authoritarian mandates has ever succeeded anywhere else. They won’t succeed in Houston because he lacks the single most essential ingredient of leadership: Trust.
He rules by fiat. That may work in dictatorships but not in schools. Fear is not a good long-term motivator. If Miles know anything about research on motivation, he would know that the greatest motivators are intrinsic, such as a sense of mastery and autonomy.
The largest school district in Texas has been in the news a lot lately. You may know the district was issued a state takeover and its superintendent was replaced by Mike Miles, who, notably, has never taught.
You may know that as a part of his “wholescale, systemic reform” he identified 28 underperforming schools and identified them as NES Schools—which stands for New Education System.
You may know a few headlines—the most bizarre being that Miles starred in a musical skit for convocation that’s been scrubbed from the Internet.
Often, the real story isn’t as bad as newspaper headlines make them out to be. That’s not the case with what’s happening in H.I.S.D.
The experiences teachers are sharing are a different story entirely.
Here is what this reform looks like on a classroom level, from teachers currently in H.I.S.D.
Teachers read from a script the first two days of school.
Read right off the page. No get-to-know-yous, no surveys, no relationship-building, no games, nothing. Right into curriculum.
Teachers must keep classroom doors propped open.
However, teachers and parents argue this violates past safety mandates to leave classroom doors shut and locked.
Teachers cannot dim lights.
Even if they leave the windows open, have lamps, etc., the lights must be at full power.
Teachers have constant interruptions from administrators and district “minders.”
APs have to submit a minimum of five teacher observations per day, so this means near-constant interruption.
Administrators evaluate teachers on a checklist that has very little to do with pedagogy.
Teachers don’t know how school leaders will use these observations. This is the actual form (big thanks to Janice Stokes).
[Open the link to see the form.]
My first three reactions:
If teachers are reading from a script created by the district, why are we evaluating them on their instruction being relevant and engaging? Isn’t that on your people, Mike?
MRS stands for Multiple Response Strategies. Pair and share, whip around, etc. These are acceptable checks for understanding, but every four minutes is formulaic and prevents any kind of extended focus or stamina.
I haven’t heard “DOL” since 1992.
Classroom monitors can coach teachers on instruction at any time.
Even with students present. Not insulting at all!
No “weak readers” can read aloud because it models disfluency.
A district employee I spoke to insists it is a “flex space that can have other uses besides discipline.” I said, “Oh, like a library?” She did not respond.
Students may not free-write.
Also, they may not work independently for more than four minutes.
Every four minutes, teachers are required to hold an all-class response to check for understanding. Which is great, until you actually have to read a book, take a standardized test, or focus for more than four minutes.
Every classroom activity must tie directly to instruction.
No classroom celebrations, relationship-building activities, brain breaks, or routines/procedures instruction are permitted.
Teachers received extremely limited training on this model.
The location chosen for training left people sitting on floors and stuck in parking lots for over 45 minutes.
There is no information tying any of these strategies to best practice or research on what’s best for kids.
This authoritarian approach to education is taking a huge toll on school climate and morale. A friend of mine said teachers at her school are breaking down on a daily basis. Even the strongest, most experienced educators—department chairs and leaders with stellar records—feel demoralized and unnerved (and that’s saying a lot after the past few years).
And no, the answer isn’t to “just move,” or switch districts, or quit teaching altogether. First, that response is lazy and reductive, but more importantly doesn’t account for the hundreds of thousands of kids in H.I.S.D. schools forced to learn in environments counterproductive to their wellness and development.
Public school teachers in Texas have known for years that it’s in the best interest of the state to destroy public education and reallocate funding to religious and private schools. Years of slashing budgets, demonizing teachers, lowering standards, letting chaplains offer mental health counseling—don’t tell me that’s a state that holds any kind of value for public education. That’s a state that wants to “prove” public education doesn’t work so it can privatize.
It’s just wild to me that they’re not even hiding it anymore.
