More Than a Score (18 page)

You can see on our Facebook page pictures where they were walking out of negotiations literally two minutes after they started on September 19, and then filing for mediation the next day. They said it was unproductive to have people testify, can you imagine that? It's unproductive to have people talk about the things they care about at the negotiations table. So yeah, in many respects you roll with it. I'm an experienced negotiator with a very experienced team. Here is what it is: we are going to continue to negotiate as publicly as we can. That is when we started these videos, so we could share firsthand the kind of testimonies we would be having at the negotiations table with anyone who would watch the videos. We started having online and physical petitions, we went door-knocking, asking people to sign on to the “Schools St. Paul Children Deserve” priorities, and we did that online as well. We collected more than four thousand signatures and delivered them to the school board in November. And at the December mediated negotiations meeting meetings they said, “All right, fine, we'll negotiate some of these things,” which they had previously refused.

JH:
So how did you all decide to try to negotiate a contract without the use of the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessment test in teachers' evaluations? How is that struggle going?

MCR:
One of the reasons we decided to oppose the MCA was that we had to get this balance back between teacher grading and student learning. And the obsession with standardized testing was not helping at all. We knew we had to do something provocative to get the conversation back on student learning and not “achievement,” right? “Achievement” is just a code word for a scale score.

We had this experience with MCAs and the things that were off with them, like all the math tests being scored wrong one year and other incidents like the piece on Native American powwows being written in a culturally irresponsible way. We decided that at the end of the day we would get back weeks and weeks of teaching and learning if we stopped administering the MCAs. And we would save money. So we know we started with a provocative conversation, but no one is having this conversation. Everyone is blindly assuming that, “Well, if they tell us we need standardized tests, I guess we need to,” and what we are seeing is more and more people across the country who are actually saying, “You know what, I am starting to think that the emperor has no clothes either, I'm starting to think that I have a voice and a say in this.” Like Jerry Brown in California, we have Joshua Starr in Montgomery County, we have Don Coon in Texas. And the latest example that warmed my heart is a superintendent in Kentucky who wants to go to portfolio assessments for her students. Instead of having a finger waved back at her, saying, “Shame on you, you're breaking the rules,” she has the state commissioner of education who says, “Yeah, I want to find out how we get out from under this federal mandate because you're doing something creative for kids.” It warms my heart, on the one hand, but it also makes me disappointed at the incredible, profound lack of vision of the education leaders in our state, when my superintendent's only answer when we wanted to opt out of the MCA tests was, “But we have to do them.” There is no dreaming there. There is no dreaming of a life after standardized tests. There is no dreaming of a balance coming back, which is so disappointing because there is a lot of energy in Minnesota to rebalance our approach to standardized testing, and they are not taking advantage of that. They think they have gone far enough—we finally got rid of the grad rule, which was a big victory.

Last year in Minnesota legislature there was this test that you had to pass, a math test, in order to graduate. It didn't matter what your grades were for the four years, you had to get a passing score on a test. And of course the test cut score that they picked was completely arbitrary. It was just like, “Let's put it here.” So despite kids getting passing grades, kids weren't graduating because of this one grad test. Finally we got that grad test taken out of the student expectations, and a student no longer has to pass it in order to graduate. We do have this energy, we have people starting to think sensibly and starting to move in really sensible directions. We are very clear with our school district that we want to make progress on this language. We don't necessarily expect them to walk into negotiations one day and say, “All right, we'll take your language on testing wholesale and let's just be done with negotiating.” We expect them to come back with something that helps us make progress, like what good argument could we make—only testing in fifth and eighth grades. for example, and starting to put some parameters on the amount of time our children lose to standardized testing.

JH:
Instead of working with you and seeing the new discussion both in Minnesota and around the country over testing, didn't they just walk out of negotiations when you proposed not administering the test?

MCR:
Right, well, on September 19 they walked out because it was unproductive to have people at the negotiating table testify about why they cared about issues, including testing.

JH:
OK, so testing was part of it. So what do you say to people who say, “What you are advocating for in refusing the MCAs in your evaluation is illegal, and so, how can you do that?”

MCR:
It's the school district that is saying that, but they're not dreaming. All through history we've seen really bad laws changed by people who have decided to take illegal action. Because they couldn't act on a law as it was.

JH:
Who are you inspired by in history?

MCR:
My most immediate inspiration is Local 28, my union. In 1946 there was women's union and a men's union. The women's union was Local 28 and the men's was Local 43. The women's union went on strike and the men's union decided to join them in November 1946. And it was illegal to strike back then. They did on November 26, which was not the warmest time to be walking a picket line in Minnesota. They called it “the Strike for Better Schools.” Do you know what they were fighting for? They were fighting for modern textbooks, they were fighting for kids to not have to have classes in the boiler room, they were fighting for a way for the district to provide shoes for kids who came to school shoeless. I look back at the things they were fighting for, and they were fighting for the same things we are fighting for now, schools our children deserve.

JH:
I am pumping my fist in the air right now!

