The teaching profession has been under attack in the United States for at least the last two decades. The Bush administration’s No Child Left Behind, the Obama administration’s Race to the Top and Every Student Succeeds, and the Trump administration’s Betsy DeVos charter school advocacy, all blame public schools and teachers for failing to resolve social inequality in the United States. One result is a growing teacher shortage in some regions of the country and in subject areas where college graduates like math and science where college graduates find it easier to enter other higher paying, less stressful, professions.
The latest attack on teachers, really a continuing attack, is part of an effort to destroy public employee unions in the United States. It is the culmination of a two decade long campaign funded by rightwing billionaires. In a number of states, public employees, including teachers, who are covered by union contracts, have a choice of becoming union members or of paying an agency shop fee to the union for representing them in contract negotiations, at disciplinary hearings, and in the administration of benefits. The unions dismiss public employees who don’t want to pay their fair share as freeloaders. The first legal effort to outlaw these contractual arrangements and break public employee unions, the Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, ended in a stalemate when, with the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court was unable to arrive at a majority decision.
The billionaires tried against, bankrolling legal action by an Illinois child support worker named Mark Janus who claims that paying the agency shop fee violates his constitutional right to freedom of speech. With a new rightwing judge appointed to the Supreme Court by Donald Trump, it looks like the unions will lose. But the Janus case is not about free speech or freeloaders. It is about breaking public employee unions in the United States, undermining teacher professionalism, and weakening advocates for public education and support for the Democratic Party.
Surveys document how teacher morale has plummeted as they are scapegoated for problems in public education and American society. A recent teachers’ strike in West Virginia highlights the economic pressure felt my teachers and helps to explain why many college graduates choose not to become teachers or why many leave the profession. In 2016, the average salary for a teacher in West Virginia was only $45,622. The state ranked 48th in the country, trailed by only Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Dakota. West Virginia initially offered teachers a 1% annual raise, which would not have covered the increased cost of their health care plan.
Nationally, teacher salaries have stagnated or declined in real dollars, especially when compared to similarly educated professionals. Average weekly wages for public school teachers decreased by $30 per week between 1996 and 2015 when adjusted for inflation. Weekly wages for all college graduates rose during the same period from $1,292 to $1,416. The wage gap between public school teachers and similarly educated professionals is about 17%. Teachers not represented by a union had an even larger wage gap, an estimated 25%, a major reason rightwing politicians and charter school entrepreneurs are trying to break teacher unions.
Arizona is trying to address its teacher shortage by further depressing and deprofessionalizing teaching. Tens of thousands of non-teachers were hired in fall 2015 and 2016 on emergency or temporary credentials to fill uncovered classrooms.
Republican Governor Doug Ducey recently signed legislation that allows people to be hired as teachers with no formal training if they have five years of “relevant” experience in the subject they will teach. The legislation did not bother to define “relevant.” Ducey described the law as a positive change designed to entice “great teachers” into the classroom.
Writing in the Arizona Republic, Mike McClellan, a retired Arizona teacher, called the Ducey teacher hiring plan a “warm body law,” designed to recruit people, warm bodies, unhappy or unsuccessful in previous career.
What Ducey and Republicans in control of the state legislature ignore are the real reasons Arizona has trouble recruiting and holding on to teachers. It is near the bottom on a state list of spending per student in 2015-2016, 36% below the national average. Teacher salaries are in the bottom 20% of states. Thousands of teachers fled the state in recent years because of low pay, insufficient classroom resources, and testing requirements and teaching guidelines that allow no flexibility and little time for actual instructional.
Schools of Education have also borne the frontal assault on teaching. After all, if teachers are the problem in the United States, then the people who train teachers must be doubly at fault.
In New York State teacher education programs and the teaching profession are under attack by pro-charter advocates aligned with Governor Andrew Cuomo, “Charter Queen” Eva Moskowitz, and Cuomo’s “Backdoor Man,” Joseph Belluck, a Cuomo fund-raiser and appointee to the State University of New York Board of Trustees. The SUNY Trustees led by Belluck are in a legal battle with the state’s Board of Regents and Department of Education over who gets to establish teacher certification criteria. The Education Department and Regents filed a complaint against the SUNY Board of Trustees after it approved rules to allow SUNY-authorized charter schools and networks to certify their own teachers.
In a podcast for the Capital Pressroom, Belluck, chair of the SUNY Charter School Committee, claimed “New York is taking the lead in addressing the national teacher shortage while opening up the profession to qualified and trained individuals who want to give back, bring their enthusiasm and expertise into our classrooms, and provide a high-quality education to all New York's students.” He also denounced Board of Regents and the State Education Department as a “wholly owned subsidiary” of the teachers’ union. Belluck plans to have the SUNY Trustees issue probationary certification to teachers who work for three years at a SUNY charter school. This would provide a “backdoor” to earning teacher certification without completing a regular teacher education program.
At a time when the United States should be elevating its teaching profession, to compete internationally, and to support young people at a turbulent time in their lives, politicians and judges are undermining it. Republicans declare Scott Beigel and Aaron Feis who died in the Parkland, Florida school massacre heroes and want to arm teachers to defend schools, and at the same time plot to undermine teachers’ organizations, salaries, benefits, and education.
We know the consequence of alienated young people disconnected from teachers and with no hope for their own futures. The battle to defend teaching and teacher unions is also a battle to save lives.
Add Two More to the Long Island (NY) High School Hall of Shame
On March 14, students at Hicksville High School in New York’s Nassau County were given post-it notes to jot down their feelings about the mass killings at Stoneman Douglass High School in Parkland, Florida, and told that all the doors to their school were blocked by security guards and that a police officer stationed outside the building would escort anyone who attempted to leave back to the auditorium where they could expect consequences for their actions. In Suffolk County, at Copiague High School, security guards and teachers were assigned to block school doors to prevent students from leaving the building. Students who refused to return to class were taken to the gym to be processed for future disciplinary action and at least one of the most vocal students was suspended for two days. Governor Andrew Cuomo, who joined protesting students in New York City, is demanding that the State Education Department investigate schools that interfered with protests and are trying to punish students who participated.
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