{"id":1294,"date":"2017-12-20T23:17:16","date_gmt":"2017-12-21T06:17:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1294"},"modified":"2017-12-20T23:18:13","modified_gmt":"2017-12-21T06:18:13","slug":"teacher-work-and-teacher-unions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/charlestkerchner.com\/?p=1294","title":{"rendered":"Teacher Work and Teacher Unions"},"content":{"rendered":"

This site, named Mindworkers, <\/em>is witness to my central belief that teachers think for a living, and ought to be organized as professional workers with expansive rights and responsibilities rather than industrial workers.\u00a0 This theme is most completely developed in United Mind Workers: Unions and Teaching in the Knowledge Society<\/em><\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

Although it was published by Jossey-Bass in 1997, most of the ideas in the book are still current and the need to rethink how teachers are organized is all the more pressing given the institutional challenges to public education, which I describe in two books about institutional change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For teachers to be organized as mindworkers, their unions need to engage in continuous organizing.\u00a0 Gaining a recognition agreement and a contract is never enough.\u00a0 The relationship of teachers to their union can never be taken for granted, even if forms of union security persist.\u00a0 In addition, teachers as union members need to vastly increase the scope of their engagement with their workplaces, some through traditional contracts, and some through other avenues, such as budget discussions and assessment policy for students and teachers.\u00a0 United Mind Workers <\/em>brings forward three avenues of continuous organizing:<\/p>\n

First, teachers need to organize around quality, both teacher quality and educational quality.\u00a0 Doing so changes the authority\/responsibility dimensions of teaching as an occupation.\u00a0 A slim companion book to United Mind Workers <\/em>called, Taking Charge of Quality: Teachers, Unions and Education Reform<\/em><\/a> (Jossey-Bass, 1998) is intended as a practical guide.<\/p>\n

Second, teachers need to organize around schools as work places.\u00a0 Historically, school districts have been the focus of union organizing because public school districts have always been the employer, but the advent of charter schools, contracting out, and other forms of hybrid employment makes the central role of school districts less certain and under constant challenge.<\/p>\n

Charters, vouchers, and other forms of privatization are the most obvious challenge, but even if they did not exist there is an inherent challenge to the large hierarchy form of organization that school districts represent.\u00a0 Reformers have come to realize that the economies of scale that applied to big industrial organizations, on which school districts are modeled, make huge school districts less efficient and effective than they should be.\u00a0 Given the desire of parents and teachers to have more variety in school offerings and flexibility in organization, it becomes logical to move the management authority to the school level.\u00a0 Doing so, of course, has huge implications for labor relations.<\/p>\n

Third, United Mind Workers <\/em>argues that teaching should be organized around careers rather than jobs.\u00a0 Almost all income and social security that teachers now possess requires that they stay in a classroom within the same school district.\u00a0 Occupational mobility patterns suggest that teachers need a way to be represented as they move from one job to another and from one place to another.\u00a0 Pensions and medical benefits should be independent of a specific employer, and they should accrue to teachers whether they are work in a public school classroom, a charter management organization, or whether they are writing educational software.\u00a0 They are still teachers, and representing the full arc of a teacher\u2019s career should be union work.<\/p>\n

The first chapter of United Mind Workers, click <\/em>HERE<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

More Recent Writing<\/h2>\n

Recent pieces, written in \u2018On California,\u2019 the EdWeek.org column that I conducted, carried forward the themes developed in United Mind Workers<\/em>.\u00a0 (For a complete listing go to \u2018On California\u2019<\/a> and then choose \u201cTeacher Unions\u201d from the category menu.)<\/p>\n