The Union as Scapegoat

...Bust Shanker...

...The Union as Scapegoat Teachers and Power By Robert J Braun Simon & Schuster 287 pp $7 95 Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble A History of American Labor" Robert J Braun, the youthful education editor ot the Newark Star-Ledger, does not like teacher unionism His book, written in no punches-barred prose, is designed to prove that the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is bad "All AFT organizers growl If [they] are heavy drinkers, it is probably because many a contract has been gamed by winning a heavy drinking bout with the paid negotiator for the local school board David Selden, the AFT national president, is fully aware of the power of creative inebriation If an AFT organizer swears heavily, it is probably because many a school board has been intimidated into hard bargaining through the use of carefully chosen, adequately punctured four-letter words " Thus outmatched, local boards of education don't have a chance, according to Braun "It is wartime in the public schools ' AFT officials "are not teachers, not theorists, not advocates of social betterment They are soldiers " And, as we all know, soldiers "tend to write the rules of war as they go along"cherry bombs in New Orleans, rumors of racial upheaval m New York "Trained to treat school boards as the enemy the union's warriors are, almost to a man, devoted to union hegemony over the public schools " For the moment, ot course, ' the contract settlement is just a temporary list ot concessions, ' but it will constitute the articles of occupation when, or it, the AFT as a strong national teachers union takes over the public school system ' Braun s AFT warrior is that familiar toe, the outside agitator, without whom there would be no dissatisfaction, no strikes, no teacher militancy Teachers, we are told, 'should really derive their true protection from the pure love they provide for their children and the respect they earn in a community, a neighborhood or a town" Shades of the petite schoolmarm wooed by Gary Cooper m The Virginian Poor girl, she's been dodging the town's Nosy Parkers, prohibitionists and prudes all these years and, having found refuge in the AFT, she's expected to work miracles or, as Braun puts it, make schools "the people's instruments tor the correction of social, economic, political, legal and environmental ends [sic] " In truth, she has trouble enough teaching the young to read, write, do arithmetic, and acquire a bit ot civic sense, without taking on "the revolution' Speaking in the name of "the community," loud voices rail at her for not teaching black pride, Puerto Rican heritage, or any one of a variety of ersatz nationalisms, while most parents scream about reading levels And now Braun tells her that poverty is not the curse of our economic system, but somehow the fault of education, if teachers would only do their job, the poor would no longer be with us Braun does make passing mention of the causes of teacher unrest an unwieldy educational bureaucracy, a frustrated concern for the children, a frustrated professionalism, poor working conditions and low pay, years of neglect followed by years of blame for all the failures of society He even takes an occasional swipe at muddle-headed and unresponsive boards of education, selfappointed community leaders, and bungling, sell serving politicians Yet, reading Teaclhers and Power, one is lett to wonder why on earth teachers join the AF f or why they have prodded that hitherto professional ' and reluctant National Education Association into collective bargaining For the author s obsessive conviction is that the AFT is the true enemy It comes as no surprise, there-lore, to discover that Braun's chiet ogre is Albert Shanker, president ot the AFT's largest local, New York City's United Federation of Teachers (UFT) In the book's highly distorted account of the 1968 New York teachers strike, Shanker is depicted as a power-hungry, if not power-mad, leader who destroyed school decentralization in the city Suffice it to say that anyone who claims the decentralized Ocean Hill-Brownsville experimental school board was truly representative, responsible and workable, who ignores Leslie Campbell and his racist cohorts, the manipulativeness of the Ford Foundation, and the political gamesmanship ot Mayor John V Lindsay, among other things, just has not done his homework There is ample evidence that many, it not most, New Yorkers-parents, teachers and principals alike-originally favored administrative decentralization They agreed that the city's Board of Education had become overcentralized, bureaucratic and cumbersome Few, however, wanted what came to be called community control" The experi mental districts, incidently, were exactly that experiments Ocean Hill-Brownsville was scarcely a community, I S 201 was riven by poverty agency factional strife, and the parents of Two Bridges wanted nothing more than a return to their own school district, then administered by the very able and progressive educator, Elliot Shapiro Without Ford Foundation money and propaganda-pushing decentralization as the panacea for all our educational ills-the experiments might well have died aborning As it happened, the State Legislature, the Mayor, the UFT, the central Board ot Education and sundry others worked out a compromise, possibly an unstable one over the long-run Proponents ot community control have already condemned decentralization, claiming a lack of true community control Meanwhile, most ot New York City's school boards appear to be in the hands ot educational conservatives, it not political ones Several have been nearly immobilized by black or Puerto Rican extremist intimidation and, insofar as any education is going on in these districts, it is due to the efforts of the teachers and principals Nonetheless, Braun stubbornly argues that the AFT exploits the tear ot local involvement to preserve and expand its own power "Much is accomplished through the studied control ot the minds ot teachers, through skillful manipulation ot the media and through collective bargaining ' No matter what the AFT advocates-even smaller classes, a cause Braun cannot readily condem-he manages to make it sound positively evil "The schools must be saved," he cries at the end of his book, "all in the name of the children " What would he have us do'' Smash the AFT...

...Well, no He deplores outright union busting "The strategy is as morally and educationally bankrupt as the jingoism of the AFT " This is not a book of answers, he says, but one of questions Fair enough but, besides failing to raise the right questions, Braun retreats rapidly into mush "Public schools which might become extensions of, and responsive to, parents and community life are delicate creatures that must be cared for with patience and devotion They will prevail only if everyone who has a stake in the future of our children has a genuine opportunity to act in then behalf through some instrument other than a chronically unresponsive school board, untainted by narrow, private interests related only to job security or economic welfare of the few or, worst of all, related to the political aggrandize ment of a national lobby and its leadership' The problem, as Daniel Bell once observed, is that there are a great many voices out there, each striving to be heard, and it is difficult to discern a true communality of interests among them While "some instrument" other than an elected board of education could be devised to run the schools, it surely would not be a democratic one In the final analysis, Braun condemns the AFT because it is a union and he disapproves of teachers' engaging in collective bargaining be cause it affects educational policies If the AFT were a protest organization allied with parents and pupils, promoting unspecified reforms, "even through mass actions like strikes,' he would probably praise it His critique amounts to saying, "I don't agree with the AFT and I wish it would do what I think it ought to do," without defining what that might be Unions, however, act on behalf of their members, as they ought to Like most workers, teachers seek control over their jobs and, being professionals, advance their ideas about education through their union Collective bargaining is a give-and take process that enables agreement to be reached on wages and working conditions Though it naturally affects educational policies such as class size, the disciplinary role of teachers, etc, the major shaper of fundamental educational policies remains the public, acting through its elected officials and, ultimately, through its control of the purse strings We cannot escape our responsibility for the state of the schools by blaming everything on the AFT, as Braun so vigorously tries to do...