Letters
Editors: In his "In Defense of Public Education" (Dissent, Spring 1993), Herbert Kohl takes some uninformed and politically thoughtless swipes at teacher unionism. Teacher unions stand in the...
...q 158 • DISSENT Letters • We welcome succinct letters from our readers...
...He, like the majority of Cubans outside of the island, wants only two things for the people of Cuba—freedom and hope...
...I hope I don't have to explain to you why this is more than a matter of tokenism...
...After the UFT won a strike for official recognition in the 1960s, he complains, the union leadership abandoned "teaching issues as union issues" for a single-minded focus on salary increases and benefits...
...rather, there is an acute focus on the continuing problems of public education in New York City, on how much still needs to be done...
...MARYA E. VAN'T HUL Somerville, Mass...
...Similarly, he has misinterpreted the First Amendment, which is designed precisely to protect the vigorous and critical exchange of ideas, to mean that criticizing the speech of one's fellows is proscribed...
...As a profile of New York teacher unionism three decades ago, Kohl's commentary is open to challenge...
...But I refuse to defend any service organization that exists solely to serve the workers and ignores the fate of the people served...
...As institutions of self-selected students and teachers committed to a particular vision of education, such schools might provide friendly learning communities for the children of middleclass leftists, but are of limited relevance to the political project of transforming public education...
...as an argument for the failures of contemporary teacher unionism, it is a poor excuse for serious and thoughtful analysis...
...and that the kind of people who read and write for a democratic socialist publication might be troubled over the spread among one impoverished community of stereotypes that blind it to the needs and commonalities it shares with another...
...mentoring for novice teachers and peer intervention for tenured teachers failing in the classroom have also been negotiated...
...Editors: I'm surely not the only one of your readers to be disappointed and perplexed by the paucity of women's voices in your pages...
...Women's perspectives on the issues most important to the left often differ from men's in significant and interesting ways...
...It may be that educational change and reform have been "a major and growing concern" of the UFT and the AFT over the last decade...
...The sole evidence Kohl offers for these negative generalizations are a few reminiscences of thirty-year-old experiences with the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) in New York City public schools...
...can't you manage to find a few more of us to join the discussion...
...OLIVIA SINCLAIR Dallas, Penna...
...No, I don't think it's the job of leftists, supposed or otherwise, to instruct people in what they should or shouldn't say, let alone think...
...But unless they are integrated into larger processes of systematic change, alternative public schools and educational institutions are quickly marginalized, and become utopian communities of educational reform...
...During these years I have been an activist in the UFT and in progressive educational projects...
...I agree with him that no significant change will take place without the full participation of teachers' unions, and am a unionist myself...
...From here Siegel's report spirals rapidly downward to a snipe that the faculty supervisor "urged us to make clear to the Russians—who had given up their old lives partly because of all the good things they heard about the First Amendment—that you can't say whatever you want in America...
...Roberta S. Gold New York, N.Y...
...Educational issues—and more important, educational change and reform—have been a major and growing concern of the UFT and its national union, the American Federation of Teachers, during this period...
...They "are too insular and do not relate to the communities they are supposed to serve or speak in ordinary language to parents and concerned citizens about quality public schooling...
...My correspondence address is: Olivia Sinclair, College Misericordia, PO Box 203, Dallas, PA, 18612...
...He highlights as central to educational change alternative public schools, small networks of progressive educators, and desktop progressive education journals...
...It has developed a process for school faculties to alter through democratic votes regulations and contractual provisions that stood in the way of educational experiments and has supported school-based management and shared decision-making governance projects in schools...
...but that his colleagues' attempts to express the countervailing arguments of a leftist America are inauthentic, judgmental, and wrong...
...Letters will not be returned to senders unless they are accompanied by stamped, self-addressed envelopes...
...This is only the most abstract and facile of many questions that could be raised: of course prejudice can exist without animosity...
...Of course there are progressive individuals within the UFT and AFT, and they have struggled, both within their schools and the union, to develop more equitable and effective education...
...Polls I've seen suggest that women are if anything more heavily represented on the political left than men are...
...So if you want to write about something that you like, or dislike, in or about Dissent, please do it quickly...
...Moreover, if supposed leftists feel compelled to remain mute about bigotry when it happens to emanate from impoverished communities, they ultimately show very little respect for poor people's ability to hear and think in new ways...
...WINTER • 1994 • 159...
