[Editor’s note: This is a guest column by J. M. Canak, a Milwaukee teacher who works at a voucher-program high school. J. M. Canak is a pseudonym.]
As the school year draws to a close, many of us who work in K-12 education enter a reflective mood. Teaching is a profession full of headaches and heartbreaks, as well as joys and triumphs. For every senior that squeaks out a C- on the final to pass a required class, there are others who don’t even show up, resigned to their fate and a term in summer school. For every note of gratitude from a parent, there is one (realistically, a lot more than one) angry voice message left as a present on your voicemail when you arrive at a quarter to seven. Every wry joke told in the lunchroom has to be measured against a goodbye card for a well-liked colleague quitting the profession too soon. These are the kinds of problems and struggles that all teachers manage as we set about our important work.
At Milwaukee’s voucher and charter schools, teachers experience all of these things, as well as a host of additional indignities. We are expected to grit our teeth when some reactionary ghoul from Waukesha shows up in our classroom to get a few photo-ops with students of color in uniforms, right before hightailing it back down 94 to vote against anything that would actually help these communities. We are expected not to quail at the massive turnover which makes continuity at our schools almost impossible, at enormous cost to our students’ learning and growth.
We are expected to feign seriousness and compliance when some self-righteous dictum drifts down from a religious organization, informing us that calling students by their preferred pronouns is necessarily aggravating to our Savior (or more importantly, to some old men in St. Francis who would rather carry water for the Wisconsin Republican Party than fess up about where the money for clerical abuse survivors went). And for the vast majority of us, we are to shoulder these burdens alone, knowing that our careers could come to a premature end at any moment at the whim of an overpaid administrator or “executive”.
But it does not have to be this way. Unionization, for too long seen as a preserve of public schools alone, is coming for charter and voucher schools. It’s time for Milwaukee teachers at these schools to join the movement, both for our interests and for those of the students and communities we are proud to serve.
FOR THE LAST 40 YEARS, Milwaukee has been something of a lab rat for school privatization. While these efforts employed the seductive rhetoric of “school choice,” many of these schools became the self-indulgent pet projects of billionaires such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife MacKenzie Scott. Others were more-or-less naked attempts at union-busting on the part of Republican legislators, comfortably ensconced in gerrymandered seats far away from the students, parents, and teachers whose schools they chose to tinker with under the banner of “choice.” Other schools were legacy religious institutions (mostly Catholic) that got a new lease on life through the state voucher program. These voucher schools are among the least regulated and the most lacking in state oversight of any K-12 institutions in the state.
After decades of extensive investments in privatization, the results have not lived up to some boosters’ claims that when education was freed from the oppressive hand of teachers’ unions and given the liberating tonic of the free market, the result would be drastically improved outcomes for students. Nothing of the sort has occurred. Indeed, you don’t have to look too far to encounter horror stories about how lax oversight and toxic culture at some charter schools have led to tragic outcomes for students, staff, and communities. Nevertheless, enrollment in voucher and charter schools continues to climb. Meanwhile, the fallout from Gov. Scott Walker’s disastrous and punitive Act 10 legislation has left elementary and secondary schools of all sorts desperate for teachers, who have understandably left the profession in droves in our state. And all of this experimentation and privatization has contributed to a truly tragic result: Milwaukee remains among the most segregated school systems in the country.
FACED WITH THIS REALITY, in which working-class students continue to enroll in voucher and charter schools, even if largely due to the systemic underinvestment in public schools, advocates of true equality in education have a few different options. One is to oppose school-choice programs full stop, insisting that only high-quality public education delivered to every single neighborhood school is acceptable for a decent society. And to be sure, a decent society would be one in which unregulated voucher schools did not exist. There are also laudable and necessary steps that can be taken to ensure that if voucher programs are going to exist, they should be carefully scrutinized and held to the same standards as public schools. If voucher schools are to receive equal public funds, then they should be compliant with the IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) requirements, for example. Indeed, several recent reports have revealed that — despite receiving millions in public funds — voucher schools routinely discriminate against students on the basis of disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Reversing the deleterious course of school privatization in this city, however, will require organizing the faculty and staff without whom voucher and charter schools would not function, who often constitute the front lines of defending students’ from administrators’ most anti-student ambitions. Unionizing faculty at schools like mine would create the possibility that, regardless of which school building one enters, one will find the members of a citywide movement in favor of democratically controlled education, workers’ rights, and the dignity of all Milwaukee students.
This is not at all a novel idea in our city. Workers at Carmen High School Science and Technology held a union drive last year, which narrowly failed after the administration hired anti-union attorneys to conduct an aggressive scare campaign. Other private schools funded by public voucher money have been reluctant to unionize for a variety of reasons, be it religious conviction or ingrained short-termism that sees a union drive as an unnecessary headache for teachers who will be moving on soon. But as teacher turnover skyrockets across voucher and charter schools and horror stories of bad conditions and incompetent management accumulate, the conditions are ripe for a change.
