Work Won't Love You Back

by Sarah Jaffe

  The Cold War also led, at least for a while, to increased funding for schools. The launch of the first satellite, Sputnik 1, by the Soviets in 1957 made American officials realize that the Communist teachers had been right about one thing, at least. As Megan Erickson wrote, “education and space are both metonyms for the future,” and it appeared that the USSR was pulling ahead in both. Americans were nervous about the future, and the schools, then as now, were a locus for those conflicting anxieties—people feared that Communist teachers might be indoctrinating students, but the schools also needed more funding in order for American kids to catch up to the Communists.26

  The pattern was repeated the decade after the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954. While teachers’ unions broadly supported the school desegregation process, the fallout from the fight largely hit Black educators, many of whom lost jobs when Black schools were closed. Black students might be going to previously all-white schools, but white parents were damned if they were going to have their kids taught by Black teachers. Black teachers, who had gone above and beyond the ill-funded school system in which they had taught, who had marched and organized and fought for desegregation and served as anchors and caretakers for the Black middle class, lost their jobs as payment for all their care. Once again they were caught in the trap: too much love will cost you.27

  Teacher tenure laws were one major target for segregationists determined to find a facially race-neutral strategy for getting rid of Black teachers. Across the South, after Brown, seven states moved to change their tenure laws, and North Carolina placed all teachers on one-year contracts. These attacks had the desired effect of making it easier to fire or drive out Black teachers, but also made it easier to fire any and all teachers. Punishing teachers for failing to solve all the world’s problems with their care became that much easier. Black teachers who retained jobs were often set up to fail, as in the case of one Black home economics teacher assigned to teach second grade after integration. She—and many others—were fired for “incompetence” at jobs they had never done before. At the same time, the Lyndon Johnson administration moved to recruit students from elite schools to do short-term teaching stints, a strategy that flipped the earlier image of teachers on its head: rather than committed, caring educators, all this strategy offered students was a brief encounter with the highly educated, who would then presumably move on.28

  The tensions within the teaching profession came to a head in Ocean Hill–Brownsville in Brooklyn in 1968, where the old Teachers Union style of community organizing came up against a new style of unionism. Militant and surging unions were winning collective bargaining rights, and the hard-charging United Federation of Teachers (UFT), having won the right to represent all of New York City’s teaching force through a strike, wound up clashing with Black community activists. The UFT was focused on the “bread-and-butter” needs of teachers. Meanwhile, frustrated with desegregation efforts implying that Black children were deficient and Black teachers incompetent, Black community organizers were agitating for community control of schools, arguing that it was racism, not Black deficiency, that left Black students underachieving. Teachers who had pulled back from the community found themselves deemed uncaring by activists, who argued that Black communities already had the ability to improve the schools, if officials would just get out of the way.29

  The UFT at the time was designed to make teaching more professional, more like “work” and less like “home.” It was led by Al Shanker, who, according to educator and scholar Lois Weiner, didn’t acknowledge “the inevitable contradictions that arise between teachers’ personal and individual responsibility for children, the ways their work continues the functions of the family, and the location of these functions in a bureaucracy as paid labor.” The disconnected professionalism—which had always been gendered masculine—of the new UFT brought it into conflict with Black parents and education activists who embraced their role as caretakers for Black children. The arguments of professionalism grated on parents, who felt condescended to by those who had never seemed to care for Black children. During the UFT’s strike against the community-driven firing of white and Jewish teachers in Ocean Hill–Brownsville, many teachers—the descendants of the old TU—crossed picket lines as well. Where the Teachers Union model had worked side by side with those parents and had fought to bring more Black educators into the schools, the UFT stressed the division between “work” and “home,” which ended up pitting them against parents. This strategy would weaken the newly powerful teachers’ unions, leaving them vulnerable to attacks that they did not care enough about children.30

  This conflict also showed up in Chicago, during the then white-dominated Chicago Teachers Union’s 1969 strike. Many Black teachers who had been organizing for better schools crossed picket lines and continued to work. Others participated in the strike, seeing it as a way to bring more resources to the children of color they taught. These moments seemed to raise the same few questions: Was a strike by teachers an inherently selfish thing? Or was the problem that the teachers were disconnected from the parents and students in the communities where they taught? The embrace of such a disconnect was what administrators had wanted—a point beaten into teachers with the crushing of the TU—but the distance also served as a weapon to then turn against “uncaring” teachers. And the school districts were only too happy to fire more people.31

  The success of teachers’ unions in this time, then, was a double-edged sword. They won improved conditions through collective bargaining and strikes, including protections, Marjorie Murphy noted, that would have “saved the jobs of hundreds if teachers had had such rights before McCarthyism.” But it also set them up as a labor aristocracy—people more concerned with their own wages and job security than for the students for whom they were responsible—and left them on their own in crucial fights. When the economy as a whole turned downward in the 1970s, teachers and their unions were an easy target for tax-cutting conservatives. When the corporate reformers came in, waving their own banner of care for children while finding new ways to make profits off the public schools, the teachers’ unions were unprepared.32

