7/14 postscript on doublethink below.A novice United Federation of Teachers (UFT) caucus, Solidarity, is making a premature run for the 2016 union election. Much attention has been given to related personal controversies. This article takes the opportunity to look at the caucus, its origins and its campaign program or platform.
The caucus had in its genesis an
intense opposition to both the MORE Caucus and the Unity Caucus
statements of empathy for Eric Garner, who was killed in a chokehold
by New York Police Department officers. In the nearly one year since,
deadly police brutality, particularly against people of color, has
become the civil rights issue of the nation. People from across the
political spectrum were shocked and quite disappointed when a grand
jury issued no indictment against any of the officials involved in
killing Garner. This is important to recall when considering the
character and principles of the caucus.
In its founding it insisted on staying narrowly focusing on teacher issues and on
eschewing any attention to any other concerns beyond teachers'
issues. Yet, while it appropriates the images of Albert Shanker,
Unity Caucus leader of the UFT, it ignores that more largely, the
labor union movement has taken stances of solidarity with civil
rights activists and anti-war activists. It ignores that in 1957 the American Federation of Teachers dismissed locals that refused to desegregate. It ignores that the United
Auto Workers, the AFT and other unions marched in solidarity in the 1963 Civil
Rights March on Washington. It ignores that strikes have had their
greatest popularity when they had reached out to the community.
Witness the work that the Lawrence 1912 Bread and Roses textile
strikers did in reaching out to the community prior to their strike.
Witness the parallel work that the Chicago Teachers Union has done
when it took a year of community outreach in preparing for its 2012
strike. The CTU won widespread parent support after making sure to have a two-way dialog to understand the
concerns of parents and students, instead of simply pursuing an
employee-centered contract and strike campaign. Teacher-community partnership continues to this day in other examples such as St. Paul, Minnesota
Hypocritically, in the quest for allies
for its caucus once it had an election in mind, it opportunistically
parted from the caucus' founding principle to eschew larger issues or
the community and solicited support from a community anti-high-stakes
testing group, Change the Stakes.
Now, let us look at the Solidarity
Caucus' platform and what is missing
While it gives attention to the special
needs of Absent Teacher Reserve teachers (ATRs) where others are
silent, this is almost where its issue attention ends. It does not
look to the experiences of the regularly assigned teachers. One
wonders if the authors even consulted regular classroom teachers.
There is no specific discussion about the Danielson Framework, the
New York State-dictated Measures of Student Learning (MOSLs) or other
aspects of New York City's Advance teacher evaluation system. There
is no attention to structural dynamics such as mayoral control, which
determine the parameters of what the City Department of Education can
do. There is no attention to the Common Core State Standards, which are alienating teachers from their profession and are alienating students from learning. There is no attention to the parent-student solidarity movement which is so essential for teachers who are suffering under the over-testing regimen, the opt-out movement.
The caucus platform includes complaints
about the use of tests in value-added metrics to evaluate teachers.
However, the platform does not recognize how the testing emphasis is
directly linked to other larger issues, some of which are issues that
lead directly to the excessing of teachers into the ATR category: the
DOE's testing focus narrows the latitude of what teachers can do in
the classroom, the testing focus on core academic subjects crowds out
attention to non-core subjects such as foreign language, the arts or
physical education. Moreover, the platform studiously ignores larger
social-economic-political realities. It ignores that there is a
corporatist campaign by politicians in both major parties and an
economic privatization campaign by privatizers that capitalize by the
test-based stack ranking (rank ordering) of teachers and students and overall
privatization of curricula, tests and schools.
Additionally, the caucus program's
focus on the teacher involves an ignoring of the effect of the
high-stakes tests on students themselves. It ignores the emotional
stresses upon students and the attendant alienation from the
schooling process in this overall climate of high-stakes testing and
driving non-tested subjects out of the curriculum. Just as a decent
doctor would care about a patient personally and their living and
working conditions and how those impacted the person's health, one
would hope that teachers would care about their student charges and
the factors that impacted on their life. Just as one commenter on a
blog in reaction to the formation of the caucus by saying that he
cared about the living conditions of the students, I would echo those
points. Teachers are choking under the attacks by corporatist
politicians and by privatizatizers, and more rank and file teachers
are recognizing this. Yet, Solidarity has made a big conceptual error
to ignore this larger context in their program. In this sense, it is
mirroring the conceptual errors that conventional, mainstream unions
or caucuses, that Michael Mulgrew and the Unity Caucus makes.
Teachers ought to consider the larger
social conditions impacting on students. As emphasized previously on
this blog, income disparities are extreme in this nation and within
the nation, income inequality is more extreme in New York city and state. (See this posting re inequality in the city; and regarding poverty impact on learning see introductory comments at this blog posting.) The
stresses of race and class inequality impact on students' lives and negatively impact their educational performance. From
issues of police mistreatment of youths of color to profound personal
emotional stresses of poverty, these experiences inform the lived
reality of the children that we teach in our classrooms. If we wish
our students to have the best educational experience, we as teachers
should not only attend to our own craft, our own performance, but we
should also be concerned with recognizing the social inequality; we
should work to change that inequality. This is why I am a social
justice education unionist.
POSTSCRIPT:
There are many aspects about the organizing tactics of the key personalities in the caucus that are at once deceptive and deeply disturbing. Most recently, a social media page connected with the group has been created. A Solidarity page headline boasts an army of 10,000. It turns out that the organizers of the page snatched up 10,000 names and made them --unwittingly, mind you-- into "supporters." This is putschist organizing at its basest.
New exploitative techniques in political deception on Facebook:
Just when you thought it could not get worse. The leader of Solidarity has taken the names of a few dozen well-known opponents of Michael Mulgrew and posted their names in Facebook postings. The risk is that the uninitiated would think that these persons endorse the Solidarity cult.
Doublethink alert:
The Solidarity leader ignores that the New Action caucus supports Michael Mulgrew in every election in NAC's quid pro quo for executive board seats, and he cries foul when Mulgrew and Unity opponents challenge his desire to ally with NAC, questioning whether they are truly an opposition caucus. Yet, Solidarity claims to oppose Mulgrew and Unity. Thus, this is a classic example of doublethink: the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, especially used in political indoctrination. If you cannot be clear how Solidarity leaders think, can you be clear where their true convictions lie?