of loss and anger and memory on a rainy winter day

I am watching the rain fall on a chill winter's day, and I am thinking.

Yesterday morning I had the joyous opportunity to play with letters and words with kindergarten kids in three different schools in Albemarle County, Virginia.

They showed me how to make a J.
I challenged them with a special "J-word" - Jelloricious.

This was special. Special because, though I am not in Virginia this week, I could join through the contemporary technologies which make the world of these children something unique, and special because, unless you routinely see "school,' "education," and our planet through the eyes of young children, you are in no position to discuss education and educational poverty. The gift these five-year-olds give to me is a gift which makes my work possible.

But yesterday morning I also became aware of the horrible evil playing out in a Connecticut suburb, a place close to the homes of friends, a place close to the homes of dearly loved cousins - not that that matters, really - but a place any of us might find ourselves... as parents or teachers.

A mentally ill young white suburban male - does this sound familiar - who did not get the help he probably needed in school, whose family was spread out too far, whose father spent three hours a day commuting to a job I know was longer than eight hours in length, whose - well, we'll never know most of it but we know it all too well, walked into an elementary school, an elementary school secured with all the silly security systems politicians and media-trained parents demanded after Columbine, and murdered 20 babies, five and six-year-olds, and six of those "lazy, unionized" adults our leaders say work in our schools.

Why? There's no answer. I could tell you about profiling the paranoia which grows in certain isolated minds, about how that morphs into conspiracy, merges with America's peculiar machismo love of heavy weapons, and turns lethal, but that's the stuff of stupid Today Show interviews now. It doesn't matter.

There may be answers in American gun laws. America's leaders are far more interested in arresting 19-year-olds with beer cans than people with assault weaponry - "killing machines" is the only term we can use. (A police academy instructor once told us, "There may be legitimate reasons to own a single shot rifle, but the only purpose of handguns and multi-shot weapons is the murder of humans.") There is a great deal of the mantra of the American right wing in this, "the "right-to-life" ends at birth." We like to pretend, in America, that we are heroes instead of an increasingly frightened population, terrified of our own shadows, so we cling to our guns as a faux masculinity, unwilling to take any necessary steps which might make our children safer.

There may be answers in our health care system as well. As middle class health insurance has been gutted by greedy corporations and moronic state legislators, mental health supports have dropped. As school budgets have been cut so has counseling support. I remember being amazed, when I first went to work in a high school, that we had one social worker for 1800 adolescents. Many football coaches, one social worker. It is only because of Obamacare that this shooter could have even had health insurance as a 20-year-old not in college, and, you know, Obamacare is a socialist plot.

The Twilight Zone - The Bewitching Pool - not every suburban idyll is idyllic

There may be answers in our desires for status. I do not know if I would have spent a great deal of money to live in a place which left me with three hours of commuting each day, and only minutes with my children. I earned very little during the time I had to devote to parenting, but I was there. And I'm glad my son and I watched TV together and ate dinner together almost every night. I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilt here, but I think we might need to examine our priorities, to stop laughing at the Greeks or Irish because they value time home with their families more than money and 3,000 square foot homes on half acre lots. I think we need to decide whether our time is better spent in our adult pursuits or in parenting. I think we need to wonder about living in neighborhoods instead of subdivisions.

President Obama

And there may need to be a rethink about how we act when our kids are in trouble. Do we protect our reputation or do we get help?

But, as I watch today's rain, I guess the biggest question is our priorities as a society. I understand that I, as someone who hates guns - I carried one every day for my job, I'd never do that again - its no big deal for me to give up guns if it makes kids safer, but if guns are your love, your hobby, your passion, would you make that choice? I know every tax dollar I pay "hurts" - but I pay, as Michigan's late great Governor George Romney said, "because its my responsibility." I'd rather pay ten more bucks and have a psychologist in every school. I'd rather pay another ten bucks more and make sure the teenager on the next block over has the access to great mental health services. I'd rather pay more at a store which offers benefits to my retail-employed neighbors than shop at Walmart. I'd rather drive a car built by an American unionized worker because I know they have the salary and benefits they need to take care of their families and have dignity in their lives. And I'd rather do what I do with schools than make a lot of money.

I'm hardly a saint. That's not the point. The point is that from every direction, the White House, the Republicans in Congress, America's governors, the Koch Brothers, even Andrew Cuomo (who, like Mitt Romney, was raised to know better), and especially corporate America, children in our society have been pushed to the back of our priorities list. We worry about taxes, and rights, and unions and socialism, but maybe the first question should be, "what about our children?"