School started in the Houston Independent School District, and many teachers were stunned by the extent to which their actions were constrained by a script. The new superintendent Mike Miles has be never been a teacher but he thinks he knows everything about teaching. He laid down strict rules, and teachers must comply without hesitation. Miles is the kind of leader who, if put in charge of a hospital, would tell surgeons how to conduct surgeries. This story appeared in the Houston Chronicle and was written by staff writer Anna Bauman.
As she prepared for the start of a new school year in Houston ISD, a fifth-grade reading teacher stripped much of the colorful personality from her classroom, including motivational posters, student art projects, several bins of books and a social-emotional learning nook with comfy furniture.
She wiped away tears and, earlier this week, started teaching at a school under the New Education System, a wholesale reform model introduced by Superintendent Mike Miles, who was appointed in June by the Texas Education Agency to run the largest school system in Texas.
While parents and students may have noticed few of the changes, educators from a wide swath of schools in HISD say they feel micromanaged and stressed in their first week under new district leaders, who are reportedly enforcing strict guidelines and conducting frequent classroom observations that have sparked frustration, fear and low morale among teachers at both NES and non-NES schools.
“I feel like they are not allowing me to do what’s in the best interest of the children,” said the reading teacher. “Every day I go to work, I’m crying. Every day I leave from work, I’m crying.”
The superintendent, meanwhile, said he has been pleased with what he has seen while collecting a “baseline” at NES schools in the first week.
“I was very impressed with their progress, even in one day, but also their preparation for the beginning of the school year,” Miles said. “Teachers were teaching well, they were following the instructional model, and it was pretty good. It shows that the schools and the teachers have been preparing hard for the first day, second day of school.”
The district is laying the groundwork for a pay-for-performance evaluation system geared toward measuring the quality of a teacher’s instruction, although a Harris County judge has temporarily blocked HISD from implementing the system.
“The high-quality instruction, there’s a clear rubric for that, there’s a clear spot observation form, because we have to train teachers,” Miles said. “We can’t just do what we’ve always done, which is go into a classroom every three weeks or three months and think we’re going to see something that is effective teaching, and just rely on, ‘Oh, I’ll know it when I see it.’”
This year, all principals will be evaluated under a new system that requires them to give instructional feedback and spend significant time coaching teachers in classrooms. Principals will be graded in part based on the quality of instruction at their school. Meanwhile, teachers will also be measured with a new evaluation system this year, although those who do not work in the schools targeted for reform may ask for a waiver.
District leaders trained teachers in recent weeks on the evaluation system and new classroom expectations. For example, one slideshow presented during teacher training listed some “common practices that we want to generally avoid,” including stream of consciousness writing, rooms with dim lighting and worksheets that are not purposeful. The training materials also discouraged teachers from showing entire films, letting kids “earn” free time and allowing “poor readers” to read aloud during class.
The slideshow instructed teachers to post a “lesson objective” on the board before the start of each class, avoid wasting time on transitions between activities, teach “bell to bell,” teach grade-level content to “every student every day” and use a timer to guide pacing of the lesson. Teachers should use a “multiple response strategy,” an activity that engages and checks the understanding of all students, every four minutes, according to a sample spot observation form.
On the first day, teachers said they were expected to skip introductions and get-to-know-you games, instead jumping right away into instructional material.
“I don’t even know who my kids are because we haven’t been able to get to know them,” said the fifth-grade reading teacher. “They still call me ‘teacher’ because they can’t remember my name.”
She has struggled to stay on pace with the timed lessons and was scolded for bringing in additional materials to help students, many of whom are Spanish speakers who cannot read on grade level. When she raised concerns about the fast pace, a district official told a campus administrator that the teacher was “moving too slow.”
“We’re not allowed to give them work on a level they understand. Most of the time, they sit there confused,” the teacher said. “I’ve had students crying since day two, saying they’re overwhelmed.”
Meanwhile, Jessica Waligorski, a special education support teacher at Isaacs Elementary School, said she appreciates the rigor, high expectations and organization of the NES model. Administrators are supportive and easily accessible at her NES campus, she said. Teachers lift each other up when doubts creep in and students have taken to the new model “like sponges,” she said.
