In this episode, Bill discusses the teacher protests that happened this past week in Denver and goes in-depth about what it was like on the scene and the conclusion that Denver Public School came to. Enjoy!
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The Origination Point Podcast
In this episode, I want to talk a little bit about institutional bias and institutional racism. It’s been on my mind a lot because here in Denver where I live and work, we survived a teacher strike where our teachers were negotiating a contract for several months, and finally came to an agreement after a three-day strike. This was the first time this has ever happened in my experience. It was interesting to see what was happening connected to the origination point of the inception of education. There were a lot of discussions, not only around pay but also around the structure of how people get paid and the intent of the bargaining, whether it was done in fairness and with transparency from both sides. It resulted in some quite interesting outcomes that I’m going to get to.
First, I want to talk about though some of the things that were talked about through the process of the negotiation. I’m going to start with pay. It’s important to understand the historical context of what we’re working with in terms of education. When education started in the 1700s and 1800s, women were not even allowed to teach. They weren’t allowed to teach until the early to mid-1800s when men gave them permission to teach.
Teacher Protests: When education started in the 1700s and 1800s, women were not allowed to teach. They weren’t allowed to teach until the early to mid-1800s when men permitted them to teach.
Teaching Wasn’t Structured Around High-Quality Teaching
A lot of that teaching wasn’t structured around high-quality teaching, it was structured around getting another workforce in front of students and most students of diversity who didn’t identify as White. When teachers started teaching at that time, the women who were teachers were paid less than the men. The organizational structure had always been run by men in mostly what’s called a hierarchy. All of the power rested at the top and all of the communication that happened floated from the top down. If you had enough privilege, you had access to the decision-makers at the top.
The reason why it’s so important to understand the inception of education is that many of the institutional and systemic biases that we see are still inherent in that system now. Most of the upper-level leaders are still White men. Most school districts still run as a hierarchy where all of the power is at the top and the messages run to the bottom. If you don’t have enough privileges, you’ll never have access to the decision-makers at the top.
Most school districts still run as a hierarchy where all the power is at the top, and the messages run to the bottom. If you don't have enough privileges, you'll never have access to the decision-makers at the top. Share on XThis is important to understand because when I witnessed the negotiations during the first part before the strike, there weren’t strong relationships between the negotiating team for the union or the district. In some ways, this hierarchy prevents us from having strong relationships with leaders at the top. It’s a combination of both that hierarchal structure and that structure of education wasn’t designed around strong relationships.
When we’re talking about the things that are impacting us in terms of culturally responsive work and the diversity of the students, the system was not even designed to do that in terms of multicultural education or having culturally responsive pedagogy and practices, and even equity. This system as its structure now was not designed around equity. If you look at equity being the ability to differentiate learning styles, curriculum delivery, and things like that, the original system wasn’t designed for equity because it was a very homogeneous, mostly middle-class group of men that were being taught by men. The need to differentiate wasn’t even there when education started.
As we talk about this whole idea of equity, there has to be an understanding that equity is rooted in relationships. Without those strong relationships, people who are negotiating contracts don’t always see the best intention of the person whom they’re negotiating with. In fact, it gets couched mostly as a battle where there’s a winner and a loser.
After the strike was over, the majority of the headlines that I saw were, “The teachers won.” I agree that teachers are highly underpaid and not respected professionally for the work that they do, and that has to change. I also know that in the state of Colorado, this is a state issue as well as a local issue. Local schools and districts can only go so far without the state changing the way that it does business with education as well.
Without the relationships, the negotiations tended to become quite adversarial. There were chanting against the superintendent, misinterpretation of things that were said, and times when the negotiations completely broke down. Finally, on a Sunday, the union said, “The district can have time. They have until Tuesday. We’re going to plan a strike for Monday.” Striking in America is historically done when groups of people who are organized don’t get their needs met. We could debate the role of unions in terms of their role in who they’re protecting. We’ll save that for another episode.
Institutional Pieces
What I want to talk about is how these institutional pieces played a role in how we related to each other. This idea of a winner and a loser meant that for one group to win, another group had to lose. When we think about the outcome of these negotiations, the teachers got very close to what they wanted at the beginning. For them to have that, it means that there’s a group of people who will lose their jobs to be able to create the revenue stream that’s needed to fulfill the contract. This is all part of the process.
Part of why I’m saying this is we don’t always talk about these other elements of the losing side. A lot of what we heard is the winners and thanking people for supporting them. We don’t often talk about the people who are going to pay for this. I would include our community, our students, and the people who will be repositioned in their work or let go.
Those are all real parts of the outcome that we saw, not just in this strike. These are outcomes that are real in strikes that we’ve seen all across the country in education. It’s important for us to get to a place where we value education to the point that we fund it properly, teachers are paid a professional wage, and are respected for the work that they do. I don’t believe we’re there yet and we still have some work to do.
Teacher Protests: We need to get to a place where we value education to the point that we fund it properly, teachers receive a professional wage, and receive respect for their work.
Accountability
I want to shift over now to talk a little bit about accountability and how that showed up in a variety of ways while we were going through this strike. There were behaviors that were used by people to demean other people. There was very little accountability for the impact of those behaviors. As we got into the strike, they became more prevalent.
There were instances in schools where teachers would surround the cars of the people who were going in to support their students. You would call them scabs or folks who were coming from the administration building to support the students and the administrators who were still there. In some cases, those people driving into the parking lots, their cars were surrounded by teachers, they were yelled at, they were cursed at, and they were treated poorly when all they wanted to do was to go in and support the students who were still in the building. There were times when people were very unkind to each other in terms of how they spoke to their colleagues.
