Recently, a resignation letter caught my attention:  A teacher of 24 years from Lyons Township High School (LT) quit and published his reasons for leaving.  And those reasons do strike this retired teacher (33 years total, with 8 at Peacock Jr. High in Itasca and 25 at Hinsdale South High School in Darien, both in Illinois) as legitimate issues which currently plague classroom teachers throughout the country.  Any intrusion between a teacher and his students is to be regarded skeptically, but the trend in the U.S. lately has been for everyone to stick their noses into this important relationship, generally to the detriment of both teachers and their students.

I could get into the specifics of what has gone wrong at LT to motivate this educator to quit, but the bottom-line problem currently raging in our public schools is who knows best what should be going on in our classrooms, same as it has been…well, forever.  From getting 50% credit for doing no homework and no failure policies (two changes cited in the LT letter) to so-called “critical race theory” to following health recommendations to when to use remote learning to gender/sex education to security, the debates about our schools have little to do with public education’s only real purposes: the fostering of independent critical thinkers capable of becoming productive contributors to civic stability and progress as well as providing basic reasoning skills for coping with the social problems our communities face, including battles over authoritarianism, racism, environmental degradation, public health, women’s rights,  and/or gun violence. 

But neither the specific rabbit holes to which each of those other issues leads nor the overall question of how to channel the interests/concerns coming from those outside the schools in productive ways is what caught my attention here.  What gave me pause was how powerless teachers are feeling, especially when I don’t think it needs to be that way.  Overreaching governors in Virginia and Florida to say nothing of state legislatures and school boards in many other places have dictated new rules and restrictions designed to rein in and control what teachers can do in their classrooms, leading some teachers to leave public education rather than to acquiesce to policies they find harmful to their students.  Yet, there are methods for teachers to participate as equals in policy formation which impacts their working lives rather than completely ceding decision making to those who know little about what creates a successful school experience, which by all accounts, the resigning LT teacher had been providing.

In more than half of U.S. states, working conditions are mandatory topics for bargaining between school districts and teachers.  In Illinois, for example, the Labor Relations Act states, “The duty ‘to bargain collectively’ shall also include an obligation to negotiate over any matter with respect to wages, hours and other conditions of employment, not specifically provided for in any other law or not specifically in violation of the provisions of any law.”  This sentence states quite clearly that “conditions of employment” need to be negotiated with the exclusive representative of the teachers, which in almost every school district in Illinois would be their union.  In other words, if something is required for employment (a “condition”— some rule or policy for which teachers will be disciplined and/or fired if they fail to comply), that something is then a legitimate topic for negotiations between the school district and its teachers’ union.  Rather than quitting, teachers covered by collective bargaining agreements could utilize these laws to respond to any requirement coming from above which negatively impacts how they run their classrooms.  In Illinois, which I know best since it is where I worked, the union can file a “demand to bargain” about the new condition of employment, contract negotiations can be reopened, both bargaining teams can reassemble to negotiate new language on the new condition (rule or policy), and the new language can be added to the current contract as a memorandum of agreement.  Yes, technically, all other clauses of the contract could then also be renegotiated, but both sides could agree to limit negotiations to the single issue.  And yes, this process would be a huge pain for administrators and union representatives (who are typically also classroom teachers), which is probably why it doesn’t happen much.

But the “hassle” of renewed contract negotiations should not mean teachers have to quit rather than having a say in how they do their jobs.  When a new policy comes raining down on teachers from above (administrators) or outside (governmental agencies) or a combination of the two (school boards reacting to the complaints of parents or community groups), just the threat of having to bargain is a way for teachers get a seat at the table as the vital shareholders they are.  With a vigilant teachers’ union which will insist on following the labor laws already in place, teachers can have significant input into these decisions and can help to prevent some of the ridiculous outcomes we hear teachers citing in their resignation letters.  Even if the contract were not reopened and both sides figured out a more informal way to resolve the issue, the potential of having to bargain the new condition of employment would force otherwise headstrong administrators or recalcitrant school boards to allow for teacher input into how the new condition would be implemented, or if it would be implemented at all.

And there are other union/contractual solutions to this lack of teacher input:  We created a clause when I worked at Hinsdale South which required the union be notified if any decisions which might impact working conditions were being contemplated.  This clause also allowed the union to name specific teachers to be on the various committees where these kinds of decisions were being worked on so they could represent the union’s (teachers’) position.  The key idea is that administration/school boards work cooperatively with their teachers to resolve anything which impacts how they do their jobs.  I know many of you have a strong antipathy to anything associated with something called a “union.” (Why do you think many teachers belong to the National Education Association and you rarely hear education labor leaders referring to their organizations as “unions”?)  But keep in mind that in most schools, union members and the teaching staff are one and the same, with the leadership also coming from the ranks of working teachers who volunteer their time (mostly) to do union…excuse me…association work.