We are hurting right now. Horribly hurting. It is beyond our imaginations. But it will go on and on like this until we choose to make different decisions.

There is nothing a school policy or any school security can do about this. This is a society which needs to ask itself some very deep questions.

Because when I next interact with five-year-olds, I do not want to look at them with fear in my heart. I do not want to do that.

- Ira Socol

EduSolidarity: Teachers, Unions, Democracy

Let me begin simply, if you are actually "middle class" in America - if you have a decent salary, a decent place to live, vacation time, sick time, a break for lunch, you were either born to America's aristocracy or you owe all that to unions.

You may or may not belong to a union. Your union might have a strange name like, American Medical Association, or American Bar Association. You might be a freeloader, like U.S. employees of Toyota or Kia or Nissan who receive union type benefits because the company wants to keep the unions at bay. You might even consider yourself an "independent businessman" who pays dues to, and/or takes advantage of, the combined lobbying power and purchasing power of something like a "Chamber of Commerce." Whatever. You owe your advantages to unions. Unions created livable wages, vacation time, sick time, lunch breaks, minimum wages, working hour rules... yes, unions created the American middle class.

Why does this matter? Because the ability of citizens to organize themselves is essential to democracy. It is essential to human rights. The United States even said so when it ratified the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. And that right is under attack in America today.

No, no state legislators are trying to break up Chambers of Commerce. None are insisting that Ace Hardware stores stop collective purchasing and advertising. And surely, I have yet to see the Republican governor push a bill to stop capitalists from joining together in an organization designed solely to limit their liabilities for debts and wrongdoing to customers and investors (we call this "a corporation"). But for people like you and me? The goal is no labor rights.

I have written a lot on the value of teachers, the need for tenure, the importance of unions, and, yes, even how I would change teacher training. But, there's a story I will add for EduSolidarity Tuesday 2011.

EduSolidarity

My mother was first hired as a teacher when I was seven-years-old. She had struggled to go back to school, with four kids in the house, to get one of the few good jobs open to women at the time. Among jobs in America, then as now, teaching was in the top level of required education/training. Plenty of nurses back then had two-year degrees. Most jobs had no educational requirements. Teaching required a four-year degree including apprenticeship time, and continuing education once on the job.

In exchange for that she was paid a little better than $3.00 an hour for time in school, around $4,500 a year, about 2/3 of the median full-time head-of-household worker pay at the time, just below average, and about 45% of what lawyers averaged. She was on duty outside the school before and after the school day, and most days had "lunch duty" and "playground duty" as well. There were no planning hours or professional development days. She would be up late into the night creating plans for the next day, or, three times a year, writing out report cards in her magnificent "third grade teacher" handwriting. I haven't thought about the combination of her fountain pen and the carbon paper she used for that task until just now... could you press hard enough with a fountain pen?

Of course, she found jobs every summer to get the family through those unpaid months. A lot like all the non-union teachers today (from Christian schools and for-profit charters in my area) who I see working in stores in the evening and on weekends to make ends meet. Yet every August she'd spend a fortune on materials for her classroom which the school did not supply.

Americans fight for union rights, Walter Reuther attacked at the
Battle of the Overpass.

Early in her career she joined the movement to organize her school district with the American Federation of Teachers. This was incredibly controversial. Why would teachers need a union? Especially an AFL-CIO union?

You already know the union did not bring miracles. If you are a teacher today your job only looks a little different, but in the hyper-inflation of the 1960s and 1970s, the union kept teachers near that "average" wage. It created real tenure and job rights. It allowed lunch time and planning time. It created professional development days. It broke up the fourteen hour days which came when parent conferences occurred. It gave teachers a voice in curriculum development, in district policy. In her district it led directly to highly successful educational innovations - open classroom elementary schools, aggressive desegregation policies, inventive high school solutions. More than anything, the union protected the cutting edge teachers - the ones who challenged the system on behalf of their students. I witnessed numerous situations in my secondary school experience where the best teachers in a building would have been fired as "troublemakers" were it not for the New Rochelle Federation of Teachers.

The power of unions. Polish workers begin the destruction of the Soviet Empire, August 1980.

In other words, the union lifted my mother from an abused female worker into a middle class professional. It gave her decent working conditions, time to use the toilet, time to eat, a survivable salary, the ability to retire (eventually), and a voice.

