John Thompson: Time for our Unions to Lead Reform
Guest post by John Thompson.
Mark Simon's "High-Stakes Progressive Teacher Unionism" is a must-read. Simon's contributions to I Used To Think... And Now I Think.... are the reflections of a pioneer in the "new unionism" of the 1990s. Even back then, he realized that if the union did not advocate for "reforms that preserve the integrity of good teaching and real learning," that the alternative would be "Taylorist teacher-proofing." Now he knows that data-driven "reformers" attacked us with more self-righteousness than could have been expected. "Today," writes Simon, "the antiteacher and antiunion reform approach has hit with such a vengeance that it is clear, with hindsight, that progressive union leaders, always in the minority, moved too slowly."
I think Simon is too self-critical. We have seen an amazing increase in teachers coming over to his position that, "the teacher union is the organized voice of teachers," and it must be "focused as much on curriculum, instruction, assessment, and evaluation issues as on pay and hours."
I hope that non-teachers will read Simon's piece in conjunction with another contribution to