Do Teachers Unions Need to Fight Harder for Their Members? Labor Day Reflections by Dr Patricia Robinson-Linder
On this Labor Day – and I am extremely grateful for it – I am collecting my thoughts with regard to my membership in labor unions. For the record, I have all my life held down two full-time careers, which necessitated my membership in eight labor unions. Most of them are part of the AFL-CIO. Two of my show business unions are affiliated with the Teamsters. Also, for the record, I belong to both of the teachers’ unions, the AFT and the NEA, as well as the professors’ union, the AAUP. I have been working in one of my careers since I was fifteen months old. At some point in my maturation, I decided that “the union can help you and the union can hurt you”. Clearly, I tried never to be naïve .Even so, in forty-five years of teaching, ten for the School District of Philadelphia, and more than sixty years in entertainment, there has been only one epic fail, and that was at the hands of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers. First, allow me to say that I have no particular quarrel with the downtown, Chestnut Street representatives who connected with my schools. They were good, except in one way, and I now believe that that one tragic flaw was orchestrated somewhere on high and handed down through many layers of the American Federation of Teachers. Looking back, I believe I received no substantial warning from the teachers’ unions as to how the corporatization of education would affect us so negatively. I am referring to the advent and arrival of Common Core, the almost ridiculous and certainly obscure “newer” methods of teacher evaluation, the fervor of administrators to accept the garroting of highly-qualified, wonderfully-educated career faculty, including what I would call “smear campaigns,” and the bizarre and often pointless paperwork assignments (e.g. “back-mapping”) that kept us away from our preparation and execution of admirable classroom presentations, and our work with students, much of it individualized, that encouraged all students to internalize their lessons. Although I had been reading With A Brooklyn Accent: Do Teachers Unions Need to Fight Harder for Their Members? Labor Day Reflections by Dr Patricia Robinson-Linder: