First & Foremost Winter 2018

With ‘Janus,’ Corporate Interests Launch Another Attack on Workers

On September 28, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would be taking up a case that could impose “right-to-work” on the entire public sector—the culmination of decades of attacks on working people by corporate CEOs, the wealthiest 1 percent, and the politicians that do their bidding to rig the economy in their favor.

The Janus v. AFSCME case challenges a public sector union’s ability to collect “fair share” or “agency” fees from employees—reduced amounts charged to workers who opt out of union membership, yet continue to receive the union representation and bargaining services that benefit all employees and which unions are required to provide.

A ruling by the court to strike down fair share fees would strip bargaining power from workers across the country, undermining the ability of people to come together in strong unions to win better wages, benefits, protections, and standards for working families. In effect, the entire public sector becomes “right-to-work” in one fell swoop.

This assault comes at a time when unions are more important than ever. Unions provide a path to the middle class for working people—especially at a time when big corporations and the wealthiest individuals in the nation are tipping the economic scales in their favor, knocking American families and the entire U.S. economy off-balance. When union membership is high, entire communities enjoy wages that represent a fair return on their work and greater social and economic mobility.

“For decades corporate CEOs and the wealthy have fought to enrich themselves at the expense of the rights and pocket books of working people, and that harms families in communities across the country,” said National Education Association President Lily Eskelsen García in response to the Court’s announcement. “As the nation’s largest union, this fight not only hurts our members, but also the families of the children we educate.”

Survey: Americans’ Confidence in Public Schools Grows

According to a recent PDK International survey, the percentage of Americans who give their community’s public schools an ‘A’ is at its highest in more than 40 years of PDK polling. Sixty-two percent of public school parents give public schools in their own communities an A or B grade (The percentage dips to 45 percent with nonparents). When parents grade their own child’s school, grades improve even more. But the PDK poll also found that only 24 percent give public schools nationally the same grade.

“The 25-point gap between ratings of schools in one’s own community and schools nationally is consistent with more than three decades of PDK poll results,” the report noted. “Awareness of a few poor schools can diminish the ratings of all schools together, driving down scores nationally while leaving local scores far better.”

New Gallup surveys also reveal a gap in local and national perceptions of public schools. Nearly half of U.S. adults (47 percent) said they are completely or somewhat satisfied with the quality of education for K–12 students—a jump of 4 percentage points from 2016. When parents were asked about their child’s education specifically, 79 percent said they are completely or somewhat satisfied. Only 21 percent said they are not.

Education Voices

Social Class as Predictor

“Extensive research has conclusively demonstrated that children’s social class is one of the most significant predictors—if not the single most significant predictor—of their educational success. Moreover, it is increasingly apparent that performance gaps by social class take root in the earliest years of children’s lives and fail to narrow in the years that follow. That is, children who start behind stay behind—they are rarely able to make up the lost ground.”

—“Education Inequalities at the School Starting Gate,” Economic Policy Institute, September 2017

After Strike, Vermont Educators Win More Planning Time

Throughout Burlington, Vt. elementary teachers are expected to cover “supervisory duties” like lunch and recess monitoring, morning door duty, dismissal duty, and breakfast duty—often more than one a day—despite a lack of planning time or time to meet with students. The duties could range

anywhere from 15 to nearly 40 minutes, making a teacher’s ability to plan and prepare for student contact impossible.

That’s a primary reason why Emily Ide, a member of the Burlington Education Association (BEA) and a negotiator on the bargaining team, joined her colleagues in a four-day strike in September when the team couldn’t reach an agreement with the school board on terms for a new contract.

After four days, the strike ended. Ide worked with her colleagues on the contract language and they were able to include for

elementary school teachers some scheduling changes that will go into effect in the 2018 – 2019 school year.

“And all we could get right now was the promise that no teacher will be assigned more than three non-teaching duties per week, and that at least one time block would be available for team work,” says BEA President Brock. “It’s a start.”

This year’s strike was only the second to occur in Burlington in 40 years. The system works, but according to Brock, the crucial aspect of collective bargaining is having two sides that respect one another.

“Our board, and some of the administration, clearly made it known that they did not respect the union, thought little of teachers, and really had no interest in understanding how schools need to function in today’s world. Going up against that sort of arrogance and obstructionism will be problematic regardless of the system used,” Brock says. “But to borrow from Winston Churchill, ‘Collective bargaining is messy but it is better than any other alternative.’”