There was even a division between who was striking and who was not striking. In some cases, teachers felt like they were being bullied by other teachers for their decision to stay in the building and teach. It’s very interesting because a lot of our conversation post-strike is talking about how you come to terms to create a culture of acceptance when you don’t have agreement on how people showed up from a values perspective.
Let’s take one of our values. It’s called integrity. Here’s the argument from both sides of integrity. A teacher who stayed in the building crossed the picket lines and taught their children said, “I am in integrity because I’m doing this for the students. I’m staying in school for the students.” The teacher who walked out and joined the picket line said, “I’m in integrity because I’m staying outside in picketing for stronger wages and a more simplistic pay scale that I can understand.” Both people, in talking to them, would say, “I was in integrity.” When there’s a disagreement in the way that is acted out, the conversation goes to who’s right and who’s wrong. We go back to this win-lose.
When there's a disagreement in the way that is acted out, the conversation goes to who's right and who's wrong. Share on XIn the conversations I’ve had in the past few weeks, there is no right or wrong because each person believes that their way of showing integrity was right for them. The big question is, as we move forward, how do we create a culture of acceptance versus agreement? We’re not always going to agree. There were some cases where teachers got upset because, throughout the days of the strike, the administrator didn’t recognize the folks who were striking outside.
I would say yes because they were pretty busy trying to run a school without their regular teachers. It’s hard to be able to stop, shift, and do some of the things that people expect. 1) You don’t know what they expect. 2) When there’s a strike, there were chaotic scenes inside and outside the building. Everyone’s normal is completely thrown off. The idea that anything would continue as usual, including niceties, didn’t happen. Now, we’re at the point where we’re beyond the strike and we have to start looking at what we do next.
I had an experience where I was in a school and the students were great. The majority of them wanted to learn and it gave me a whole new insight into some of the behavioral expectations that we have for our students, especially our Black and Brown students, and how in some ways, even in a normal environment, their needs aren’t being met. As we start to look at some of these issues, we have to look at how the structure of education isn’t serving us now and think about how we move forward in a way that rebuilds our relationships, that puts us in an environment where we’re doing right by kids.
The Disruption Of The Current Educational System
The last piece I want to share is what came up from other folks who are doing a lot in the disruption of the educational system. That is talking about equity and how equity is being used or not used to enhance the learning environment. If you understand the history of education, it wasn’t designed to be equitable. It wasn’t designed for culturally sponsored pedagogy and practices.
For this to work, we have to fundamentally change the systems that we all operate in from the leadership model all the way through to how we make decisions and allocate resources. Doing one piece won’t be enough if we don’t impact the whole system. Instead of a hierarchy, let’s think about a matrix. In a matrix model, communication flows sideways and up and down. You always have a leader. The difference between a matrix and a hierarchy though is that everyone has access to the leader. Your access to that leader is not based on privilege.
Teacher Protests: Doing one piece won’t be enough if we don’t impact the whole system. Instead of a hierarchy, let’s think about a matrix.
Another piece that we need to look at is how most of our school districts still operate off of seat time, which basically says that if a student is in their seat for 180-plus days, they have the ability to graduate even if they’re not reading at grade level. Most of us in our work lives and most of you reading out there, do not get paid for how many days you show up at work. You get paid for the competencies that you have and how well you follow through and learn about the things that you’re doing at work. That’s another conversation that we have to have in terms of shifting the way that we do education.
Looking at our teachers as respected professionals who deserve the respect and pay that comes along with the position that they have. Our teachers are the most important person in front of that student. All the research shows that a teacher that knows how to build relationships and has strong classroom management skills is going to support their students to higher level achievement than a teacher who doesn’t have those skills.
The challenge that we have is we are such an assessment-driven culture that we spend more time teaching kids how to take a test than we teach them about how to develop strong relationships. There’s a lot more research out there now that’s starting to show that a strong relationship between a student and a teacher is more predictive of academic and social-emotional success than teaching them how to take a test. We started statewide testing, no child left behind, and all of these initiatives, and nothing has changed in the achievement of non-White students.
I will never forget the comment that a Latina parent made to me in my second year on the school board when she came and we were talking about the gap. In this case, it was the academic gap between Latino students and White students. She told me, “If the statistics were reversed and White kids were achieving at the level of the Latino students, our boardroom would be a war room. We would address this as though it was a crisis.”
I would submit to everyone that’s reading this that we have a crisis. The crisis is not that we have a bunch of people who don’t care about what they’re doing. In fact, it’s the opposite. We have a lot of caring people who want to do the best by education, yet are operating in a system that wasn’t designed to meet the needs of the teachers or the students that we have in education now.
I also think it’s important that people take accountability for their behavior. There were things that were said and done to each other in schools and at the district level that were very hurtful and demeaning. It created a barrier between people, in some cases, between teams at schools. It’s easy to blame somebody else for the impact of my behavior or my words.
Teacher Protests: People must take accountability for their behavior.
If we look at the structure of education and the work that we need to do, there is enough for each of us to own that we don’t have to blame anybody. We need to look within and think about what my role is in disrupting a system that’s not working for a lot of children across America. This is not a Denver conversation. This is an American conversation about the state of education in 2019 and thinking about what our role is in moving this work forward. I’m going to leave you thinking about what you can do. If you were to step out of the blame game, what do you think your role is in disrupting a system that wasn’t designed for the students we have now? Until next time, keep busting those biases.