Credit to “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In)” by Kenny Rogers & the First Edition, Eagles of Death Metal and others

The line in the title resonates with me. They fooled you, many of you readers out in non-union or non-collective bargaining states. They told you new laws would not matter to you. They even vilified teachers in the process, some deliberately and some simply because they caught a wave whose true dimensions they did not understand. Those latter writers understood only that “bad teacher” stories were selling for some reason. How do you destroy a union? You paint its members as lazy neer-do-wells and even pedophiles hiding out in secret rooms in New York where they send the bad teachers they cannot fire. Why can’t you fire them? The evil union, of course. Although New York mostly survived those gratuitous attacks, other teachers in other states did not — but then New York is a heavily Democratic state. I will return to this point later.

Here is the start of a story by Karen Matthews, an Associated Press Writer, updated 6/22/2009 6:05:42 PM ET: NEW YORK — “Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.” http://www.nbcnews.com/id/31494936/ns/us_news-education/t/nyc-teachers-paid-do-nothing/#.X3yD2hSSmUk

The wave of stories continued because they sold. The long-term impact of that hit job went unappreciated. The advantages of having a union and collective bargaining rights can easily go unnoticed in quieter times. Latent power is often invisible.

Now, in many areas, legislators and school boards have been working nonstop on plans to get students into school and only sometimes out of school when things go wrong. In lucky locations, teachers have the help of unions. If not for relatively strong unions, would New York City have a plan for shut-down in the face of exploding coronavirus numbers? In too many areas, no one has an exit plan because we have no unions, or unions are so gutted that they might as well be trapped in brown paper bags. We need to drop in soon — and find out what condition our unions are in. And then we need to begin reforming those unions. Or restoring those unions to positions of power.

Eduhonesty: When THIS song makes me think of the state of U.S. education, we have taken our foot off the gas for far too long. What happened to collective bargaining power? They came for our rights in the night, they came with fabricated stories or cherry-picked examples, and we just opened the door to votes that sucked away the individual worker’s voice. We let our voices go because we did not understand the implications of being muted, not well enough to rage as legislators stole away our bargaining rights.

I believe that part of the reason we did not rage is that teachers tend to be regrettably trusting — at least at first. They believe the Board has their school’s best interests at heart. They believe they and administrators are on the same team (In better schools, this is true.) and they count on the Your-State-Here State Board of Education to look out for the students in their care. This faith has been eroding, as teachers watched test-score mania and the Common Core gain momentum, but remnants of trust and goodwill remain.

Unfortunately, we were not paying enough attention to the “bad teacher” stories this last decade. They had a purpose, and only in the most naïve hands was that purpose believed to be improving education. Instead, those stories had everything to do with control. If you eliminate the right to collective bargaining and/or ban the union, then you then can’t be strong-armed into paying teachers a fair wage or providing students in poor districts with a more equitable learning landscape. You can keep things exactly as they are, no matter how unfair that may be to teachers — and students with the bad luck to be living in the wrong zip code. Or the wrong state, it seems today.

Florida is an outrage and not the only outrage.

I am not against sending children back into live learning situations, and I fully understand some of those attempts will hit COVID walls, as sick kids and staff members try to manage quarantines and shut-downs. We have no perfect solutions. Everyone is operating in perilous times, heading into an unknown future. Going to live instruction or a hybrid version of this may be the best of the bad options in many locales. But that choice should not be driven by politics — and teachers should be participants, not terrified onlookers, in the decision-making process.

Let’s focus for the moment on those legislators who negotiated away teachers’, students’, and others’ voices. Since their immediate acts took place in the then-present — our past — and the world was much quieter back then, too few people fought back. Nothing much changed in “Washington Elementary” or other schools when anti-union legislation slipped through. I am sure quieter times disguised the immediacy of the threat of that legislation. Maybe we thought we could trust the government to take care of us.

I repeat a question from my last post: Is the government taking care of us?

Yet the future eventually arrives, and the future is hitting us much harder than anyone anticipated. Now, teachers and students are not worried about having enough paper or a half-hour for lunch. They are worried about physical safety. In some locations, they are being badgered to open even when circumstances suggest opening might be unsafe. In some locations, they are even being given the choice to either enter the classroom or be fired.

That’s not true in Illinois — where schools were shut in Chicago and remain shut until they are considered safe — but then Illinois is a heavily Democratic state, like New York. So is California where many schools remain closed, depending on what condition their schools’ condition happens to be in.

Here’s why I think anyone with free time who is willing and able to take on the fight should be working for the Democratic Party right now: Democrats have historically been exponentially friendlier to unions than Republicans. Especially in these fraught times, we need to organize or reorganize in many places. We need to reclaim our voices. To do that we will have to break Republican strongholds. Those Republican governors, senators and representatives? They must go — even the ones I like, I’m afraid. I have voted for a fair number of republicans in my life — I’m registered as an independent and I always liked the designation.

But desperate times call for desperate measures. I upset some readers recently by writing that people in democratic states should not vote for third parties. But a third-party vote in a democratic state is a vote for the current administration. We can’t keep voting in republican majorities if we want to #ReclaimOurVoices and #RebuildOurUnions. We need to flip those republican legislatures — small and large. The we need to repeal a number of laws and

Those of us lucky enough to have a union? Let’s see if we can help our fellow teachers who are not as lucky.

P.S. In fairness, I should note that anti-union sentiment goes back to the very foundations of the first unions. That sentiment took on legitimacy and gained support during the time of Ronald Reagan, a snowball that has been rolling downhill since Reagan and the air traffic controllers. But teachers were a tougher target to assail — because America once thought highly of teachers. Fortunately, despite the hit job, many people still do. But for those teachers who can’t understand the negativity toward them, given all their hard work and selfless acceptance of substandard working conditions in return for a chance to help and even sometimes rescue kids — go looking for those stories about unions protecting bad teachers. Those stories have a great deal to do with the contempt teachers now sometimes encounter in dealings with administrations and parents.

Organizing and reorganizing can improve working conditions for teachers.

Although I’ll add one last blast — If conditions are too bad, I suggest taking a chunk of time daily to try to change districts. There are some great principals and good districts out there. You CAN also QUIT! I read a post from a woman whose spouse took a position as a fast food assistant manager and now is making more money than she is. Fellow teachers, you have degrees. You are articulate. You know how to work long and hard. Maybe it’s time to get your real estate license? Sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards. A friend of mine who is an ER doc did a residency in occupational medicine to change into another field. It was a lot of extra work for awhile as well as extra educational fees. But she doesn’t have to get regular migraines from brutal night hours and changing shifts now. If Sunday night makes your stomach sink or even causes you to cry — think about it. You can move on.