  The same people who demanded that teachers be held accountable for perceived declining standards were those who advocated slashing taxes and making teachers do more with less. This trend began in the 1970s but was ramped up in the 1980s with the neoliberal revolution. Class sizes grew and, particularly in urban schools, programs like art and music were stripped away. Public schools in the United States have always been hampered by the fact that they are mostly funded through local property taxes, meaning that the richer communities have more money to pour into schools, and poor neighborhoods suffer from less money per child. The inequality now rampant in American life shows up in public education in dramatic fashion.33

  FOR A WHILE, TEACHERS ACQUIESCED TO THE CHANGES. “WE’RE USED TO being like, ‘OK, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, because we all care about what’s best for kids,’” said Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union during its 2012 strike. But that kind of caring didn’t help them against a corporate-backed education “reform” movement that wedged itself into the cracks between teachers and the communities they served; no matter how much the teachers conceded, the reformers continued to insist that teachers’ selfishness was the problem.34

  The creation of charter schools was at first itself an initiative of the AFT, but the union quickly realized its mistake when neoliberal reformers seized on the charters as a way to open new, nonunion, privately run schools with public dollars. The schools targeted for closure or privatization, and the teachers targeted for removal, tended be to those responsible for educating Black and Latinx children. “Choice” was a sleight-of-hand turn away from “community control.” Instead of schools that parents could be involved in—like the schools Rosa Jimenez works to create—charter schools gave parents a “choice” of the underfunded, overcrowded public school or a shiny new program with experimental (
and often draconian) disciplinary policies and claims of improved test scores. Implicit in the rhetoric of choice, as Adam Kotsko noted, is the acceptance of personal responsibility—and the attendant blame if your choice doesn’t work out. It echoes in the line we’re often given about “choosing” a job we love—as if work were a thing we decided to do for fun.35

  Teachers were used to accepting blame by now, but even the reformers had to admit—as they did in the Reagan administration’s 1983 report on the situation, called A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform—that teachers were being asked not just to make up for underfunded schools, but, with their care, to make up for the cuts to the entire welfare state. The report still, even admitting this fact, blamed schools for the nation’s economic problems. But the real problem was that, like the home care workers who filled in the gaps of social care, teachers were expected to solve problems caused by homelessness, hunger, and a lack of health care in their communities. Just as the cuts pushed responsibilities back onto individual parents, they also forced teachers—those whose work was assumed to be closest to that of mothers—to make up for massive cuts elsewhere.36

  In order to better “hold teachers accountable,” the reformers relied heavily on standardized testing. George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act, passed with bipartisan support in 2002, introduced a strict testing regime and made federal funds—which were desperately needed in poor districts where property tax money was insufficient—dependent on the schools submitting to a range of new regulations and privatization schemes. As Lois Weiner noted, the law brought home the reforms that had been imposed on Global South countries through the United States’ dominance of international institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The intent behind the reforms, Weiner suggested, can be seen most clearly in those international documents, which state explicitly that most students are destined for menial work and need neither a well-rounded education nor skilled (or particularly caring) teachers.37

  The Obama administration made noises about changing No Child Left Behind, but its own program, Race to the Top, doubled down on testing students and firing teachers. The language that Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his allies in the now-sprawling private education reform industry used was “putting students first,” the implication being that selfish teachers and their unions did the exact opposite.38

  Yet these reforms were designed in fact to produce less-caring teachers. Whether it was bringing in short-term outsider teachers, from programs like Teach for America, or imposing weeks of standardized testing, the reformers deskilled teachers while denying they were doing so. After all, teachers’ concern and care had never been recognized as skills to begin with. They were just attributes of naturally caring workers.39

  Schools are the hinge point of neoliberalism, a place where it has been imposed and where the blame is placed for its harms. If teachers were simply adequate, the thinking goes, then all of this inequality would go away. Yet when this line of argument is pursued to its end, the lie is evident: even if every single child received a top-notch education, and “learned to code,” as the cliché has it, all this would do is produce more competition for those relatively few highly paid knowledge-economy jobs, and drive down their wages. It’s almost like that’s the point.40

  But in 2012, the Chicago teachers’ strike upended these power dynamics. Black teachers like Karen Lewis were at the forefront of the reform movement within teacher unions around the country, drawing on the history of Black and leftist teachers’ community involvement in places like Chicago and New York. With the CTU’s confrontation with Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Lewis and the union sent a shot across the bow. “We’re supposed to think that the elite, who are very wealthy and very well educated and don’t send their children to public schools, care more [than we do] about black and brown children they don’t know?” Lewis said. They were the ones with the children day in and day out, and with the community by their side, they were going to fight for the kinds of public schools their students deserved.41