“Everyone is holding each other to a standard and we’re not wavering,” she said. “We have set the tone, we have set expectations, we have set goals … and our kids have been engaged, learning. They don’t have a minute to misbehave because there’s so many things they’re learning.”
Miles has said there is no directive from the district mandating that teachers at non-NES schools teach with a specific curriculum or follow a certain instructional model. In reality, however, many of the new rules and expectations seem forced on campuses across the district, including high-performing schools that do not fall under NES.
Some of the rules seem to have been taken to an extreme. One teacher said she asked for an accommodation to use lamps instead of florescent lights in her classroom due to a serious medical condition. District officials denied her request and suggested another option: Wear sunglasses.
The teacher has already started getting headaches from the bright lights.
“I have all my lights on,” she said. “I’m trying to get through the day.”
In addition to turning on lights, the teacher, who works at a non-NES middle school, has made several other changes this year, including removing bean bag chairs from her classroom, keeping the classroom door open and following the new instructional techniques outlined on the evaluation rubric.
District staff have been observing classrooms almost every day this week, she said. The teacher said she was nervous to sit down while taking attendance or interrupt a lesson to tell a funny story during class.
“We all feel afraid to step out of line,” she said.
One teacher at a non-NES campus said she was observed by appraisers three times on Monday, creating a climate of fear and nerves even at a top-ranked campus. She loves having visitors in her classroom — “I’m a really good teacher and I’m proud of what I do” — but it feels different when “someone’s sitting there, ticking boxes,” especially on the first day of class.
“People are having trouble sleeping because they’re on edge,” she said. “It’s the constant anxiety that we’re going to be caught and that we’re going to be dinged. … I think you’re going to see a mass exodus of teachers at the end of this year, if this continues.”
One teacher at a different non-NES campus said he and other educators were chastised for spending the first day on introductions, logistics and relationship building with students rather than teaching content.
The teacher stayed three hours late that night to adjust his lesson plans for the second day, and his principal checked in first thing the next morning to make sure that he was prepared to teach a full-blown lesson, as expected by the appraiser in his classroom.
The new expectations and frequent classroom observations from district administrators this week has created a sense of frustration and anxiety on campus, according to the teacher, who said he was ready to quit even though he feels “called” to the profession.
“There’s no grace, there’s no empathy, there’s no treating people as people,” he said. “We are not encouraged to move forward — we’re pushed off the cliff and told to fly. And if you don’t fly, you fail.”
Many of the teachers at his top-rated campus have decades of experience, he said.
“I work at a really special school. … We should not be the target,” he said. “We were hoping that we’d be so far under the radar that we’d be left alone, but that’s not the case.”
Peter Greene has an excellent post today about the groups and individuals who want to eliminate teachers’ unions. Some hate unions, because they impinge on employers’ freedom to pay as little as they want. Some hate them because they fund Democratic candidates. Some don’t want workers to have any voice. Please open the link and read it all.
Greene writes:
If there’s anything true about teachers in unions, it’s that some folks wish they weren’t. And right now, yet another group is trying to sell the idea. But looking at some of the players in this anti-teacher-union space seems like a fine way to celebrate Labor day.
In some states, the tactic has been to simply strip unions of power so that A) they can’t really do anything and B) teachers leave them because they can’t really do anything.
But in other states, the tactic has to try to sell teachers directly on the idea of getting out. We’ve seen a variety of these outfits.
Leave your evil union!
Early entry into the field included Free To Teach, an operation of Americans for fair Treatment, a shell group for Pennsylvania’s right wing Commonwealth Foundation.
There’s the Freedom Foundation, which once bragged that it “has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation … we won’t be satisfied with anything short of total victory against the government union thugs.” Freedom Foundation was founded by the Bradley Foundation, the Koch Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
Or you could have My Pay My Say, the “don’t you want to quit the union” initiative of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a right wing pressure group based in Michigan and so, as you might expect funded with a bunch of DeVos money as well as Walton, Koch and dark money.
The Janus decision, which invented the right of teachers to be free riders in unions, collecting benefits but paying no dues, gave rise to plenty of these groups. They will argue teachers should drop union dues because then they would get more money (spoiler alert: none of these groups or their backers have ever advocated for higher teacher salaries).
