Teaching used to be a lot different than it is now. I’m not talking about the Smart Boards and the computers, but rather about other, more fundamental things. The very first school in the Thirteen Colonies was started in Boston by a Puritan, Philemon Pormont. Called The Boston Latin School, it was for boys only, as education followed the trend in Great Britain: girls only needed to learn to sew neatly and keep house; boys needed to be educated, the brightest of them to head for college. Moravian missionaries founded the Salem Academy and College as the first school for young girls in 1772 in Salem, North Carolina. Slowly common schools, tax-supported, began to open for all children, but boys and girls entered by different doors and were taught in different rooms, usually by a teacher of the same sex.
It wasn’t until 1840 in Lowell, Massachusetts that the first coeducational high school was opened and not until after the Civil War that they became common. As the country spread westward, small frontier communities were forced to accept both boys and girls into the same classes simply because it was difficult to find teachers who often had to be brought from the more populated eastern U.S. Men were less inclined to go to these small, one-room school houses, and so the majority of the teachers soon were women.
Life for a teacher was not easy. Not only did she teach up to 8 grades in a single room, but she was responsible for arriving well before the students to make up the fire in the wood burning stove, and leave well after the students in order to sweep and wash the school room floor, windows, and blackboards. There were no custodians. In addition, she could teach only as long as she remained unmarried, and on the tiny salary (if she even was paid at all) she received she could not afford a home of her own, so parents of the students took turn housing her month by month.
And the qualifications to teach were simple in many places. You only needed to have completed the 8th grade yourself and if possible have attended some teaching classes at a Teachers’ college. Even as late as the early 20th century, teachers’ colleges abounded. Indiana State University was first Indiana State Teachers’ College and existed for the sole purpose of training teachers. My mother taught in Minnesota and there, as in many other places, a teaching degree required only two years at a teachers’ college.
One room schoolhouses were still common around the country. My parents moved to Terre Haute, IN when I was a baby and Vigo County had graduated by then from one-room school houses to schools where only two grades were taught in the same room through elementary school. But such was not the case everywhere. Some of my cousins in Minnesota attended a one room schoolhouse. My mother’s cousin taught in one. My husband attended one for a while before his family moved into town. The last one room school house in Illinois closed in 1960, but the last one in the United States didn’t close its doors until 1967.
Even though education was improving in that teachers were soon required to have completed four years of college in their chosen field – – – elementary school, or a single high school subject such as English, math, or science, things were still not as good as they could be. Teachers were totally at the mercy of the school boards and could be fired at will if they angered a board member by disciplining his/her child or giving the child a bad grade. In addition, teachers often negotiated their own salaries with the school boards, and in many places, “salary” still was a matter of room and board provided in the community. When boards actually did pay teachers, elementary teachers often got less money than high school teachers, and high school teachers might be paid according to their relationship to a board member or according to how important the board considered the subject that they taught. There was little consistency or fairness. Thus entered the teachers unions.
The National Education Association is the oldest teachers’ union. It was formed in Philadelphia in 1857 by 43 educators who wanted to see changes made. They focused on raising salaries for teachers, enforcing and improving child labor laws, educating emancipated slaves. Chicago, which has always been an entity of its own, was still not paying teachers as late as 1897. Teachers’ “salaries” still consisted of free room and board within the community. Thus, in an effort to change that, the Chicago Federation of Teachers was formed. Five years later, a Chicago teacher was fired for refusing to let a disruptive student back into her classroom and teachers, parents, and students united in the first teachers’ strike in the U.S.
In 1916, the American Federation of Teachers was formed in Chicago. Members of the National Education Association (NEA) regarded the AFT as beneath them, refusing to call themselves a union, but rather an “association.” The AFT was and remains, connected to the AFL-CIO labor union, and the NEA considered them “too radical” rather than “professional.”
In the 1950s the NEA joined with black teachers’ organizations in states where segregation was still rampant, and the strength of the teachers’ unions began to be felt. By 1951, 98% of urban districts were paying teachers based upon their educational qualifications rather than upon the grade level that they taught. And in 1959, Wisconsin passed the first collective bargaining law for teachers, followed by other states and an immediate increase in union membership.
I began teaching in 1969. The NEA still looked down upon the AFT and tended not to want to strike since that seemed too “AFL-CIO” and not professional enough. Both unions had members in the first high school where I taught I Terre Haute and the AFT did in fact hold a strike. I don’t remember it accomplishing much because NEA members, who were greater in number, crossed their pick lines. Soon Vigo County require all teachers to vote for a “sole bargaining agent” and the NEA won. There were no more strikes for the 7 years I taught in Terre Haute, nor for the year in which I taught near Muncie, IN.