...Ultimately he employs a double standard, however, for he evidently considers it acceptable to print a critique of his ESL colleagues...
...Far more compelling concerns about the bigotry at issue would be that stereotypes, hate-filled or not, are inherently dehumanizing...
...in shining the glare of harsh truth on the Moscow frame-up trials so dramatically presented in a historic confrontation between Max Shachtman and the Stalinist faculty leader Morris Schappes...
...But since the ascendancy of Shanker and his conservative wing of the union, they have been in a distinct and embattled minority...
...it was no longer concerned with "negotiating over conditions of teaching, supplies, control over curriculum and self-accountability...
...These institutions do have a positive role to play in the reform process, if only as incubating laboratories in which new ideas and practices can be tried and improved...
...ISRAEL KUGLER New York, N.Y...
...If any reader could supply me with any information on these subjects I would be grateful...
...Irving played a key role not only in the writing of flyers, but also in his editing of our mimeoed magazine, "The CCNY Redbook...
...However, that depends upon what one means by change and reform...
...Considerably less sympathy is on hand for the English teachers at the meeting, whom Siegel portrays as bonding together in self-righteous and unfair condemnation of their students...
...Teachers can and must join with communities to preserve and improve public education...
...We reserve the right to edit letters down to fit our space and to choose which shall be printed...
...What hope then remains for the struggle to forge a coalition that will critique, confront, and change an oppressive society...
...Editors: Of all the tributes to Irving Howe in Dissent (Fall 1993) only that of Daniel Bell touches the City College experience, but then only the period of 1938-39...
...The UFT has developed a wide array of teacher education and collaboration programs dedicated to educational reform and has been among the strongest advocates of meaningful educational experiments in New York City schools...
...The UFT has initiated contractual language that has given teachers professional autonomy in lesson planning, professional conciliation in conflicts with supervisors over pedagogical issues, and control over a pool of funds for supplies...
...This was our real education at City College...
...Siegel begins by recounting an ESL faculty meeting convened to discuss the anti-black sentiments many instructors had found among their students, recent Russian-Jewish emigres...
...Dissent could only be enriched by including more of them...
...in the assassination of Andres Nin and the persecution of the POUM and Anarchists in the Spanish Civil War...
...If, in addition, support for national testing and a national curriculum is considered a way to effect greater learning 156 • DISSENT Letters then perhaps one should concede that these unions are committed to change...
...Editors: Yesterday, my father risked his life in the fight against the Batista dictatorship...
...Here he has taken an admirable sympathy for the confusions and tribulations his students face to mean that he must refrain from doing his part to acculturate them to American progressivism...
...Recently, through organizations such as the National Coalition of Educational Activists and the Network of Progressive Educators I have met union activists who are themselves critical of many union practices...
...I am specializing in the history of Abbie Hoffman, the Yippie movement, and the 1968 Democratic convention (including the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial...
...What with Roberta Gold taking me to task for not telling people how to think, scolding me for criticizing what the other ESL teachers said, and accusing me of violating the WINTER • 1994 • 157 Letters First Amendment, I'm a little anxious about replying to her letter, but I'll take a chance...
...The crux of my piece was the "anti-Haitian" student Gold refers to, who in the end voted in a classroom exercise to allow Haitian refugees into America...
...But because we have a long "lead time" for each issue, you have to send us your letter within three weeks after getting an issue of Dissent in order to get it into the next issue...
...We are unable to acknowledge letters...
...We exposed the duplicity and brutal totalitarianism of the Stalinist movement by revealing Stalin's sale of oil to Mussolini in the Italo-Ethiopian War...
...That ESL teachers, all of them white and most of them products of the upper class, should undertake to do so with newly arrived immigrants on public assistance who can barely speak English provoked me to write about it as an extreme instance of politically correct narcissism...
...Any "defense of public education" worthy of its name must take this political reality into account...
...As for how progressives should relate to disenfranchised people, I am inclined to think that "Workers of the World, Be Polite" is inadequate as a motto to inspire solidarity...
...The absence of both is the result of Castro's tyranny, not the international embargo...
...However, if serving students in more effective, humane ways, and remaking the curriculum to reflect the fact that we live in a diverse and culturally complex society with serious racial, gender, and authority problems, then the leadership of the unions can be faulted, even more than my article implied, for being blind or complicit with bad practice...
...Why on earth not...
...The portrait Kohl paints is an unrecognizable caricature...
