| SEARCH OnWEAC |
|---|
Speech by NEA President Bob Chase
WEAC Local Officers Meeting
Regency Suites Hotel, Green Bay
September 25, 1999
Good morning.
It's great to be in Wisconsin. You might not know this, but I once wore a cheesehead. That’s right. It was after that awful Super Bowl in which the Packers, your Packers, beat my New England Patriots. Yes, I lost a little wager on that game and had to don the cheesehead. It was what coaches like to call “a character-building experience.” I am sure I’m a better person for it.
My crack staff back in Washington actually urged me to wear the cheesehead again for this speech, especially if I insisted on talking about the “new unionism.”
“It is less likely they’ll string up someone wearing a cheesehead,” was the staff’s advice.
But I decided not too—let’s face it, I’m still bitter about that Super Bowl, and I already have enough character—or am already enough of a character, as my daughters like to remind me.
Enough about football. Let’s talk education.
For educators and education union leaders, I must say these are remarkable—and often frustrating—times. You’ve probably noticed as much. There are things going on out there that just don’t make much sense.
For example, Wisconsin high schools students scored number one in the nation for the 7th consecutive year on the ACT college entrance exam, but the Wisconsin public is so conditioned by the media to expect only the worst from the public schools that they flat-out don’t believe your students came out on top, again, in the ACTs.
For another example, 72 percent of Wisconsin high school students go on to post-secondary education—one of the highest rates in the nation—72 percent! But the state of Wisconsin, for the first time in its history, now spends more money on prisons than on its state university system.
What’s more, the state of Wisconsin is spending millions to build the Milwaukee Brewers a new stadium—with no guarantee whatsoever that the Brewers franchise will actually stay in Milwaukee. But apparently there are insufficient funds to fix the 7 out every 10 Wisconsin public schools that need serious repair or upgrading.
This month’s issue of NEA Today has a story about one such school. It’s a bravely innovative K-5 elementary school on Milwaukee’s north side. Created by teachers and parents and called La Escuela Fratney, the school features a multicultural, anti-racist, bilingual curriculum. Parents form a majority on Fratney’s school-based management council, and teachers have say in all aspects of school administration, including hiring. The school building itself, however, is another matter. In the spring, it floods; in the winter, icy winds whistle through its window cracks; and in every season, the electricity goes out. What’s more, the staff share a bathroom that is about the size of an airplane lavatory.
As Fratney teacher Rita Tenorio says: “We have a 95-year-old building, but the Brewers can’t play in a 50-year-old stadium.”
So yes, you have your share of frustrations and screwed up priorities to deal with here. But for an outsider like me, it comes as a surprise, because of Wisconsin’s proud and progressive history in education—from kindergartens to vocational schools to state universities, Wisconsin led the way.
Of course screwed up priorities are not unique to Wisconsin—they’re rampant.
In Cleveland, Ohio, for what they spent constructing a new baseball stadium, a new football stadium, and a new basketball arena—all in this decade—they could have razed every single public school in that city and built a brand-spanking new one in its place.
In California, the hub of America’s information technology wheel and the home of more Nobel prize winners than any other state, they now spend more on prisons than their higher education system.
And don’t get me started about the Congress, where the current leadership is bent on giving tax breaks to the wealthy instead of health care to poor children.
A wise writer [William Hazlitt] once observed that humans are the only animals that laugh and cry because we are the only animals that are struck with the difference between the way things are, and the way they ought to be.
No where, it seems to me, is the chasm wider between what is and what ought to be than in how our society treats children.
As a people, we say children are the nation’s most precious resource, and yet we actually spend more than twice as much incarcerating a prisoner than we do educating a pupil.
We say that children embody our hopes and dreams for the future, and yet we do not invest in what research tells us will improve the education of all children—early childhood education, smaller class sizes, especially in the early grades, and teacher quality.
We say that children come first, and yet we cram them into overcrowded, ill-equipped facilities that are as outdated as an inkwell, facilities we would never tolerate in our modern workplaces or shopping malls. And most shamefully, we provide the children of low-income families with schools in which you are likely to find many more non-certified teachers or teachers teaching out of their field, larger class sizes, and substandard learning resources.