I do have first-hand experience with how a “demand to bargain” works:  While teaching at Hinsdale South, I questioned my district’s right to require me to use an on-line grade program to record my students’ progress. (It did help that I had been our teacher union’s chief negotiator for two contracts and a past grievance chair as well).  In very short form:  Administrators told me I had to use the district’s on-line grading program; I started using it (since any teacher can be fired for insubordination—disobeying a reasonable administrative request), but told administration I would be filing a demand to bargain on this requirement since it was now a “working condition;” they consulted their lawyers about my rights to do this; and then an assistant principal quietly told me I wouldn’t have to use the program after all.  I assume the lawyer told them I was within my rights, since no further announcements about using the grade program’s being “required” were made.  (Since I was only a year or two from retirement and everybody else had already accepted the grade program as a “requirement,” I didn’t call the union’s attention to my personal victory, especially since no one else seem concerned over the grade program, and I had gotten my way.)  And I do believe that the same approach could be used to force administrators at LT at least to work with the teachers before imposing silly policies like 50% homework credit for doing nothing.

As a side note (Translation:  Major Digression Ahead!), this example illustrates the genesis of the current union neglect when it comes to utilizing collective bargaining laws to force consideration of teacher positions on working conditions to which administrators and school boards are making unilateral changes.  Few realized it at the time, but the digitalization of our schools started us on the road to getting 50% credit for not even bothering to turn homework in and policies making it harder to issue failing grades.  You see, as grade programs infiltrated public education to the point where everyone now uses them, the hodge-podge, individually created, teacher-centric grading systems of previous generations all got tossed in the trash.  I taught from 1979-2012, and I saw, used, and evolved a variety of assessment systems during that time:  Some teachers relied on assignments for points, others gave letter grades exclusively, some counted their finals as 10% or 20% of the semester grade (if they gave a final at all), some based much of the grade on classwork, and some focused much more on tests, to list a few of the different approaches you might find in the same school or even department.  Everybody pretty much did their own thing, with little direction from above.  Me?  I used a hybrid of points for graded assignments along with 25% of the grade I called “Class Participation” which was a catchall for things like non-graded homework assignments, volunteering during class discussions, taking care of missed work swiftly, promptness, courtesy, and generally being a decent human being.  Yeah, I was on thin ice then; today, I would be fired for using such subjective, non-quantifiable things as part of a grade.  (Even though I, an ex-English teacher, still argue those subjective things happen to be significantly more important than a kid’s ability to remember to put in the Oxford comma, crucial though that skill is and will always be.) 

If every teacher’s having a different system sounds chaotic and as if it would lead to different results depending on the teacher you had, that’s only because it was and it did.  If you had Mr. Jones for English I, you would get an A if you turned a few things in, didn’t screw around during all the movies he showed, and laughed at his jokes; Bs were tough to come by if you were unfortunate enough to get Ms. Smith, infamous for her pop quizzes and tough writing expectations; and you could get any grade you wanted in Mrs. Jones-Smith’s class if you could stay awake through her droning lectures.  Yep, it pretty much depended on the teacher, didn’t it?  Of course it did, and it still does, but grade programs created the unintended consequence of requiring much better consistency on the part of the students about turning in work done out of class to get decent grades. 

Once grades became digitalized, everything came down to points—you can do all kinds of fancy things with these programs in terms of weighting grades’ values, but you still have to assign some point value to everything you want to grade.  So, if you assign homework for practice—things you want the student to do in order to hone skills, not for a grade—you still have to give it a quantifiable number the program can digest.  Logically, most teachers simply assign a point value, say 10, and give students all 10 points if they do the assignment.  Remember: It wasn’t assigned to be graded.  And that’s all well and good when students turn in the work.  They get a perfect 10 out of 10 on something they might have slopped off five minutes before class, so for those who diligently turn everything in, grade programs have been a boon.  Sadly, there is generally a percentage of kids in average classes (advanced or “academically talented” classes are another story entirely) who just do not turn in homework often, especially if it requires much time to do.  Those kids now rack up the 0s on homework in prodigious numbers.  And as any statistics-oriented person can tell you, getting zero points on assignments makes your grade plummet in a hurry to depths from which it cannot easily recover. 