  This new organizing strategy is based in the teachers’ relationships in the community, harking back to the old days of the Communist organizers, and to Margaret Haley and the origins of the Chicago union. It avoids the trap imposed on teachers—strike, and get called selfish by administrators, and alienate parents who depend on the schools—by reclaiming the mantle of caring about the students and the broader community. In working alongside parents and students to make demands of the school administrators, teachers gain the space to make demands for themselves.42

  And they need that space. As economist Kate Bahn explained, teachers and other caring workers face a pay penalty when compared to other workers with similar education levels, and a big part of that is because they care. Teachers are less pay sensitive when compared to other workers, meaning they’re less likely to pack up and leave for a better-paid job, and indeed, they have accepted cut after cut. The Economic Policy Institute calculated that “teachers’ weekly wages in 2018 were 21.4 percent lower than their nonteaching peers.” Teacher Kevin Prosen wrote, “This love is supposed to be part of the compensation of doing our job. But people are less comfortable considering that love is not compensation; love is work.… It’s exhausting, loving and working so much, for such little pay—which explains why over 32,000 mid-career teachers have left the system over the past eleven years. We can’t live on these wages, and we have only so much love, and time, to give.”43

  Their opponents have not stopped, after all. The year after the CTU strike, Emanuel retaliated by closing forty-nine public schools, mostly in Black and Brown neighborhoods. And then in 2018, the Supreme Court, building off the Harris v. Quinn decision of 2014, that took rights away from home care workers, ruled, in Janus v. AFSCME, that the entire public sector was now “right-to-work.” That meant that a union that has won the right to represent a particular workforce no longer has a right to collect a fee for its costs. The backers of Janus, a who’s who of anti-union organizations, expected the public sector, and particularly teachers’ unions, to hemorrhage members, though so far the damage has been blunted—largely, it appears, by the willingness of teachers to fight.44

  When the teachers in West Virginia organized a strike in 2018, closing every public school in the state to demand fair pay, they kicked off a strike wave that spread to at least fourteen states, further changing the calculus about public schools. Their slogan, taken from Chicago, “Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions,” was written across protest signs, printed on T-shirts, and included on lists of demands. And as Los Angeles struck, as Chicago struck again in 2019, and as the St. Paul Federation of Teachers struck in the spring of 2020, the teachers continued to further their demands, adding safe housing, restorative justice programs, moratoria on charter schools, and mental health care for students to the list of victories won by teachers for their communities. The framework begun in Chicago is now known as “Bargaining for the Common Good.” It provides a way for unions—not just teachers but many different kinds of unions—to bring demands to the bargaining table that benefit the community at large.45

  That kind of union ethos served teachers well when the COVID-19 pandemic began. In New York, as it became clear that the virus was spreading across the city, teachers mobilized to pressure the city’s Department of Education to close schools. Organizing networks that had begun as a reform movement within the union sprang into action, using video calls to discuss what to do. The idea of a sick-out, as teacher Ellen Schweitzer explained, came up relatively early. “Many rank and filers, who hadn’t necessarily been that involved before, just sprang into action seeing that this was urgent, that others needed to step in and take charge and that a sick-out would work.” As the momentum for the sick-out built, and as teachers spoke out and parents joined them, the DOE announced that schools would close.46

  The teachers have had enough, and because of the work of reformers like Lewis, Schweitzer, and Rosa Jime
nez, the public is once again on their side. From the strikes to their mobilizations against police violence that sparked in late May 2020, these organizers demonstrated a point that radical teachers have long known: teachers’ fraught location in public life can be an immensely powerful one if they use the skills they’ve honed on the job—caring, communicating—and their ability to disrupt the day-to-day functioning of a city or state to see that their demands are met.47

  THE RAIN ENDED IN LOS ANGELES ON A FRIDAY IN JANUARY 2019, AFTER four straight days of downpour on more than thirty thousand UTLA member teachers who turned out to the picket lines in ponchos and borrowed rain boots, carrying umbrellas painted with strike slogans such as “Red for Ed,” “Students First,” and “Lower class sizes now!” Many carried signs with some version of the slogan “We strike because we love our students.” They had held dance parties and sing-alongs in the rain; with the sun, they poured into Grand Park downtown for a rally and concert with another thirty thousand or so of their friends, students, and allies. “UTLA, do you feel your power?” boomed the union’s president, Alex Caputo-Pearl, from the stage, and the crowd roared back at him.

  In the afternoon, in the sun, the picket line outside of RFK Community Schools was raucous, even before the hotel workers’ union showed up. Rosa Jimenez joined her coworkers in marching alongside the UNITE HERE members, taking over the streets in a red-clad mass of solidarity that culminated at the LINE Hotel on Wilshire, where the hotel workers also sought a contract. In her red UTLA shirt, her daughter at her side, Jimenez grabbed a bullhorn and addressed the crowd in Spanish and English from the back of a pickup truck. “It is important that we are together!” she told them. “We’re all workers, we all need good health care, we all deserve a good wage.” The rest of her comments were drowned out in cheers.