There are also anti-union teachers who make arguments like “I could negotiate a better contract for myself if I weren’t tied to this union,” and they are just so cute. Nobody tell them about Santa, either. The anti-union outfits love to cheer these folks on, and they might even get to leave teaching for a cushy thinky tank gig.
But when these groups are not trying to coax teacher away from the union, their purposes are more clear.
The teachers unions (well, all unions, but the teachers have the biggest ones these days) give a whole bunch of money to Democratic politicians, so, the reasoning goes, defund the unions and defund the Democrats. Plus, as a bonus, depower the unions and then teachers don’t get all uppity about decent contracts and working conditions and just generally getting in the way of The People In Charge.
Some of this is just realpolitik gamesmanship, but there are anti-union folks who feel pretty mouth-frothy about this. The narrative for some is that public schools are a scam, a way to funnel money to teachers who in turn funnel it to Democrats and liberals. (In return these “teachers” get a pretend job in which they don’t actually try to educate anyone.) You’ll hear language about how union leaders are “corrupt,” and that Venn diagram shows some overlap with diagram of people who think elections are rigged because those elections allow people to vote who shouldn’t have a say. If you’re of the opinion that society is supposed to have tiers, then teachers unions represent an attempt to exercise power by people who shouldn’t have any, people who refuse to know their place.
Another wing of these anti-union efforts are the anti-union unions, groups that are set up to provide a alternative organization for people who don’t want to go it alone. We’ve had teacher collectives a decade or so ago that were created for the purpose of supporting Common Core and high stakes testing (“See? Teachers think this stuff is great!”) like Educators 4 Excellence et al.
But nowadays the big names are about giving teachers an alternative to AFT and NEA.
Please open the link and read about the organizations created to supplant unions, like the Christian Educators Association and the American Association of Educators.
With only one exception, I have never before posted two articles by the same person on one day. The exception occurred several years back, when I discovered the brilliant teacher-blogger Peter Greene and devoted an entire day to his insightful, humorous writings. Heather Cox Richardson stands alone as a historian who posts a timely commentary almost every day. Consider subscribing to her blog. You will be glad you did.
Heather Cox Richardson wrote this post to recognize the historical roots that link contrasting visions of slavery and labor. We live in a society now that has no slavery yet has crippled organized labor and tolerates horrible working conditions. Some states, notably Arkansas and Iowa, have weakened child labor laws, so young teens are permitted to toil in dangerous jobs. Parental rights, you know. Texas legislators recently declined to pass a law requiring employers to provide 15 minutes for water breaks for employees working outdoors in a historic heat wave.
On March 4, 1858, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond rose to his feet to explain to the Senate how society worked. “In all social systems,” he said, “there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life.” That class, he said, needed little intellect and little skill, but it should be strong, docile, and loyal.
“Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization and refinement,” Hammond said. His workers were the “mud-sill” on which society rested, the same way that a stately house rested on wooden sills driven into the mud.
He told his northern colleagues that the South had perfected this system by enslavement based on race, while northerners pretended that they had abolished slavery. “Aye, the name, but not the thing,” he said. “[Y]our whole hireling class of manual laborers and ‘operatives,’ as you call them, are essentially slaves.”
While southern leaders had made sure to keep their enslaved people from political power, Hammond said, he warned that northerners had made the terrible mistake of giving their “slaves” the vote. As the majority, they could, if they only realized it, control society. Then “where would you be?” he asked. “Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided, not…with arms…but by the quiet process of the ballot-box.”
He warned that it was only a matter of time before workers took over northern cities and began slaughtering men of property.
Hammond’s vision was of a world divided between the haves and the have-nots, where men of means commandeered the production of workers and justified that theft with the argument that such a concentration of wealth would allow superior men to move society forward. It was a vision that spoke for the South’s wealthy planter class—enslavers who held more than 50 of their Black neighbors in bondage and made up about 1% of the population—but such a vision didn’t even speak for the majority of white southerners, most of whom were much poorer than such a vision suggested.