This is easily illustrated:  Two students get the same grades on two tests, 85/100 for a total of 170 out of 200 points.  Five 10-point homework assignments accompany those tests. Student 1 does all five for 50 additional points, whereas Student 2 does only two for 20 points.  Now, the total points in the class come to 250, with Student 1 scoring 220, or 88% (B or B+, depending on the system), while Student 2 lags at 190, 76% (middle C).  And if that less-motivated student hadn’t done any of the 50 points of homework, he would instead have 68% (D).  I’d argue he earned it, but you can see how fast a kid who scored solid Bs on both tests could wind up with serious grade trouble once point values have been assigned to homework assignments.  Major out-of-class projects that don’t get turned in or made up have an even more dramatic effect on grades.  If Student 2 had missed a 100-point project instead of the 50 points of homework, this B-test-taker would have failed the class (56% or 170 points out of 300). 

You can certainly make the case that Student 2 deserves exactly what he gets, but it’s a big problem for any high school administrator when classes required for graduation are being failed by significant numbers of kids, and grade programs have eliminated much of the discretion teachers often employed over the years.  Since I taught for 33 years, I know a secret or two about how most teachers operate, and I can assure you that virtually every D- ever assigned on a report card should have been an F.  Teachers sometimes manipulate numbers and shade things in order to make grades turn out how they want—and in my experience, 99.5% percent of the time, in dire situations when teachers decide to fiddle with grades, they assign a higher grade than the gradebook actually showed.  With grade programs, however, that discretion has become harder to justify, to say nothing of the fact that grade digitalization has led to the posting of grades online, where students and their parents check them daily.  If a kid has a 45% on-line, it’s tough to give him/her that charity D-.  Yes, since I never used grade programs, I did give out grades like that a time or two in my career, even though the vast majority of my 45% students failed.  But now, the new grading policies artificially inflate percentages so that grades (such as they have become) can be posted on-line.  Instead of the occasional, teacher-determined “adjustment” of a bad grade, administrators have utilized the idiotic, blanket, 50%-for-nothing policy, as well as other clumsy “fixes” so students can pass without doing much of what the teacher has determined is needed.

As we turn back to the original focus of this essay, it becomes clear why a competent, impactful, creative teacher would reject the idea that it’s reasonable to give credit for assignments not turned in or that it’s not okay to limit cell phone usage during class (another major problem for many teachers) and quit instead.  Much more common, however, are teachers who cede what they know to be the best way to educate their students in order not to get in trouble with education’s noisy, clueless critics, and in the case of many administrators, those who are seeking only that which makes things go smoothly, regardless of the negative impact on the education of young people.  Especially for teachers who worked many years before these new policies materialized, having those with little knowledge of what they do in their classrooms direct them to abandon methods they’ve spent years developing is a morale-crushing experience.  Being forced to do that which you know to be wrong is hardly the work-approach I want in my community’s teachers, but that’s what’s been happening at warp speed the last couple of years. 

Strong words, I realize, but in the debate about how to make public education better, we have to recognize how important a reasonable level of independence for teachers is and that this independence allows teachers to provide individualized, unique classroom experiences.  Of course, the idiosyncrasies of some teaching divas might drive you crazy and seem way too arbitrary—even capricious—but in standardizing the art of our classroom leaders, we do every student who will one day wind up in the working world of rough edges a huge disservice.  Can you imagine telling your boss that you should get 50% of your salary for doing nothing?  Does anyone think a permission note from your mom to your supervisor will keep you from being fired for refusing to focus on your job duties so you can text your friends?  The world simply does not function anywhere close to the inane rules many schools are enacting in response to changing trends. 

Somebody’s got to temper these ill-advised concessions to technology (to say nothing of clueless politicians, administrators, or community members), and collective bargaining laws often provide teachers and their unions with some of the anti-stupid ammunition they need.  No, this will not make unions more popular in a climate that has been anti-labor in recent years, especially in areas where collective bargaining laws have helped make teacher pay much better (e.g., high school districts in DuPage or Cook counties), nor will many administrators appreciate those trouble-making union leaders.  (As a long-time union activist, however, I found my work day went much, much better when I had my administrators’ respect rather than their love, for what it’s worth.)  But I would encourage teachers—and particularly those who are also their school’s union leaders—to use all the tactics they have to fend off changes from those who don’t know or understand what makes a quality classroom, even if some of those discussions are uncomfortable, or even confrontational.  Bottom line, insisting that your state’s collective bargaining laws be appropriately applied is one of most effective tools teachers have in warding off excesses coming from outside their classrooms.  And it’s a much better alternative to giving up or quitting.

For more on how public schools can be improved, you can check out my e-book, excerpts of which can be seen here.