But when I moved to Paris, things got wild. The year before I was hired at Paris High School, the teachers had a sick in and most simply did not go to school. The first year I was hired, I did not join the IEA/NEA (Illinois Education Association affiliate of the National Education Association) because money was tight after a year of grad school and living off my savings. So, I did the unthinkable again: I crossed the picket line during a 3-day strike. Luckily, the teachers did not hold it against me (first year teachers who strike can be fired and by law no reason has to be given, thus they have absolutely no protection during a strike). I learned that some of the teachers even in Paris made more than other teachers because they had personally negotiated their salaries with the school board. The next year I joined the IEA/NEA both because I felt they really were working to improve salaries for us and also because they provided insurance and lawyers in case a student who failed a class accused a teacher of assault or sexual harassment. The insurance alone was worth the dues.
And for the next years, the IEA did work tirelessly, talking to candidates for the legislature, encouraging them to support education and to provide teachers both with a salary comparable to their years of educational training. And in fact, our retirement became far better than say that of Indiana’s teachers, though far less than that of Minnesota teachers, as Russ and I found out from my teacher cousins! But then the IEA/NEA began to move farther and farther to the left. It became extremely rare for them to support a Republican candidate in Illinois and even more rare on the national front. As they became more political and more liberal, they lost more and more support from everyday Americans.
I served for years as a building representative for our local affiliate of the IEA/NEA, then served as treasurer, and finally for many years as president. I am now the president of the Edgar County Retired Teachers’ Association, an affiliate of the Illinois Retired Teachers’ Association and NOT a part of either IEA/NEA or AFT. As an IEA president, I used IEA resources when needed, and kept our mostly conservative faculties out of participation in IEA political ventures, including being bused to Michigan to support the recall (failed) of Governor Scott Walker.
Even before the pandemic, both the NEA and the AFT protected their own teachers by trying to get rid of charter schools, talking local politicians into disallowing school choice, and decrying such things as merit pay. No reasonable argument exists for not allowing charter schools and school choice. If teachers at one school are not as good as teachers at another school, then why shouldn’t the parents have the choice to send their children to the better school? Surely this would only rid the educational system of poor teachers, something even the teachers’ union should want. As far as merit pay is concerned this becomes a bit trickier, based upon how that merit pay is decided. But as a general rule, every teacher in every school knows exactly who the really good teachers are and who are just there for the pay check. It is sad that love of the children and excellency of work are not rewarded.
Beyond their protection of all teachers, good and bad, and their support of Democrat candidates almost always to the exclusion of Republicans, they have also joined the social stupidity and false notions of the left. They support the teaching of Critical Race Theory, a nonsensical notion that all white children are born to oppress non-whites and that all other races are born to be victims. That this idea is both wrong and damaging to the psyches of young children matters not a bit to them. They also support transgenderism despite the fact that science and real life demonstrate that it is impossible to turn a man into a woman or a woman into a man. And transgenders in girls’ sports? No problem for them! They also have no problem with boys who claim to identify as girls using the girls’ bathroom even though this opens the door literally for rapists, but also causes many girls to avoid going to the bathroom all day in order not to have to be in there with a boy.
But during the pandemic, teachers’ unions have surpassed themselves in idiocy. They have again ignored the science and demanded that schools be closed to protect the teachers from catching a virus that has a 99% survival rate. Teachers with comorbidities or who were 65 or older certainly should have been allowed to teach remotely, but there was no reason to shut schools to protect the younger, healthy teaching staff. Instead, like it or not (and many did NOT), the teachers taught on the computer and students fell behind, learning at least 30-40% less than they would have in an actual classroom with the teacher in front of them. Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, made herself especially obnoxious in her demands, her condemnations of schools that did open, and her manipulation of the government’s COVID school mandates. But the NEA has not objected.
Teachers’ unions, like all unions, had a place in the history of America, a time when they were needed to force public attention to people who were working hard for very little money and no benefits. But now, laws have been passed that have solved many of the problems that unions were formed to fight. Instead, most unions, including the NEA and the AFT have become deep financial resources for the Democrat Party, using funds embedded in union dues that come from Republicans and Independents as well as from Democrat teachers. Perhaps they have seen their day. Perhaps it is time for parents to say, “We don’t need teachers’ unions telling the government what is good for our children!”