October 16, 2014
Deb: To practice genuine
democracy in our schools, our unions, and our communities, we need a different
understanding of what it means to be political.
When I taught at Bard High
School Early College in New York City, one of my favorite questions on my
mid-year exam was: What did Aristotle mean when he wrote that "man is a
political animal?"
For most Americans, the
term "political animal" would invoke the worst of American political
culture: the paranoid ranting of talk radio, the political television shows
modeled after wrestling entertainment, the election campaigns dominated by
negative attack ads, and the gridlock of a Congress where narrow partisan
advantage is everything. No wonder so many Americans run in the opposite
direction when they hear "political."
Yet our term
"political" is derived from the Greek "polis," the
city-state that was the community for the ancient Greeks. It is only through
the polis, through our communal bonds and our social life with other human
beings, Aristotle insisted, that we become fully human. Seen in this light,
politics is the art of caring for the common good of the community. The good
citizen is the person who exercises civic virtue, putting the good of the
community before his personal interests.
Isn't this our vision of
democracy in our schools, Deb, that it should be focused on the good of the
entire school community, in stark contrast to those who do their best to oppose
the interests of teachers and the interests of students? And what is
solidarity, that core union value, if not a commitment to the common good of
all our union brothers and sisters? Think of how powerful our American
democracy could be if we rediscovered this Aristotelian conception of politics,
and put the common good at the center of our political life.
This communitarian idea of
politics is only a starting point. We bring different conceptions of the common
good to our schools, our unions, and our communities. Those differences must be
negotiated, and that requires that we talk to each other and deliberate
together. It involves compromises and trade-offs, as you have pointed out. But
at a time that American politics is drowning in post-Citizens United corporate
and financial industry money, and is being dominated by the self-serving and
self-interested, a conception of politics that focused on the common good would
be transformational.
The challenge is to have
Americans envision this different world of politics. Inside the most powerful
nation in the world, we have become insular in our thinking. We have great
difficulty imagining that other nations and other traditions, even the ancient
Greek birthplace of western democracy, might be able to do politics in ways
that are more democratic than our practices. How many Americans actually
understand that most democratic nations in the world today use a parliamentary
system of government, which is different in crucial respects from our own
system of co-equal executive, legislative and judicial branches which check and
balance each other?
While the vital tradition
of individual rights has been most powerful within the American system of
government, there are aspects of the parliamentary system that we would do well
to learn from. I would argue that we would much better off with strong
political parties that develop real political platforms for elections, and are
then held accountable for implementing them by the electorate—which happens far
more often in parliamentary systems because undivided government clearly has
the power of implementation. Who do we hold accountable for the fact that ESEA
is not reauthorized, year after year? That is why I think union democracies should
have a party or caucus system that is closer to parliamentary political
parties.
Your examples of
democracies in education, Deb, focus on direct democracies such as small
schools. There certainly is an important place for direct democracies in
American society. But there is also a vital need for large, representative
democracies. Unions will never match the money that corporations and the
wealthy spend on elections: the $20 million that the AFT is spending on the
2014 elections is quite modest when compared with the Koch brothers' $300
million. But we do have one important resource they lack—an educated, active
membership of 1.6 million. Insofar as working people are going to have any
voice in an embattled American democracy and there is any hope for reviving a
politics of the common good, we need the large, representative democracies of
unions that bring together millions of working people in a solidaristic
political effort.
It is important, I would
argue, to recognize that a robust democratic society has both direct
democracies and representative democracies, and that they work together in a
complementary fashion. My vision of educational democracy is not one of
self-governing, autonomous school communes. As a democratic people, Americans
fund and support public education because of our belief that education is a
public good, fulfilling certain common purposes such as socialization,
enculturation, and education into democratic citizenship. Public schools need
to be accountable to democratically elected officials and legislatures for
achieving those ends.
As a general principle,
then, the power over important educational decisions should be largely
delegated to democratic school communities, but within broad parameters set by
state and local educational authorities that are ultimately accountable to the
electorate. A school should be able to determine democratically its educational
philosophy and program, and in particular, its pedagogy and the details of its
curriculum. It should have the authority to decide how to teach American
history and government, but not whether to teach American history and
government. It should have the power to organize its school day and schedule in
ways that best fit its educational program.
A school should have the
power to hire new faculty and staff; this authority is essential for the school
to ensure that all teachers and other staff are committed to its mission and
educational program, and willing to integrate into its culture. But a school
should not be able to use that power to discriminate on the basis of race, sex,
sexual orientation, age, religion, or experience. Evaluation of staff should be
part of a robust school-based system of peer evaluation and assistance. A
school should have broad control over its budget, with the authority to decide
spending priorities.
From the point of view of
the union, it is essential that the delegation of these powers to a school be
conditioned on real democratic decisionmaking within the school. When New York
City's United Federation of Teachers first won collective bargaining rights in
the early 1960s, it modeled itself after the most progressive and democratic
union of the day, the United Auto Workers. Since public schools were organized
around the tenets of factory production, it made perfect sense to fashion a
teachers' union contract after the UAW contract, with the use of work rules and
regulations to check the power of management to act autocratically and
arbitrarily. But if we want to create and nurture schools that prepare young people
for democratic citizenship, the autocratic world of the factory is precisely
the wrong model. We need contracts that support the establishment of democratic
schools.
There is a grand
historical bargain, therefore, that the union should be prepared to make. We
should be prepared to trade in extensive work rules and regulations for real
democratic decisionmaking that empowers teachers. A number of years ago, the
UFT worked with the first International High School to put into its contract a
school-based, teacher-majority personnel committee that made all of the hiring
and transfer decisions. In order to be hired or to transfer into a school that
used this option, a teacher had to be interviewed and accepted by this
personnel committee. This power was important for the first generation of small
schools in New York City because it ensured the educational integrity of their
school staffs in the days when there was a grassroots small-school movement.
The union's thinking was
that if teachers were collectively empowered to make the decisions, then
potential abuses of the process would be minimized. The system of checks and
balances on the hiring and staffing power of the principal would no longer be
needed. But the union needed to ensure that the school-level democracy was
real. If the principal would say to the committee, "here are the
individuals I want to interview" without sharing all of the applications
with the committee and coming to a collective decision on interviews, or if the
principal would alone observe a model lesson by a prospective teacher and then
demand that the committee make a decision based on his judgment of the lesson,
the union needs to have the power to say that this is not the democratic
process envisioned in the contract, and the old rules and regulations need to
be reapplied. Precisely because this school-based system of hiring and staffing
was much closer to the parliamentary system of democratic decision making than
our system of checks and balances, it was essential the unitary power had to be
exercised democratically and collectively.
Sadly, in the 2005
contract, this democratic process for making hiring and staffing decision was
lost. Then-Chancellor Joel Klein insisted that all power over hiring and
staffing be given to the principal alone, and ill-informed fact finders agreed.
Democracy is never a permanent achievement: the battles that establish it have
to be refought in every generation.
Leo
Leo Casey is the executive
director of the Albert Shanker Institute, a policy and research think tank
affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers. For 27 years, he worked in
the New York City public high schools, where he taught high school social
studies. For six years, he served as the vice president for academic high
schools for New York City's teachers' union, the United Federation of Teachers.
Reposted from Bridging Differences with permission.
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2014/10/leo_casey_the_political_animal.html
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