How one teacher's union is struggling for relevance in a hostile political landscape
Milwaukee has stood at ground zero of education reform battles since at least 1990, when the city became one of the first of two to experiment with vouchers for private schools. Today, roughly 26,000 Milwaukee students now use vouchers to enroll at private schools, while about 78,000 remain in the public school system.
Scott Walker’s election as governor in 2010 put Milwaukee back in the spotlight for radical education reform. Over raucous protests at the state capitol, the new GOP governor, and current presidential candidate, enacted his signature “Act 10” legislation, which took on public employee unions, including those of teachers, stripping away most collective bargaining rights. Bitter battles followed, including efforts to recall Walker. He survived three elections in the past five years.
Now, the Milwaukee school system is again on the hot seat, as the state prepares to take control of failing city schools, following the model of the Recovery School District in New Orleans, which took over and chartered almost all public schools in the Crescent City.
What happens in Wisconsin could have national implications, as teacher unions across the country are now playing defense. State leaders on the left, like Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York, and the right, like Gov. Chris Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Walker, are pushing hard to strip the power of unions and privatize, or at least charter-ize, schools.
Kim Schroeder, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Association, the local NEA affiliate, says the union has struggled to respond to the adverse climate and has had to rethink how it relates to teachers, policy makers and the general public. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Deseret News: How should parents and taxpayers think of the role of teacher unions in the public education?
Schroeder: Teacher unions are fighting to make sure that all students, regardless of their income, race, gender or social economic status, get the opportunities and support to learn and succeed. That’s our role. We represent the people in the classroom who are there every single day.
DN: So this raises the question of the critiques recently made by Gov. Cuomo in New York and Gov. Chris Christie in New Jersey, both of whom have in very similar terms attacked teachers’ unions and argued that they do not represent kids, but rather the they only represent the job security and income of the teachers.
Schroeder: Obviously, we vehemently disagree with those comments, especially from Christie, but also from Cuomo. They have attacked in a very ugly and threatening way the expertise and professionalism of hundreds of thousands of professional educators. Teachers’ unions are made of the people who work with the students. The teachers are the best equipped to stand up for the students. They see what happens in the classroom. They are the best ones to make the school and classroom decisions that ensure success.
DN: The membership of the National Education Association, which you are affiliated with, has dropped over 230,000 members in the past four years. What’s causing this decline?
Schroeder: There are fewer public school jobs with the increase in private charters, takeovers of major city school districts. Places like Wisconsin have also lost collective bargaining, which has presented at challenge to us here.
DN: Is Wisconsin a unique situation, or have others seen similar assaults on unions? Is this an oddity or a canary in the coal mine?
Schroeder: Wisconsin is unfortunately not an oddity. Wisconsin is unusual because it happened all at one time, with cuts to public education funding and the attack on collective bargaining. But we are also seeing it in Indiana and Michigan and Missouri. We saw it in New Orleans with the recovery school district, where almost the entire city shifted over to charter schools. There is a concerted effort to end public school as we know it.
DN: What is “Act 10” and how has it affected teaching in Wisconsin?
Schroeder: The legislation eliminates collective bargaining of anything at all except base wages. That means contracts can be written on a Post-it Note. Anything about working conditions, safety in the classroom, class size, hours spent teaching, health insurance can no longer officially be part of collective bargaining. It also required teachers to pay 5.8