Readers of this publication won’t be surprised to hear that the Leader is in favor of organized labor in all sectors of the economy; after all, democratic control of the workplace is a key tenet of socialism. But it is worth spelling out clearly the many tangible and immediate benefits that unionization would bring to teachers and staff in schools like mine. Pay and benefits are the obvious first incentive; on average, charter and voucher school teachers make about 15% less than public school teachers. This is not because state governments love opening their wallets to public school teachers, but rather because public schools tend to have strong unions with a position to demand better pay for their members.
THE UPSIDES OF UNIONIZATION go far beyond pay alone. Many people who choose to work at voucher schools do so for purely pragmatic reasons, but many others feel driven by a sense of mission or purpose. Far from damaging that purpose, unionization can be a powerful force for preserving what’s valuable at an institution and preventing sabotage (intentional or otherwise) from a new administrative or ownership team that has chosen to chase the next shiny object in education reform. Every teacher in every school is familiar with that tedious and stressful process of learning and forgetting an endless parade of buzzwords: STEM! No, wait, STEAM! Standards-based! Benchmarking! SWBAT! Small Teaching! Essential Questioning! Whole Language vs. Science of Reading! And after you learn the new jargon, it’s time for some new acronyms and everyone has to do more work for less pay, plus it’s easier to get canned. Unions cannot make the acronyms go away, but they can make it less likely that you will be brought up for disciplinary action for forgetting one.
The benefits of unionization also strongly accrue to students. One of the greatest weaknesses of voucher schools for students is that they tend to suffer from very high turnover. Studies vary, but even conservative estimates find that teachers at charter schools are about twice as likely to quit in any given year compared to the already high rates of resignation among public school teachers. The rates have only gone up since the Covid-19 pandemic, with many schools experiencing near total turnover year-to-year. This has a terrible impact on students in marginalized and oppressed communities. By offering stable contracts and more control over classroom conditions, unionization makes it more likely that educators will be there year after year to help their students throughout their time at a school.
A commitment to social justice unionism can also ensure that students who do attend voucher schools through public funds do not have their civil rights violated due to religious strictures at those schools. The Catholic Church’s insistence on embracing harmful and regressive attitudes towards sexual orientation and gender identity, for example, are its own business right up to the point when it starts accepting public money to run an educational institution. A union devoted to protecting its LGBTQ+ students’ rights and well-being is a powerful counterweight against this sort of destructive policy, and can force concessions when the state legislature is unable or unwilling to do so.
Finally, unions for voucher and charter schools can have benefits for Milwaukee’s working class. Schools like mine serve students who are grappling with decades of deindustrialization, predatory landlords, racist policing, and rising crime rates. In such an environment, social justice unionism which serves as a focus and organizing space for broader struggles can be invaluable. Teachers who organize to represent themselves and their students at school can use those same institutions to advocate for issues such as fair wages, safe public transit, and decent housing.
ORGANIZING SCHOOLS LIKE MINE will not be easy. Administrations and ownerships among these schools range from unenthusiastic to actively hostile towards unions. The Republican state legislature is hardly going to give up on their culture war footing of painting teachers of all stripes as degenerate Marxists bent on indoctrination (an impression which will appear laughable to anyone who has spent the day trying to keep students off their cellphones). And teachers themselves might be hesitant, understandably, to undertake an exhausting and risky union campaign with no guarantee of victory.
But none of these obstacles erase the material reality that teachers and students alike are not being well served by school privatization. Teachers in Milwaukee are serving on the front lines of a social crisis manufactured by cynical politicians, extractive landlords, and distant capitalists. It would be a terrible waste of potential to exclude from political action those of us working in Milwaukee’s privatized school landscape. Indeed, it is long overdue for us to contribute our talents and efforts to the broader cause of social justice in this city. In previous times, religious voucher schools were somewhat insulated from unionization pressures by employing clergy as instructors. Confronted with a decline in the religious vocation (in part for reasons that the archdiocese prefers not to dwell on), Catholic schools are now almost entirely staffed by lay teachers who prefer their rewards to come in the form of earthly as well as heavenly compensation.
Unionization cannot save us from grading deadlines, right-wing censorship initiatives, or ChatGPT. Nor is it a substitute for more vigorous investments in public institutions and stronger oversight of voucher and charter schools. But if we want to do right by the thousands of students enrolled in Milwaukee’s fragmented education system, we need a faculty empowered to fight for better working and learning conditions – in private and public schools alike.
