Strikes as therapy
A Labor Day essay on teacher strikes and their misplaced emphasis on self-esteem. These strikes focus too much on teachers' needs to be given proper recognition, reflecting the way psychological categories have taken over public discourse.
Perhaps you too have noticed how often the issues in recent strikes sound more like matters to be taken up in a therapist’s office than at the collective bargaining table?
Take the Kent teachers' strike for instance. When Kent School Superintendent Edward Vargas held a press conference to announce that the district was taking the matter to court, teachers, according to The Seattle Times (9/1/09) “turned out en masse to crash the press conference . . . teachers shouted out that the district wasn’t respecting them.”
It does seem often that Rodney Dangerfield (“I can’t get no respect”) is the lead consultant for striking workers or others engaged in personnel conflicts these days. Often the issue seems to boil down to concern about being respected, given proper recognition, or affirmation.
In the Kent teachers' strike the three stated issues seem curiously less than momentous. The number one issue, according to union’s website, is reducing staff meetings from four hours a month to two — which hardly seems like something to go to the mat over. Teachers also wanted a 10 percent raise over two years, instead of the offered 4.5 percent. Given an economy where a fair number of people would be happy to have any job, this seems to be asking a lot. And teachers wanted smaller class sizes, but as Seattle Times' columnist Danny Westneat points out, this is really up to the state legislature and its school funding, not the Kent District.
In a letter to the editor the writer took note of a Kent teacher who was quoted as saying, “I can’t believe instead of working with us, [administrators] take us to court. We’re the teachers. We’re the lifeblood of the schools.” The letter writer responded to this assertion of self-importance with the observation that, “The last time I checked, students are the lifeblood of a school.”
“We’re the teachers. We’re the lifeblood of the school” does sound a bit like saying, “It’s all about me,” or “It’s all about us.”
Clearly, teachers are critically important to education. And surely most teachers are focused most of all on teaching and students. And, at some level it is important that everyone involved feel valued. But often it appears the accomplishment of teachers unions has been to make schools a place that serve and protect teachers more than serving students as the school’s mission.
One might wonder if teachers and perhaps many in our culture are a bit too preoccupied with “getting their due” or being “respected.” Themes of being respected, acknowledged, recognized and the like suggest what Philip Rieff a generation ago termed “The triumph of the therapeutic.” It is some sense of basic worth or importance that seems often to be at stake these days — indicating how psychological categories and language have taken over public discourse.
There are at least two problems with this triumph of the therapeutic. First, self-respect is not something you get from someone else, whether it be a school district or administrator or winning a strike. Self-respect tends to be an inside job. If it isn’t happening there, it’s only a matter of time until the needy person or group again feels somehow slighted or diminished, thus requiring further placation.
Even more important is the way that the shift in focus to being respected, recognized, or appreciated moves the conversation away from what ought to be the real focus of teachers and administrators, namely the educational mission of the schools. Teachers or their unions will be most persuasive when they can frame their concerns and arguments around the mission or core work of schools and their commitment to improving on or fulfilling that mission.
Presumably, one of the lessons that teachers want to teach their students over time is, “It’s not all about you,” but that it is "about the work." It is about developing knowledge, skills, and capacity. Self-esteem derives from actually doing those things. When teachers or anyone else lose sight of the mission and work, and focus instead of their ego needs, they are likely teaching the wrong lesson to their students.
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Comments:
Posted Mon, Sep 7, 9:42 a.m. inappropriate
Nice. Pulling a quote from the paper, reading a column and a Web site, and psycho-analyzing the motives of striking workers from your own bubble -- without any apparent knowledge of the previous labor history in the district, which might have played as great a role in the strike as what's on the table.
Here's a radical though: Try actually speaking to some of the teachers and see if your theory holds up. Maybe you're right. But you don't really know, do you? More than likely you'll find that "respect" in the parlance of labor translates directly to pay, benefits and working conditions, not your squishy, Stuart Smalley definition. Perhaps the Kent teachers don't spend enough time in the therapist's office because they can't afford it.
Posted Mon, Sep 7, 6:41 p.m. inappropriate
There are sociologically-appropriate times to do things and then there are times NOT to do things. This is not the time to spring a strike about meeting time or class size, frankly, just about anything else. I'm a longtime labor supporter so that isn't said lightly. What most people know now is that when teachers strike, they don't lose salary, because those days have to be made up at the end of the school year. That's not the case with other strikers. The knowledge of that very important difference doesn't increase anyone's respect for teachers. That's a shame because teachers are not respected or paid enough in America. But this won't do it.
Posted Mon, Sep 7, 10:59 p.m. inappropriate
This is very well written. This is just not the time to be bickering about details when so many people are working extra hard just to keep their jobs. Teachers need to look at the bigger picture and go the extra mile during this difficult time. It's time for educators to get creative, help each other with larger classes, and let the kids help the other kids to learn.