Those politicians today, from Scott Walker to Rick Snyder, to Andrew Cuomo, to Chris Christie, to Rush Limbaugh, and John Boehner? Their goal is to rollback all of that progress. To a time when teachers were fired because they riled their superintendents. To when cops had to take "tips" to earn enough to live. To when jobs in government were given out in return for campaign contributions.

Today on EduSolidarity Tuesday we must stand as one. We must understand that globally, for the past 150 years, unions have been the guarantor of human rights, of labor rights, of professional rights - from Homestead, Pennsylvania to Gdansk, Poland. From Memphis, Tennessee to today in Wisconsin, Idaho, Ohio, and New Jersey.

Do not let a bunch of villains straight out of Dickens destroy America. Join and fight.

- Ira Socol

The Big Lies (Part Three)

Core of Knowledge." These are, of course, not policies but advertising slogans designed to convince you that those in power have your best intentions in mind. I'm here, again, to remind you, that maybe they don't. Part One  Part Two 

Unions make no sense for "Professional" teachers

In 1962 the doctors in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan went on strike for over three weeks in an attempt to block the introduction of Universal Health Insurance. Though the strike failed when the government held firm and brought in doctors from Britain to staff clinics and hospitals, the threat of this type of labor action was used repeatedly by the American Medical Association over the next 30+ years to derail attempts to bring a contemporary single-payer health system to the United States.

U.S. Republicans always point out that associations of lawyers make massive campaign contributions in order to preserve rights to legal actions on behalf of medical patients.

This is just to point out that teachers are not the only organized group of professionals in the United States. This is because, in a democracy, people have a right to association, and a right to organized action. According to the United Nations' Declaration of Human Rights (a treaty ratified by the United States of America), this includes "the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests."

Andrew Jackson's Spoils System, undone by
Chester A. Arthur, reinstated by New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie?

Unions, whether for private employees or public employees, and the collective bargaining which is the heart of union rights, exist to balance out power inequalities. In private business unions balance a few things - first, the legal "fiction" of the corporation - which allows "capitalist" investors to hide their actions from personal responsibility. Because corporations are created by governments to protect owners, unions exist - in most industrialized nations with similar government protections - in order to protect workers. In private business unions also balance the power of trade associations. Whether Chambers of Commerce or industry groups or purchasing co-ops such as American hardware and drug stores belong to, businesses are allowed to organize, so workers must as well.

In public service unions provide another kind of balance. To begin, public service unions provide protection for the civil service system which, however flawed it might seem, is far superior to the political graft system of public employment which dominated life in America before the Chester A. Arthur administration. In the "spoils system" all government jobs were dependent on who got elected, and most importantly, who had contributed to who got elected. Elections would turn over all public office holders, with political loyalty and out-and-out bribery replacing judgments of competence.

But more importantly public service unions provide the only possible balance for workers with both very limited employer choice and very limited strike opportunities. And they protect employees from the kind of political wrath being unleashed by bullies like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who would legislate working conditions and compensation for political revenge.

But let's talk teachers' unions specifically. And as we do so, let me state that I don't begin from a neutral point-of-view. I am a member of the American Federation of Teachers, my mother was an organizer of the AFT local in her school district. I am old enough to remember her being paid minimum wage with few benefits in the "minimally unionized" early days of her career.

That is not to admit that I think, at times, certain teachers' unions, especially some components the National Education Association, have been agents of professional conservatism. And yet I understand that unions - and how they operate - are always a response to an environment. If a teachers' union acts as if its members are industrial line workers this is really no surprise, since teachers are often treated by school boards - and today by the United States Government - as industrial line workers.

Still, most often, I see teachers' unions doing the hard work of professionalism. It is only because of unionization that teachers' salaries have become middle class salaries. Still far below lawyers and doctors and others with equivalent educational expectations, but middle class. Beginning at about $25,000 in most states and topping out a bit under $50,000. It is only because of unionization that teachers are working on their jobs at night instead of working second jobs (as I see most non-unionized private and charter teachers doing). It is only because of unionization that teachers have planning time and professional development days. It is only because of unionization - and the tenure it has brought - that great teachers are willing to take chances to move their students and the profession forward.