And it certainly didn’t speak for northerners, to whom Hammond’s vision of a society divided between dim drudges and the rich and powerful was both troubling and deeply insulting.
On September 30, 1859, at the Wisconsin State Agricultural Fair, rising politician Abraham Lincoln answered Hammond’s vision of a society dominated by a few wealthy men. While the South Carolina enslaver argued that labor depended on capital to spur men to work, either by hiring them or enslaving them, Lincoln said there was an entirely different way to see the world.
Representing an economy in which most people worked directly on the land or water to pull wheat into wagons and fish into barrels, Lincoln believed that “[l]abor is prior to, and independent of, capital; that, in fact, capital is the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed—that labor can exist without capital, but that capital could never have existed without labor. Hence they hold that labor is the superior—greatly the superior of capital.”
A man who had, himself, worked his way up from poverty to prominence (while Hammond had married into money), Lincoln went on: “[T]he opponents of the ‘mud-sill’ theory insist that there is not…any such things as the free hired laborer being fixed to that condition for life.”
And then Lincoln articulated what would become the ideology of the fledgling Republican Party:
“The prudent, penniless beginner in the world, labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own account for another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. This, say its advocates, is free labor—the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”
In such a worldview, everyone shared a harmony of interest. What was good for the individual worker was, ultimately, good for everyone. There was no conflict between labor and capital; capital was simply “pre-exerted labor.” Except for a few unproductive financiers and those who wasted their wealth on luxuries, everyone was part of the same harmonious system.
The protection of property was crucial to this system, but so was opposition to great accumulations of wealth. Levelers who wanted to confiscate property would upset this harmony, as Hammond warned, but so would rich men who sought to monopolize land, money, or the means of production. If a few people took over most of a country’s money or resources, rising laborers would be forced to work for them forever or, at best, would have to pay exorbitant prices for the land or equipment they needed to become independent.
A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Lincoln’s day, but on this Labor Day weekend, it strikes me that the worldviews of men like Hammond and Lincoln are still fundamental to our society: Should our government protect people of property as they exploit the majority so they can accumulate wealth and move society forward as they wish? Or should we protect the right of ordinary Americans to build their own lives, making sure that no one can monopolize the country’s money and resources, with the expectation that their efforts will build society from the ground up?
Almost one hundred and forty-one years ago, on September 5, 1882, workers in New York City celebrated the first Labor Day holiday with a parade. The parade almost didn’t happen: there was no band, and no one wanted to start marching without music. Once the Jewelers Union of Newark Two showed up with musicians, the rest of the marchers, eventually numbering between 10,000 and 20,000 men and women, fell in behind them to parade through lower Manhattan. At noon, when they reached the end of the route, the march broke up and the participants listened to speeches, drank beer, and had picnics. Other workers joined them.
Their goal was to emphasize the importance of workers in the industrializing economy and to warn politicians that they could not be ignored. Less than 20 years before, northern men had fought a war to defend a society based on free labor and had, they thought, put in place a government that would support the ability of all hardworking men to rise to prosperity.
By 1882, though, factories and the fortunes they created had swung the government toward men of capital, and workingmen worried they would lose their rights if they didn’t work together. A decade before, the Republican Party, which had formed to protect free labor, had thrown its weight behind Wall Street. By the 1880s, even the staunchly Republican Chicago Tribune complained about the links between business and government: “Behind every one of half of the portly and well-dressed members of the Senate can be seen the outlines of some corporation interested in getting or preventing legislation,” it wrote. The Senate, Harper’s Weekly noted, was “a club of rich men.”
The workers marching in New York City carried banners saying: “Labor Built This Republic and Labor Shall Rule it,” “Labor Creates All Wealth,” “No Land Monopoly,” “No Money Monopoly,” “Labor Pays All Taxes,” “The Laborer Must Receive and Enjoy the Full Fruit of His Labor,” ‘Eight Hours for a Legal Day’s Work,” and “The True Remedy is Organization and the Ballot.”