We preach equal opportunity for every child, we say education should give a child the means of exceeding the limitations of his or her class or family income, but in reality, we practice something very different, we practice social apartheid.
What’s going on?
Well, I am only a middle school social studies teacher, but let me venture this explanation: Over the last three decades an increasing number of adult Americans have become disengaged from their communities, and this disengagement has had serious ramifications for children. It is through community, after all, that we share responsibility for other people’s children—their education, their health, their future. It is through community that we affirm the hope, passed down from one generation of Americans to the next, that our children and grandchildren will thrive. And it is in our community schools that hope becomes capacity.
Time pressures contribute mightily to civic disengagement. Work in America has become more time-consuming. In fact, a recent U.N. report shows that Americans now spend more time on the job than people in any other industrialized country—and by a wide margin. The more time we spend at work, the less time we have for family and community.
Mobility is certainly another factor—fewer people these days put down roots and become committed to a place.
In addition, the unfettered market, powered by material rewards rather than spiritual values such as compassion, tends to pull us away from community. Consequently, the classic hierarchy of social roles in a democracy has been turned upside down. An increasing number of people think of themselves not primarily as citizens, but as private individuals who pursue their private interests as consumers, jobholders, and investors. Well, this is not what Aristotle, Locke, or Jefferson had in mind. In their vision of democracy, citizenship was the highest calling, and citizens actively participated in their community and government.
Increasingly, people today abrogate their responsibility to community in the vain hope that the market will somehow solve social problems for them without their doing anything. That is certainly what’s behind the voucher and school privatization movements. “Let the market take care of the schools—I can’t be bothered,” seems to be the underlying message.
In contemporary America, it is easy, as one observer has noted, to turn off the needs of community and slip into the shell of private life. And in that shell, it is all too easy to be a “visionary” who never confronts social reality or tries to change it.
Now I realize the picture I am painting for you this morning is not a sunny one, unless of course you’re really into the stock market or shopping. Why, you may be wondering, have I risked sending you into a deep depression that will require years of therapy—or another Super Bowl victory by the Packers—to overcome?
Why? In order to underscore the extraordinary boldness of WEAC’s Great Schools initiative.
Not only are you seeking to hold a one-on-one conversation with each of our 88,000 members, but in every public school in Wisconsin—and I understand there are 2,006—you are seeking to seriously engage the public—and to hell with civic disengagement!
To engage citizens in a conversation about how their schools can best meet the needs of their children—I can’t imagine a more important undertaking. I can’t imagine a better way to begin putting the public back into public education. I can’t imagine a more worthy venture for our association.
No NEA state affiliate is doing anything as ambitious as your Great Schools initiative. This is brave work you have embarked on. I say “brave” because of course any time you undertake something as ambitious as Great Schools, you run the risk of failing. And I am sure you’ve already heard from the cynics. No doubt they’ve told you one thousand and one reasons why the Great Schools initiative will flop. You know, it has been my experience that cynicism is never creative—it’s always a dead end, it never shines light on what will work. Pay the cynics no mind.
As your Great Schools manifesto states: “Only a community can define a Great School. It is a vision of parents, teachers, schools employees, principals, school board members, senior citizens, and other interested people.”
I hope there are a lot of round tables in Wisconsin because if there ever was a conversation that demanded a round table it is your Great Schools conversation.
I hope WEAC members, teachers and support staff, participate heartily in this effort, and bring to the table their hard-won wisdom acquired actually working in the schools with the students.
I hope your Great Schools initiative is a huge success—a success that NEA can trumpet across America in publications and cyberspace, a success that other state associations will emulate.
Like you, I am convinced that our union can and must play a decisive role in revitalizing public education for all children of this country. “Great schools—every kids deserves one”—with that as our beacon, we can and must take the initiative.
We—the union—can take the first step to end the head-butting between union and school management. We can put issues of school quality front and center at the bargaining table. We can promote community and parental involvement in public schools. We can insist on a more robust role for teachers and support staff in organizing their schools for high performance. We can be the champions of school reform measures such as smaller class sizes that our members know will work.
But we cannot meet big challenges with small ideas.
We must move forward, and create a new NEA and new style of unionism—with sharp new emphasis maximizing learning for every child. This is not a matter of repudiating our past, but building upon it.
