I’m not exactly ashamed. I tell myself I was busy — and I was nonstop busy, with small children, adolescent children, work, evening school to get a teaching degree, and finally classroom responsibilities loaded on top of family life. My union was merely a fee deducted from my paycheck. I came close to needing help once or twice, but the union existed mostly at the far periphery of my life. Versions of me abound in the teaching world. We buy the union like we buy insurance. Then we stick our card in the glovebox and forget about it.

But now it’s 2020. If I go to Twitter and other online sources, I find those unions speaking out for teachers. I find the voices demanding safe working conditions, many of them union voices. I also find panicked teachers, trying to avoid being forced into classrooms that don’t feel safe.

Who speaks for the teachers? The saddest part of my card-in-the-glovebox approach can be seen in areas where individual teachers are speaking for themselves in a cacophony of social media posts scattered across platforms — because no central voice exists to speak for them now, no voice with numbers behind it, no voice that brings power into a discussion that’s all about power.

We let our unions slip away. I’d venture to guess that some teachers were even relieved when the laws passed that stripped them of their collective bargaining rights. I’m sure a few who no longer had to pay dues felt happy to see the extra money for Starbucks and classroom supplies. Flood insurance is a nuisance until the flood.

That flood’s here, murky water climbing the steps and beginning to pour under the front door. The right to strike was the one real power teachers possessed in the past. Strikes remained uncommon because strikes were often avoided by negotiations. But it’s tough to negotiate if you cannot bring leverage to the table. Without an organization behind them, teachers’ words become garbled and disconnected sounds, lost right now in the sheer deluge of COVID-19 craziness.

Eduhonesty: So what next? Now I guess we just keep shouting. We keep posting pictures of unsafe conditions — except many teachers are afraid to post those pictures for fear of losing the positions that pay for the groceries and roof over their heads. In some geographic regions, teachers are left to hope that adolescents with cell phones will speak for them.

Years ago, I should have been taking a long, hard look at this map. Instead, I bought school supplies and decorated classrooms, while teachers in state after state watched as legislators stripped teachers of their limited privileges. Those politicians did not understand why people serving on the front-lines of education might need a voice in charting education’s path.

No Child Left Behind (NCLB) came at us. We worked on, despite the fact that teachers in academically-struggling areas understood quickly that ensuing attempts to teach to standardized tests were leaving many students behind — the very students the program had intended to help. Response to Intervention and Race to the Top came at us. We worked harder, knowing that RtI, especially, favored wealthier districts. Poor districts ended up diverting staff from classrooms to do mandatory small group tutoring, often resulting in decreased instructional time for the overall student body. The Common Core came at us. Math teachers went off to learn how to teach a new mathematics, a math parents did not understand. Parents could no longer help with even elementary math homework unless they received tutoring themselves. Classics of literature were replaced with nonfiction how-to books. And still we worked on.

Oh, articles were published in education magazines and websites. Books were written, some sitting today on nonfiction shelves of libraries. Teachers blogged and went to school board meetings to try to explain what they saw unfolding around them.

But again, too often, without the force of an organization behind them, without the job security they had once had, teachers mostly did not speak too loudly, not in those gray areas on the map above. They had families to feed. They had school supplies to buy for their classrooms and for their own children, and a dream to hold on to — that dream of being a teacher. Brainstorms from Washington, D.C., kept descending and when teachers saw those brainstorms were hurting students, not helping them, not enough people listened as the nation’s teachers said: in disadvantaged areas especially, these plans are not working. When the country’s beleaguered teachers tried to speak up, without unions, without organization, without power — other people who had no classroom experience managed to explain their remarks away. Other people mansplained their remarks away.

(See https://www.eduhonesty.com/covid-19-highlighting-decades-of-a-funding-crisis-in-a-time-of-union-busting/, which points out that 87 percent of American teachers are female today and those numbers continue to increase annually.)

The very fact that the Common Core got as far as it did should tell us one thing: Teachers, we must take back our right to organize. We must release our muted voices. How do we do this? First I suggest we vote for any and every plausible PRO-UNION candidate. I suspect those candidates will almost all be Democrats. Then we must reclaim the gray areas on the map.

How can we do this?

Pull the card out of the glovebox. FIND each other. As I said in a previous post, if the #MeToo women found each other, then the #RebuildOurUnions teachers can find each other. Obviously, August will be too chaotic to launch that rebuilding this year. Too many of us are merely hoping to survive August as #schoolmageddon2020 takes off.

But for the sake of the kids, we have to #RebuildOurUnions and #ReclaimOurVoices.

Can we put that on the calendar for the first real lull in 2020’s COVID storm?