The New York Times denied that workers were any special class in the United States, saying that “[e]very one who works with his brain, who applies accumulated capital to industry, who directs or facilitates the operations of industry and the exchange of its products, is just as truly a laboring man as he who toils with his hands…and each contributes to the creation of wealth and the payment of taxes and is entitled to a share in the fruits of labor in proportion to the value of his service in the production of net results.”
In other words, the growing inequality in the country was a function of the greater value of bosses than their workers, and the government could not possibly adjust that equation. The New York Daily Tribune scolded the workers for holding a political—even a “demagogical” —event. “It is one thing to organize a large force of…workingmen…when they are led to believe that the demonstration is purely non-partisan; but quite another thing to lead them into a political organization….”
Two years later, workers helped to elect Democrat Grover Cleveland to the White House. A number of Republicans crossed over to support the reformer, afraid that, as he said, “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”
In 1888, Cleveland won the popular vote by about 100,000 votes, but his Republican opponent, Benjamin Harrison, won in the Electoral College. Harrison promised that his would be “A BUSINESS MAN’S ADMINISTRATION” and said that “before the close of the present Administration business men will be thoroughly well content with it….”
Businessmen mostly were, but the rest of the country wasn’t. In November 1892 a Democratic landslide put Cleveland back in office, along with the first Democratic Congress since before the Civil War. As soon as the results of the election became apparent, the Republicans declared that the economy would collapse. Harrison’s administration had been “beyond question the best business administration the country has ever seen,” one businessmen’s club insisted, so losing it could only be a calamity. “The Republicans will be passive spectators,” the Chicago Tribunenoted. “It will not be their funeral.” People would be thrown out of work, but “[p]erhaps the working classes of the country need such a lesson….”
As investors rushed to take their money out of the U.S. stock market, the economy collapsed a few days before Cleveland took office in early March 1893. Trying to stabilize the economy by enacting the proposals capitalists wanted, Cleveland and the Democratic Congress had to abandon many of the pro-worker policies they had promised, and the Supreme Court struck down the rest (including the income tax).
They could, however, support Labor Day and its indication of workers’ political power. On June 28, 1894, Cleveland signed Congress’s bill making Labor Day a legal holiday.
In Chicago the chair of the House Labor Committee, Lawrence McGann (D-IL), told the crowd gathered for the first official observance: “Let us each Labor day, hold a congress and formulate propositions for the amelioration of the people. Send them to your Representatives with your earnest, intelligent indorsement [sic], and the laws will be changed.”
Under unrelenting pressure from major corporations, unions have experienced a precipitous decline in their numbers in recent decades. Only about 11.3% of workers belong to a union, and most work for government. Among the nation’s largest unions are the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. Rightwing provocateurs have gone to the Supreme Court repeatedly to strip these unions of their power to defend the rights of their members.
Just in the last few days, unions won an important victory before the National Labor Relations Board. This victory was possible because Biden was elected in 2020, not Trump. Trump would have appointed people to squash unions like pesky bugs.
Harold Meyerson wrote about the ramifications of the latest NLRB decision:
Hot Labor Summer just became a scorcher.
Last Friday, the National Labor Relations Board released its most important ruling in many decades. In a party-line decision in Cemex Construction Materials Pacific, LLC, the Board ruled that when a majority of a company’s employees file union affiliation cards, the employer can either voluntarily recognize their union or, if not, ask the Board to run a union recognition election. If, in the run-up to or during that election, the employer commits an unfair labor practice, such as illegally firing pro-union workers (which has become routine in nearly every such election over the past 40 years, as the penalties have been negligible), the Board will order the employer to recognize the union and enter forthwith into bargaining.
The Cemex decision was preceded by another, one day earlier, in which the Board, also along party lines, set out rules for representation elections which required them to be held promptly after the Board had been asked to conduct them, curtailing employers’ ability to delay them, often indefinitely.
Taken together, this one-two punch effectively makes union organizing possible again, after decades in which unpunished employer illegality was the most decisive factor in reducing the nation’s rate of private-sector unionization from roughly 35 percent to the bare 6 percent at which it stands today.