Posted Tue, Sep 8, 7:25 a.m. inappropriate
Why do the Kent teachers think they should get any pay raise given the current economic climate? How many of the parents of their students have lost jobs and staring the possibility of losing their homes in the face?
These teachers show incredible insensitivity to the problems their community are facing.
As a proud member of a different union I feel these teachers are giving the union movement a black eye.
Posted Tue, Sep 8, 9:07 a.m. inappropriate
Teacher negotiations primer 101
Do you feel dissonance when you read about educational personnel and their contract negotiations? Do you trust what your neighbor, the teacher, says about them but have trouble harmonizing that with what the district is telling you? Well, welcome to the club. Have a seat, and let me explain the relationships that cause you to feel that way.
The educational arena is one of the few public sector areas where full bargaining can take place. Money and its subset, benefits, and working conditions are on the table. Now, it is different than private sector bargaining in the respect that both sides know exactly how much money is available. It is also different because what management doesn’t give away in wages it does not get to keep in their pocket, making the traditional source of bargaining conflict moot.
So how does this work?
Schools are majorly financed by the state. Money is driven to districts by the “state salary schedule,” which gives the districts money based on the years of service and educational achievements of its teaching staff. The “state salary schedule” is a misnomer, because it is not a salary schedule at all, just a way to drive money to the districts. Some local levy money is involved, but that is theoretically for “extras,” or top spin, not for everyday operations. A pittance comes from the Feds, although they would like to have you think it is a boatload. In truth it is about enough to fund the salary of the folks filling out all the federal forms.
So, we have this pot of money, and we have salaries and benefits to pay. We also have “working conditions,” including hours and days of work which when kept to a minimum by the educator’s negotiating team, allows for “extra” money for “extra” work, which is not extra at all in any other professional environment.
The administrators and their contracted negotiators typically bargain with very well union-trained teachers and the professional union staff. Teachers want short number of workdays, short number of work hours, and then to get paid “extra” for “extra” days and hours. Most professional folks work 220 days per year after vacation and holidays, teachers work 180, or only 82% of the year most of us work. While they like to tell you they need the extra time for professional development, you will note that the rest of us do it on our own time.
They tell us, and we majorly accept, “small classes are better,” but then they want overload pay for extra students, and fight over having those overloads classes and the resulting higher pay. Go figure.
Stay with me now, I am not just bashing the teachers.
The administrators want high teacher pay too because if the top teacher makes X, the Vice Principal will point out they only make a few shekels more than their top teacher, so they get a raise. Same with the principal, who only makes a few dinero more than the V.P., and so on up the administrative chain. And remember, management doesn’t get to keep any money for themselves that they don’t spend on salaries, so there is no incentive to keep salaries at a low level, but instead to increase them as high as possible, having a positive effect on their negotiations later.
So everyone, save for the school board who must balance the budget and not spend over the budget, wants the teachers to have maximum money.
Why, then, the unrest?
Great question. Educational employees, and even school board members, don’t understand the budget. Ever hear “We are keeping the cuts away from the classroom?” Don’t you believe it. 85-87% of the budget is salaries, so there is no effective way to do that. Also, if there are non-classroom cuts to be made, why weren’t they made already?
What is the solution? We need to professionalize the teaching profession! We need to demand they step up to professional standards found in other professional work. Work full years for the mid-point of the money they get now. Compress the compensation schedule so that the top teacher doesn’t make over twice what the young ones do. After all, the output is the same, advancing 25 kids to the next grade level. Is the senior teacher putting out twice as good a product? I think not. We lose so many bright young folks in this profession, it is disturbing. After a couple of years at $35K, when their peers are making $50 K, they leave.
We need to have honesty at the bargaining table and count all additional pay as a percentage increase. We need management to get a backbone and be honest about their interests. We need to start telling the truth, instead of justifying our behaviors.
Will it happen? I am not staying up waiting.
The Geezer is the son of two life-long teachers, served for 13 years on a local school board, former VP and chair of the legislative committee of Washington State School Director’s Association. He also serves as the Director, Public Policy, for the Washington Civil Rights Council
Posted Tue, Sep 15, 10:50 a.m. inappropriate
'They tell us, and we majorly accept, “small classes are better,”...' No respected research is out there to support the notion that smaller class size leads to better teaching and learning. None. Zilch. Good teachers can of course use smaller classes in creative ways, but mainly teachers want small classes because they make classroom management and control of students easier.
On the other hand, research demonstrates that Total Student Load DOES count. Teachers who have around 80 or fewer students per year get better results from students. This is the case even if it's 3 classes of almost 30 students, or 4 classes of 20+. Go ahead, Google or Bing "Total Student Load."
How can schools finance TSLs of around 80 max? Put principals in full charge of their individual schools' budgets so they can cut superfluous non-teaching staff, etc. Rigorously train principals first, so they get good at making these kinds of executive decisions.