Margaret Haley, the "lady labor slugger" of Chicago. She was one of the nation's first teachers' union organizers.
It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the
Chicago teachers’ negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and
neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is
a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should
teachers be judged by their students’ test scores, as opposed to by more
holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will
be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many
reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to
demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level
of government are strapped?
I’m not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I
do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in
perspective. The modern teachers’ union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and
many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom
autonomy -- remain more than salient today.
In 1800, 90 percent
of American schoolteachers were men; by 1900, three-quarters were women. The
feminization of teaching—a job once filled primarily by transient young men,
often saving up to finance a legal or medical education—was, in large part, why
education became one of the few white-collar unionized professions in the
United States. Here’s how it happened, and why it happened in Chicago.
Around 1830, the American political, business, and intellectual
elite began to come to a consensus that state governments should guarantee all
children a free, basic education. Businesses wanted literate workers, and there
was the idea that education would reduce social ills like intemperance and
crime. But more than that, Common Schools reformers believed the young nation’s
tenuous experiment in popular democracy required informed citizens, voters able
to balance competing claims, judge the character of candidates for political
office, and generally put the long term common good above short term,
individual gain. (Like today’s
education reformers, Common Schoolers were an idealistic group.)
The inescapable reality, however, was that schools were
expensive, and Americans, then as now, didn’t like high taxes. So in order to
rapidly open many more schools, states, cities, and towns made the conscious choice
to hire mostly female teachers, who were cheaper to employ. To sell that idea
to a public wary of women working outside the home, and accustomed to corporal
punishment and other stereotypically masculine ways of retaining control over a
classroom, Common School reformers like Horace Mann, the Whig politician, and
Catharine Beecher, the public intellectual, wrote and spoke ad nauseam about women’s moral
superiority. As a schoolteacher, Mann lectured, a woman would be like an angel, “her
head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on
which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin
its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue!” Male teachers,
Beecher liked to say, were “low, vulgar, obscene, intemperate, and utterly
incompetent.”
This bracing rhetoric covered up an ugly reality of pay
discrimination. Most female teachers earned just half the salary of a male
teacher, and their jobs were getting harder and harder each day. In turn of the
century Chicago, classrooms housed 60 students, many of them new immigrants
from Eastern and Southern Europe who couldn’t speak English. Yet teacher pay
had been frozen for 30 years at $875 annually (about $23,000 adjusted for
inflation), less than a skilled manual laborer could earn.
The nation’s first teachers’-only union, the Chicago
Teachers Federation, was founded by two pissed off lady educators, Margaret
Haley and Catherine Goggin. They split the CTF from the administrator-dominated
National Education Association in 1897. Haley, a sixth-grade teacher, became a
national political force after she launched an investigation into the school
system’s budget. She found that major Chicago corporations, including the Chicago Tribune and the city’s railroad,
gas, and electrical utilities, had been issued 100-year “leases” of land owned
by the Chicago public schools for far-below the market rate, and were paying no
taxes whatsoever on the land. Haley’s successful lawsuit against Chicago’s
leading corporations, and her decision to ally the Chicago Teachers’ Federation
with the blue-collar AFL-CIO Chicago Federation of Labor established teacher unionism as a potent force in
American urban politics, and earned her the ire of the conservative elite. One
businessman called her “a nasty, unladylike woman.” But Haley knew that because female teachers couldn’t vote, they
needed the muscle of the male-dominated labor movement to back them up in their efforts to win higher pay and more say over how schools were run.
Amid these tensions, in November 1902, the Andrew Jackson
School on Chicago’s West Side hosted the
nation’s first ever teachers’ strike.
Superintendent Edwin Cooley had replaced a popular female principal at
the school with a man sent from the central district office. On Halloween,
Janice McKeon, a longtime teacher with deep ties to the predominantly Irish
neighborhood, booted a student from her 55-person class for using profanity
against another child. When the new principal sent the offender back to
class—and McKeon refused to let him enter the room—she was suspended without
pay for 30 days. A week later, on Nov. 7, 400 students, parents, and teachers
protested outside the school in support of McKeon, giving a boost to the newly
formed CTF.
Political reformers of this period looked at the chaos of
urban school systems and concluded that young, non-college educated women
weren’t tough, ambitious, or intellectual enough to be effective teachers. Men
like Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, Columbia University president and
standardized testing-enthusiast Nicholas Murray Butler, and Harvard president
Charles William Eliot vowed to once again attract a higher-class (read: male)
professional to the K-12 classroom, and to turn education into a “science”
governed by standardized teaching practices and measured by test scores. Margaret Haley, however, saw female educators not as the problem with poverty-stricken schools, but as part of the solution. She wanted to try a different way
of running schools, one that increased budgets, but also relied less on
technocratic centralization and more on the instincts of individual educators
with ties to the communities in which they worked.
For awhile, the early CTF found a partner in Chicago schools
superintendent Ella Flagg Young, a fiercely intellectual high school teacher who earned a Ph.D at the
University of Chicago and became a disciple of John Dewey, the founding philosopher of
American progressive education. Young led the Chicago system from
1909 to 1915, and worked with the teachers’ union to institute a pedagogy based
on theories of the whole child, which emphasized a broad curriculum and project-based
learning. She allowed “teacher councils” within each school to set priorities, arguing
that empowering teachers would help students achieve joy in learning. “In order that teachers may delight in
awakening the spirits of children, they must themselves be awake,” Young
said. She also resisted attempts by business leaders to direct working class
children to a narrowly conceived version of vocational education, and she
continuously fought corporate efforts to pay lower school taxes. Ultimately,
business interests on the school board succeeded in pushing Young out of
office.
There are some obvious parallels
between the teacher labor battles of the past and those of today. First, teaching remains an overwhelmingly female
profession, one that is often understood more as a romantic calling than as a
career like any other, in which pay, autonomy, and working conditions matter.
Second, raising taxes is typically a political nonstarter; in a system serving
an extremely needy population, there is perpetually the need to do more with
far less than would be ideal.
But there are also clear
differences. Today’s teachers, though they earn less than other
college-educated workers, do make a stable, middle-class salary. They are working within a knowledge economy
that rewards worker flexibility and lifelong learning; it would be
counterproductive, both for students and for the strength of organized labor,
for local teachers’ unions to hang on to old notions of rigid job security and
near nonexistent teacher evaluation. (Many teachers’ unions do have their own proposals for how to
evaluate teachers, through processes like peer evaluation and portfolios of
students' work. There are also good ideas from other quarters, like much more rigorous classroom observations.) And while large class sizes remain a problem, many high-poverty schools in cities like Chicago, New York, and Los
Angeles are actually experiencing rapid declines in enrollment, in part because of competition from charters. This help explains the push for school closures and teacher workforce reductions.
Teachers’ unions are among the
most controversial institutions in American public life. I hope to demystify
them in my upcoming book. There is much more to say, but for now I will stop
here.
Recommended reading:
Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley by Kate Rousmaniere
Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 by Marjorie Murphy