In the Board’s press release outlining its 121-page decision in Cemex, it explained:
“… the revised framework represents an effort to better effectuate employees’ right to bargain through their chosen representative, while acknowledging that employers have the option to invoke the statutory provision allowing them to pursue a Board election. When employers pursue this option, the new standard will promote a fair election environment by more effectively disincentivizing employers from committing unfair labor practices.”
“This is a sea change, a home run for workers,” said Brian Petruska, an attorney for the Laborers Union who authored a 2017 law review article on how to effectively restore to workers their right to collective bargaining enshrined in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, which was all but nullified by the act’s weakening over the past half-century. Taken together, Petruska added, last week’s decisions recreate “a system with no tolerance for employers’ coercion of their employees” when their employees seek their legal right to collective bargaining.
Petruska’s 2017 article explained how an attorney’s misstatement in a 1969 case before the Supreme Court (NLRB v. Gissel Packing Co.) led to the abandonment of a previous Board ruling in the case of Joy Silk Mills, which had required employers to recognize their workers’ union and enter into bargaining if they’d refused to recognize the union after a majority of workers had voted for affiliation. The article didn’t draw wide notice; at least, until President Biden’s appointee as the NLRB’s general counsel, Jennifer Abruzzo, sent out her initial memo to the 500 NLRB attorneys across the country whom she supervised. In the memo, Abruzzo laid out the kind of cases those attorneys could pursue, and suggested that they consider cases based on the long-forgotten Joy Silk standard, which she viewed as erroneously discarded, with demonstrably catastrophic consequences for workers’ right to unionize and bargain.
How catastrophic? In the profile I wrote of Abruzzo in the April 2022 print issue of the Prospect, I cited numbers from Petruska’s article that showed “in the five years before Joy Silk was struck down, charges of employer intimidation totaled about 1,000 cases a year. Once the softball remedies of Gissel became the standard, charges exploded to a peak of 6,493 in 1981, after which they fell along with unionization efforts generally.” As the new post–Joy Silk tolerance for employer coercion became the norm, interest in organizing withered.
By the time Abruzzo became general counsel, “even labor lawyers had forgotten about Joy Silk,” which had then been a dead letter for 52 years, UC Berkeley law professor Catherine Fisk told me for my Abruzzo profile. Abruzzo, however, had had a long career as an NLRB attorney and had also served as a special counsel for the Communications Workers of America (CWA), a consistently militant union. Even within the community of pro-labor attorneys, she was known for her exceptional dedication to worker rights and her knowledge of how the laws that once afforded them their rights could be revived and renewed. The brief she presented to the Board in the Cemex case promoted a ruling that differs in some respects from the standards promulgated in Joy Silk, but its effect is essentially comparable.
The Cemex decision secures Abruzzo’s place as the most important public official to secure American workers’ rights since New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who authored the NLRA in 1935 (the same year he authored the Social Security Act).
Since the days of Lyndon Johnson, every time that the Democrats have controlled the White House and both houses of Congress, they’ve tried to put some teeth back into the steadily more toothless NLRA. But they’ve never managed to muster the 60 votes needed to get those measures through the Senate. The Cemex ruling actually goes beyond much of what was proposed in those never-enacted bills.
Still, there’s one crucial element to restoring workers’ rights that has yet to be accomplished: Companies can still indefinitely refuse to agree on a contract. Some of the failed labor law reform bills included provisions mandating that an arbitrator impose a contract if no agreement has been reached after a specified period of time (say, 90 or 180 days). Absent such a provision, workers’ rights can still be thwarted, which we’re seeing happen in real time with the inability to complete a first contract at hundreds of Starbucks shops and Amazon’s warehouse in Staten Island.
Nonetheless, Cemex should open the door to more organizing campaigns than American labor has seen for decades, at least among those unions (SEIU, CWA, the Teamsters, National Nurses United, the private-sector wings of AFSCME, and the American Federation of Teachers, to name just some) that still have robust organizing departments. It could help the Steelworkers, the newly led United Auto Workers, and the Machinists to organize the federal incentive–driven factories springing up in the historically anti-union South.