MCR:
So I would say that is my most local example. I have a number of other examples that I sort of personally use, when I look at the relationship, the friendship that Frederick Douglass had with Susan B. Anthony. They were both suffragists, they were both abolitionists and you know they had these serious of arguments. Voting wasn't legal for either black men or any woman. And slavery still existed when they struck up this friendship, two things that were institutionalized in our laws. These two struck up this friendship, this camaraderie, to fight them both. And I'm sure people told them that “slavery is in the law, there is nothing you can do about it,” and “Women will never have the right to vote,” and “Black men will never have the right to vote, that's just the law.” Their friendship is one of the most intriguing relationships in American history, for me. Here were two people fighting. I don't look at our work to fight standardized testing as monumental, perhaps, as ending slavery or for universal suffrage. Yet at the same time they inspire me because they agitated each other, they dreamed with each other, they didn't stop, they didn't lose hope.

The other thing that really intrigues me is people who are far, far less famous. When I look at pictures from the civil rights movement, I am inspired by all the people whose names I don't know, who are siting at a lunch counter getting sugar poured on their head, and getting coffee poured in their laps, and we don't know the names of those people. But segregated lunch counters were illegal, and they decided to defy that. Sure, they had people who said, “Hey, that's just the way the world works, don't fight it.” Of course they did. But they had this power of dreaming, that this doesn't have to work that way. I just think, we don't know their names. We don't have monuments to those folks in Washington, DC, or anything like that. But those are the folks who really did it. Those were the rank-and-file social justice advocates who really started changing hearts and minds. It was that nameless person who walked back to her community, with sugar and ketchup and mustard and pepper and coffee all spilled on her dress. Everyone in her community saw that, and they were changed by the courage that whoever she was had. I believe that “It's the law” is one of the hollowest arguments you could make. Give me any other argument, but don't give me one that is so lame as “It's the law.”

JH:
That to me is so inspiring, that those are the people you look to in terms of transforming American society, and that you're able to use the lessons of history and struggles for social justice and implement them for teachers today who have become, sort of, the “invisible man” that Ralph Ellison wrote about—not consulted at all about education, right? We are the last who are consulted . . .

MCR:
Not even acknowledged to be in the room!

JH:
. . . and billionaires, people who have never been to public schools, are the first to be consulted about what changes should take place. And students, parents, and teachers are the last. And so I really wish there were more union leaders like yourself and I wonder what you think the role, in general, of teachers unions is in the struggle against standardized testing, but also in the larger struggles for social justice.

MCR:
I actually think that in many respects we need to reclaim the roots of our union movement. The roots of our union movement were rooted in social justice work. Our fight for a fair wage was all about lifting people out of poverty, and all about decent housing, and it was about ending discrimination. It was about lifting up a whole community when people, when all work, was treated with dignity. So in many respects we need to go back to the roots of our union movement and look again. I feel very strongly that as the president of our union, I have an obligation to carry on in that spirit and that history of standing up for what is right for students and their families, and for a teaching profession that we deserve. I read stories from 1946, and I read about sugar beet workers who stood up for our teachers, and I read about how the AFL stepped in and helped support our teachers, and I just think that we understood community back then and we understood the Paul Wellstone adage that “We do better when we all do better.” I think that it's our union's responsibility to tap back into the social justice work that birthed the union movement. Our history in the civil rights struggle, our history in ending discrimination and understand that there is place. . . . Obviously, that is my big “warm my heart” vision that gets me out of bed in the morning.

I will give you the most pragmatic first step I would recommend for any other union leader—that our contract is the most powerful document that we can use to get our point across. I can fill school board meetings with teachers until the cows come home, and there is power there, but it is limited power. Or it is temporary power. We might get them to swing a vote on one thing, but our contract the only place that we have enduring power. As a union leader, if I want to send a message that I think is right, for students, families, and the future of our profession, the place I send that message with a sonic boom is our contract.

JH:
That's right.

MCR:
That is what is pragmatic for me. It's the ability to negotiate language that improves teaching and learning.

JH:
I've been so inspired by the Chicago union for taking up the fight by building community but by bringing it into the contract, by your struggle, and in Portland, they are in a similar fight. There seems to be a new upsurge in rank-and-file teachers who want to reclaim the profession from the corporate education reformers. I wonder what you think the future of that rank-and-file upsurge is, because as much as I defend our unions all the time against the corporate education reformers, I also get frustrated by some union officials who are stuck in an old model that isn't working in this current onslaught of attacks.

MCR:
Right, in some respects, I don't know how this comes across, but I'll say that I think that I am a manifestation of that insurgence. I was someone who came from a union background, and when I decided to run for president in my union in St. Paul I had no reason why I really had to. I loved my classroom, I had just finished my National Board certification, I was the district model classroom of secondary English language arts, so people were coming through all the time and I was leading great professional development. I had no reason to want to do this, except that everything I saw, back in 2004 to 2005, started crumbling around me. That was the way teachers were starting to be treated, the way the profession was seen as a starter profession, and in some respects I had every reason to want to stay, but if I don't do this now, then I have to accept that this is what is going to happen. So I think that we need more people, and it's not going to happen overnight for some people, but I think getting involved in your union that is already established and that already has a structure—you're able to tap into a national network and sometimes union leaders who look more resistant to be more bold really just need more people to stand with them, because what I found is that being a local president is lonely. But being a teacher is lonely, too, only different. You don't have a lot of peers, you don't have a lot of time to meet with those peers, because teachers have so much time on task with our students, so it is pretty lonely.