No union, no tenure

In my experience, just as a student, I watched unions fight for educational re-design, for open classrooms and alternative schools. I watched them fight for the jobs of great teachers who otherwise might have been fired for "rocking the organizational boat." I watched them insist on ongoing professional development. And I watched them keep great teachers in schools by paying them decently. At the same time I've watched school boards and governments change educational policy by whim and by election. I've seen school administrative and political vendettas. I've seen curriculum and practice politicized.

So, in my mind, unions are essential, and the evidence seems to show that unions make education more successful: "Only 5 states do not have collective bargaining for educators and have deemed it illegal. Those states and their ranking on ACT/SAT scores are as follows: South Carolina – 50th, North Carolina – 49th, Georgia – 48th, Texas – 47th, Virginia – 44th. If you are wondering, Wisconsin, with its collective bargaining for teachers, is ranked 2nd in the country." Yes, that's only one measure, but it backs up much other data, from the US and elsewhere, that by the measures prized by "educational reformers," unionized teaching staffs produce better results.

Teachers should be paid less than Wall Street bankers or brokers (or Governors)

"[aveeno89] is not difficult to become a teacher, so why should they be paid so much? teaching is such a cake job.... it may be stressful but simply look at their hours and their education background"

That is a typical anonymous blog response to the question of teacher pay. It follows the line promoted by Bill Gates, by Wendy Kopp, and by Arne Duncan that teaching is both easy and relatively unimportant.

And that is the societal position. In the United States, where the power structure constantly argues that high pay is justified - not just justified but essential - to bring good workers to important jobs, teacher salaries remain among the lowest of all professionals.

Yes, we can laugh at Republican (US) - Tory/Lib Dem (UK) - Liberal (Australia) hypocrisy on this. CEOs won't work unless paid a billion. Brokers won't work unless paid millions. Teachers need "merit pay" to motivate them, but, teachers, police officers, firefighters don't really need to be paid well, but the fact is that these capitalist societies demonstrate "value" of a profession through pay. And by this measure, these societies see teachers, and education, as unimportant.

Now I think differently. I think teachers save more lives every year than doctors. I think teachers protect more people's rights every day than most lawyers will in their careers. I don't think that there is anything society does which is more important than moving our next generation forward. So, to me, teachers deserve to be among the best paid professionals in a society.

They also need to be among the best trained, with ongoing in-service training as a part of every schedule, just as it is for doctors. 

Chris Christie, $400,000 a year is "middle class"

What's well paid? Well, Republicans and right-wing Democrats claim that $250,000 per year in salary is "just middle class" and that group cannot pay more taxes. So, if that's true, $250,000 seems a fair annual salary for a veteran teacher (in New Jersey, according to Governor Chris Christie, this figure is $400,000).

This is really not a question of national resources. It is a question of distribution of national resources. Every time taxes on the wealthy are high, or are raised, and resources are shifted to public service and public works, the American economy improves as the health of the middle class improves and as opportunity improves because of better public services. So when Eisenhower was U.S. President and the top marginal tax rate was 91%, those funds built schools and universities, paid teachers and professors, and opened up professional careers to many. Research funds created computers and jet engines and nuclear power, cured polio, and made measles rare. When Bill Clinton raised taxes and invested in police protection for America's cities, it created a safer society in which entrepreneurship could flourish in urban areas. These two "high tax" eras represent the real growth moments for the post World War II United States economy.

So raising taxes on the rich in order to pay teachers salaries Republicans consider "middle class" makes sense all around.

corollary - Superintendents are overpaid

Chris Christie, home above,
thinks you are overpaid

From Gov. Christie in New Jersey to Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York, and sure to come to a state near you soon, comes the idea that not just teachers are overpaid, but that school superintendents are particularly overpaid.

“We must wake up to the new economic reality that government must be more efficient and cut the cost of the bureaucracy,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement on Monday. “Reducing back office overhead, administration, consultants and encouraging consolidations are the best targets to find savings.”

Remember, these are the same governors who won't raise taxes because "talent" might leave their states if take home pay is in any way reduced.

Now superintendents are easy targets. They are the highest paid people in each school district (except maybe in Texas, where no pay limit has been suggested for high school football coaches), and superintendents tend to make enemies as they negotiate the competing interests pulling at their organizations.

But I always wonder why businesses must pay big bucks to get the best employees (see above) but government requires no incentives to attract talent? And I wonder why a CEO making 262 times the average worker's pay is 'appropriately compensated' but asuperintendent making, say, $250,000 in an organization with thousands of employees (averaging, say, $40,000) is 'grossly overpaid'?

- Ira Socol

next: parents, poverty, system change