Those of us who cut our teeth on traditional unionism…those of us who fought to build strong unions to give a voice to school employee…those of us who battled management to win dignity and standing for our members: we have every right to be proud of what we have accomplished. We built the foundation upon which we now build a new NEA—a mature, self confident Association that matches our traditional agenda of improved wages, benefits and working conditions for our members with an intensified commitment to quality and professionalism.
And of course here in Wisconsin, you have an added challenge, don’t you? You need to create a new bargaining law that frees K-12 public school teachers to engage in mutually satisfactory negotiations with school boards and enables your members to forge effective, problem-solving partnerships.
Some organizations change the name of what they’re doing, but they go on doing the same old things. This is called clinical insanity. And this is clearly not what you are about in WEAC or what we are about at NEA.
We are about deeds, not words.
Just as you have made a major investment in your Great Schools initiative, NEA has made a major investment in our new quality agenda. Three priorities now drive the NEA budget: enhancing student achievement, improving teacher quality, and strengthening school capacity. We now hold every NEA program accountable to those priorities.
Earlier this year at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., I released this report entitled Stepping Forward: How NEA Members Are Revitalizing America’s Public Schools.
For many of us at NEA, Stepping Forward proved to be both a sobering and surprising document.
Sobering because it clearly shows us that we must not become too full of ourselves. NEA is really running to catch up with and support its most innovative local and state associations. NEA didn’t invent peer assistance and review. We didn’t invent interest-based bargaining. We didn’t invent the new community partnerships. But we are lending a hand to those who want to pursue these and other new ways of serving our members.
And what’s surprising about this document is that it reveals a greater volume and velocity of change within our organization than many ever thought possible. Of the thousands of local and state initiatives in the book, very few predate the early 1990s. This decade, especially the second half, has been one of unprecedented change within our association.
The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association initiated a Teacher Evaluation and Mentoring program in 1996 that has helped scores of teachers improve their teaching skills and helped other teachers, who could not improve, to voluntarily leave the profession. It would have been unthinkable a decade ago for MTEA to be involved in such a program.
Our colleagues at Augusta High School in rural Wisconsin have created, with a grant from NEA’s National Foundation for the Improvement of Education, a school-to-work program for high school seniors. Students, many of them from low-income families, expand their business and communications skills in evening courses and work with mentors, including business and community leaders. We didn’t used to get involved in things like this.
The Green Bay Education Association four years ago launched a major public outreach effort to give people in this community a better idea of what we stand for, and the quality product we deliver. They opened the door for more public involvement in the schools. This Green Bay effort has really been a precursor to your larger Great Schools initiative.
At the national level, NEA’s new direction and focus is already having an impact. But let’s face it, we are not as close to the classroom as you are. Not to put you under too much pressure or anything, but you should know this: How your Great Schools initiative turns out could well affect public education across America.
Let me be blunt. The longest running voucher program in America is right here in Wisconsin. The most serious abridgement of our members’ collective bargaining rights—the QEO (Qualified Economic Offer)—is right here in Wisconsin. And the unequal distribution of public school resources, though hardly unique to Wisconsin, is an ugly, unprogressive fact of life right here too. And I understand it’s growing worse.
What you do here in Wisconsin to reconnect with your communities could have implications far beyond your borders. What you do here could well shape the very future of public education in America.
Listen to what David Mathews said recently. Mathews is the CEO of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and an outspoken supporter of public education. He said:
“We have to face the fact that we might not have a public school system in the 21st Century. There will, of course, be schools for some that are financed by tax dollars, but there is no guarantee that what we and our parents and our grandparents understood as the public schools will survive. Public schools could become to our educational system what Medicaid is to our health care system.”
Run that future by anyone in NEA or WEAC, and the response will be immediate and emphatic: “Not on my watch.”
Public schools will never, ever become the schools of last resort if we connect with parents, citizens, and communities…if we mutually agree upon a common vision for our Great Schools…and if we pursue that vision with vigor.
Leaders of WEAC, I salute you. Your courage and commitment encourage us all. You are on the verge of writing a new history of public education, and NEA, 2.5 million members strong, is proud to walk with you in your Great Schools initiative. May God speed you in your work.
Posted September 25, 1999