...Yes, racism is ugly and destructive...
...As organizer of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL) captured by the Trotskyists and a supporter of the faction led by Max Shachtman, I was Irving's comrade in building a revolutionary alternative to the powerful Young Communist League...
...For the last decade I have taught in an inner-city high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn...
...Kohl's treatment of teacher unionism is symptomatic of a major blindspot in his strategy for "the defense of public education...
...Indeed, though I've since left the ESL profession as a way to support my depredations against democratic socialism, I've learned that the supervisor Gold admires as a representative of "leftist America" has thrown herself into trying to bust the teachers' union...
...GUILLERMO MARMOL Dallas, Tx...
...If public education is to be saved, teacher unions must take on a task of "reach(ing) out to a wider public with visions of public schools that work...
...Likewise, he implies that the myriad voices in American culture that have fed the immigrants' racist notions are part of some authentic, and hence sacrosanct, "immigrant experience...
...Whatever criticisms one might want to make of its stance on particular issues, and I would personally dissent on some points, there is no more consistent or more powerful voice for change in education...
...that the prejudices Siegel and his colleagues described (including beliefs that African Americans are animals and are possessed of undersized brains) were decidedly perjorative, that is, the kind of prejudices that often do lead to harmful impulses...
...He produces a fine sympathetic account, casting light on experiences in both the former Soviet Union and the United States that have cultivated the immigrants' negative and stereotyped perceptions of their African-American neighbors...
...Systemic educational change requires the leadership and full participation of teacher unions, the only established mass educational institution with both the means and the will to pursue that project...
...Having excluded such matters from consideration, however, Siegel proceeds to give his rendition of racial issues from the immigrants' point of view...
...It should read "Perhaps more disconcerting is a recent poll that revealed that 70 percent of the population is skeptical that either of the two major parties can solve 'political problems' in Germany...
...My point was that I didn't have to bully her into voting that way...
...I am compiling information for a thesis on post-1945 American History...
...If change means giving teachers' unions more power and if reform means giving people who have failed to deliver decent education to their students freedom from evaluation then Casey is right...
...Only three out of twenty-six contributors to your Summer issue, to judge by their names, are women—not an atypical ratio, and one you should be embarrassed by...
...Go figure...
...This distinguishes him from Gunter Grass in two important regards...
...LEO CASEY Brooklyn, N.Y...
...I know of no one active in the UFT who believes that it has done all it can and should do in the area of educational change...
...I think the major problem with Casey's position is that it implies that any public criticism of union practices is tantamount to rejecting unionism...
...Letters must be kept to about 500 words, typed, double-spaced, and carry the full address and name of the sender...
...But I am sure Gold would agree that, especially for teachers, it is important to show contempt for racial prejudice while at the same time making sure not to overwhelm benighted students with one's own moral superiority...
...It seemed to me that evening that the question—for African Americans no less than for immigrants—was whether prejudice could exist without hatred or the wish to do harm...
...There was an unspoken sentiment in the room that those Russians who couldn't learn to speak the language of tolerance should go back to where they came from...
...Teacher unions stand in the way of the necessary change in public education, he charges...
...Siegel appears to have trouble drawing meaningful conclusions even from good foundations...
...This was the milieu where Irving developed his talents and skills in brilliantly setting forth his ideas in politics and literature...
...And as my examples made clear, I hardly think there is anything "sacrosanct" about immigrants' racism...
...The AFT has become a forceful presence and participant in every major national debate over education reform, from national standards to teacher professionalization...
...today, he does not drool apologies for Fidel Castro...
...He tells with pride how he ignored this exhortation during the next week's class, when he refrained from engaging a student's anti-Haitian prejudice: "I certainly was not going to tell her what to think...
...that the immigrant students, to the extent that they realize their dream of rapidly ascending the American status-ladder, will move into positions of power from which they will be able to exercise harmful intentions...
...Sympathy and respect do not mandate silence...
...Teachers' unions, in my view, do this to an excessive degree these days and find themselves in opposition to their most logical allies...
...We regret that the first sentence of the last paragraph of Anson Rabinbach's article in the Fall issue ("Fire and Blood in Germany") carried an incorrect statistic...
...Editors: That Lee Siegel's Summer "Notebook" entry on racism among his ESL students reaches a conclusion so lacking in acuity is perhaps not surprising given the rocky analytical start to which it gets off...
Vol. 41 • January 1994 • No. 1