One reason that these two landmark decisions came down last week was that the term of one of the three Biden appointees to the Board, Gwynne Wilcox, is about to run out. Board terms normally last for five years, but Wilcox was appointed for just two years to fill out the balance of the term of a member who had retired early. Once she’s off the Board, there will be just three members, since one of the Board’s Republican seats has now been vacant for nearly a year. (By mutual consent, the Board is composed of three members from the president’s party and two from the opposition.) And when it has only three members, the Board is forbidden from making decisions that change its rules.
The normal procedure for filling seats on the Board (like with many multimember commissions) is that an appointee from one party comes before the Senate for confirmation in tandem with an appointee from the other party. However, hoping to thwart the now Biden-dominated Board from making decisions like those of last week, the Republicans, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have declined to put forth a nominee to fill the vacant Republican seat, plainly hoping that Democrats would adhere to the custom of not bringing up an unaccompanied Biden appointee for a vote. More precisely, they’ve wagered that the anti-worker duo of Sens. Manchin and Sinema would deny that nominee the 51st vote required for confirmation, using the fig leaf of the absence of a Republican nominee to justify their opposition.
The White House renominated Wilcox for a five-year term some time ago, and Bernie Sanders’s Senate Labor Committee has sent her nomination to the floor, with all the committee Democrats plus Alaska Republican Lisa Murkowski voting to do so. For whatever reason, however, both the Biden administration and Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have put the floor vote on hold, perhaps in the vain hope that Senate Republicans will put forth their nominee, which Republicans have made obvious that they have no intention of doing. As a result, the Board is about to go down to three members, and become effectively inert.
Hence, the timing of last week’s one-two punch on the eve of Wilcox’s departure, even if just temporary. It will require the vote of any one of Manchin, Sinema, or Murkowski to restore the Board to its rulemaking authority.
Despite that drama, last week’s punch was historic. “Congress passed the NLRA to give workers the right to deal with their work issues immediately, not to have them delayed and denied by employers who feel free to violate the law,” says Jules Bernstein, the doyen of the D.C. union-side bar. “A ruling that restores that right—and that’s what the Cemex ruling does—is terrific, and long overdue.”
Florida used to have four Black members of Congress. Ron DeSantis took personal charge of redrawing the state’s districts and changed the lines to make them more Republican, eliminating three Black seats. A judge just tossed DeSantis’s map as unconstitutional. The decision will be appealed.
DeSantis had wagered the state’s Fair Districts Amendment against the U.S. Constitution, arguing mandatory protections for Black voters violated the Equal Protection Clause. Second Judicial Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh flatly rejected that gamble, rendering a decision that could reverberate from the halls of Tallahassee to the streets of Jacksonville, paving the way for a new, Democratic district where Jacksonville’s Black voters have more influence.
Marsh refused to bite on DeSantis’ claim that the state’s Fair Districts Amendment violated the U.S. Constitution, saying DeSantis’ secretary of state and the Legislature didn’t even have standing to make such an argument…
DeSantis conceded that his map did not meet the state’s “non-diminishment” standard, which mandates that new districts must not undermine the voting power of racial minorities. The protection mirrors language in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the state argued Marsh should strike down that protection as violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. At a hearing last month, Marsh questioned why Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody wasn’t defending the state’s Constitution in the case.
He also expressed sharp skepticism that he could make such an expansive ruling. Marsh said that if he ruled for the state, “this court will be the first in the country to say that even the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional.” If the Florida Supreme Court sides with DeSantis, it could have national implications. It means the court, a majority of whom DeSantis appointed, would go further than the U.S. Supreme Court has in advancing a legal argument, pushed by many conservatives, that it’s inherently wrong to take race into account, even if it’s done to preserve the political voice of Black voters.
DeSantis’ veto of the initial map and the GOP-controlled Legislature’s decision to adopt his new one sparked an historic protest in the Florida House where Reps. Angie Nixon (D-Jacksonville) and Travaris McCurdy (D-Orlando) led a sit-in to disrupt the proceedings. After that protest, DeSantis vetoed all of Nixon’s appropriations in the current budget, and legislative leadership put her office in the basement of the Florida Capitol. [Bold added.]
Diane Ravitch's blog 