Leaving the profession

Why Teachers Say They Leave the Profession

55%

Accountability pressures, administrative support, teaching pressures

43%

Family/personal reasons

31%

Retirement

31%

To pursue another job

18%

Financial reasons

Note: Percentages do not add up to 100 as teachers may select more than one reason for leaving.

Source: learning policy institute analysis of national center for education statistics teacher follow-up survey, 2012–2013.

Quality Professional Development Still Out of Reach for Most Educators

A majority of teachers believe that their school leadership regards professional learning as a top priority for all staff. Still, they feel excluded from decisions and don’t believe enough opportunities for effective professional development exist. These are some of the findings from a new nationwide survey conducted jointly by Corwin, Learning Forward, and NEA. The survey looked at attitudes 6,300 teachers have toward professional development opportunities in their schools and district.

20%

Teachers who indicate they have no input in their professional development. A little more than half report they have “some say” in these decisions.

75%

The percentage of teachers who identify their school and district leaders as the primary professional learning decision-makers.

4%

Teachers who say decisions about professional learning are made by teachers.

25%

One out of four teachers reports spending less than one hour each week on professional learning.

What Would Thomas Jefferson Say to Betsy DeVos?

Author Johann Neem wants us to “think more about the broader purpose of education,” he says. And to start the conversation, Neem, a history professor at Western Washington University, and an NEA Higher Ed member, has published a book, Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America, (Johns Hopkins University Press), which explores exactly what the progenitors of public education, like Thomas Jefferson, had in mind. They saw public education, or “common schools,” as a way to unify the new nation, and to bridge the gaps between rich and poor, immigrant and non-immigrant, Catholic and Protestant, Neem notes. They also saw it as a way to help people become citizens who participate fully in democracy.

These founders of public education saw that “common” or public schools would serve a common or public good. You still hear this in policy-oriented conversations about public higher education, but less often in discussions about K–12 education. Is it an idea that’s falling out of favor?

Johann Neem: I think we’ve lost that focus. From the very beginning, public schools always have had mixed purposes. In the 19th century, there was a strong civic component—it was about preparing citizens for democracy. Of course there were people left out, like African Americans, but the goal was to create common ground. And there also was this idea around developing human beings, and investing in our nation’s economy.

What’s happened is we’ve lost the first two purposes, and focused almost entirely on the third—we’ve reduced our notion of public schools to meeting the needs of a global economy. We talk about college and career readiness, and really about career readiness. We’re not talking about the liberating experiences that come with education, and the possibility of creating more fulfilled lives. One of the reasons I wrote the book was to remind people that we do care about these things.

Much of what’s in the book about the 19th century movement toward “common” schools that would help turn a diverse society into a single nation, and away from private schools for rich students only, still seems relevant today. How could the history of public education inform the current conversation around school vouchers, for example?

JN: Education reformers like Horace Mann believed every family should be a stakeholder in the public schools, and that the system would be most successful if rich parents enrolled their students alongside poor students. They understood that if too many parents opted out, education would remain a private good. For the most part, their vision has worked. Americans have invested in educating each others’ children. We recognize that the benefits of education are shared by society, not just the individual who receives that education, and that we’re all stakeholders in these institutions. Vouchers would fragment the notion that education is a public good, and have us thinking about education as it benefits our own families only.

Public higher education is an example of what could happen in K–12 education. Today many of our large state universities operate more like private institutions, or charter schools, with their own boards of trustees and a combination of private and public funds that compete with each other to attract students. We have seen how these public institutions, these state universities, have lost prestige and status, and are not really producing the kind of egalitarian education in the same way they did in the years after World War II.

I don’t want to say that any policy is inherently good or bad. I am saying that we should think about the ends we want to achieve, and how we get there. What kinds of schools achieve our goals? Do we want schools funded by corporations? Do we want schools owned by corporations? These are important questions. We, as citizens, should argue over these things.

One in Three Students Use Cell Phones to Cheat on Exams

McAfee, the online security software maker, conducted an online survey of 1,201 U.S. high school students in grades 9–12 last June and found mobile devices are too great a cheating temptation for many students to ignore. One in three kids in the U.S. use cellphones or other devices to cheat. In addition, six in 10 teens have seen or know another teen who used a connected device in class to cheat on an exam or quiz.