A recent study published in the American Journal of Political Science entitled “Labor Unions and White Racial Politics” makes a compelling case that unions reduce the racist beliefs of white workers. Drawing upon a trove of survey data, authors Paul Frymer and Jacob M. Grumbach found that union membership tends to lessen white racial resentment due to “long-term cooperative intergroup relations.” In other words, belonging to a union helps white workers form deep relationships and develop solidarity with nonwhite workers, which in turn makes them—unsurprisingly—less racist. This news was celebrated on the Left, and for good reason. In a racist and rampantly unequal society, any evidence that demonstrates the effectiveness of unions at diminishing racism while organizing the working class is welcome news indeed. 

Yet as a public school teacher, my initial enthusiasm about the study soon gave way to a troubling realization: the conditions described in the study as necessary for improving racial attitudes don’t exist for most public school teachers. From a purely demographic standpoint, the teaching profession in the United States is overwhelmingly white. In the face of this reality, it is difficult to imagine the amelioratory effects described by the study actually taking place inside most public schools, which have few teachers of color. Even in Oakland, the city where I teach, where just under fifty percent of the teachers are either Black, Latinx, or Asian, making it commonplace for white teachers to work alongside teachers of color, the culture of “deeper and more cooperative” contact—which Frymer and Grumbach argue is both a common feature of unionized workplaces and a key to breaking down racial resentment—just does not exist. The lack of contact and cooperation among teachers in public schools is not due to any fault of teachers. It is, unfortunately, a feature of public schooling, and one that has serious implications for the potential of schools and teachers to advance antiracist ends.

The question of what teachers can and should do to end racism—both in our schools and society at-large—is on the mind of many educators right now. As we reflect on our pedagogy and practice, it is clear that we have to do more to make our classrooms more equitable for all our students, particularly our Black and Brown students. But as we engage in that necessary internal work, we must also set our sights on larger policy objectives. Ending racism will require collective action, and so we must also act collectively, through our unions, to push for deeper, more fundamental changes in how we relate to our students, to the communities we serve, and to one another. Many teacher unions have already endorsed initiatives like Black Lives Matter at School as well as efforts to remove police from schools, which is a promising start. Yet in this moment of potential reckoning, teacher unions have an opportunity to advance a more far-reaching vision, one that transforms the prevailing culture of schools and, more importantly, helps win economic policy change capable of remedying the racial and the economic inequality that characterizes so much of American society. 

To realize this vision, we have to first understand how the current structure of schooling hampers efforts to address, and ultimately end, systemic racism. 

A Lonely Profession

Teaching, as it is generally practiced in the United States, transpires in structural isolation. As David Labaree has noted, most teachers “teach under conditions where they are the only professional in the room, left to their own devices to figure out a way to manage a group of 30 students and move them through the required curriculum.” Or as one of my colleagues once ruefully described it, when you’re a teacher, you’re an “an army of one.”

While there is a certain seductiveness to the autonomy given to teachers, teaching in this manner leads to harmful outcomes. For starters, it undermines efforts by school faculty to establish common pedagogy and shared professional culture. Instead of talking to our colleagues, sharing best practices, and engaging in lesson study, we’re forced to spend most of our time hunkered down in our classrooms, desperately trying to attend to the countless number of tasks that are routinely dumped on our laps. Our daily interactions with colleagues are often limited to trading pleasantries in the hallways or commiserating over the fact that the copier has broken down yet again, even though we would much rather spend an hour at the end of each day talking, planing and reflecting with those same colleagues. Yet the unceasing demands of the job—which are the result of deliberate policy choices—work against that desire at every turn. 

Even worse than the lack of collaboration is how our isolation encourages us to conceptualize teaching as an individual endeavor—what Dan Lortie notably called, “a private ordeal”; it is a task that you simply have to figure out on your own. This conception of teaching, which so many of us unwittingly accept, dampens any instinct that would push us towards deeper connections with our colleagues—the kind that Frymer and Gumbach argue dismantle racist beliefs.

This is not to say teachers never act out of shared interest; the recent surge in teacher strikesproves that educators both feel and act out of genuine solidarity. But while teachers might practice solidarity in a fight against austerity or a campaign for better learning conditions, too often we fail to acknowledge or confront our complicity in replicating a reality that, for the most part, does not benefit poor Black and Brown students. We organize ourselves against the budget cuts that come down on us like clockwork, but can we say the same about the racial inequities our classrooms churn out year after year? While these inequities are unquestionably intertwined with poverty and economic class, that doesn’t excuse us from taking action to address them. 

The school to prison pipeline, one the most oft-cited examples of racial inequity in public education, is a prime example of this: Black students are routinely suspended and expelled at significantly higher rates than white students. This disproportionate discipline becomes a pathway to prison as students who are subjected to harsh school penalties face a higher likelihood of being arrested and incarcerated as an adult. And despite the progress made in places like California, which has reduced the number of suspensions and expulsions across the board, the racial disparity in discipline persists. 

What’s often lost in discussions of the school to prison pipeline is the hand that sets the wheel in motion. Last summer, one of my colleagues suggested that when it comes to Black students, there’s not much difference between cops and teachers. This was in early June, at the height of the protests over the murder of George Floyd, which might explain why I initially dismissed his suggestion as utterly out of hand. How could any harm done by a teacher to a Black student ever come close to the harm done that has been done to Black people and the Black community by the racist machinery of policing and mass incarceration? The very suggestion struck me as absurd. 

Some months later, I’m no longer so sure. Labaree writes that in order to “rise to [the] challenge” of teaching (i.e. survive the ordeal) many teachers “turn [their] classroom into a personal fiefdom, a little duchy complete with its own set of rules and its own local customs.” As teachers, we must face the fact that these rules and local customs of our classrooms are the tools with which Black and Brown students are disproportionately targeted and punished (something that is often true of our grading and assessment as well). And with no one there to break through our isolation and hold us accountable for our actions, or suggest that there might be a better way, one that is not instinctively punitive, these small injustices build into a greater one, even as it remains mostly invisible. Whatever personal price the private ordeal of teaching exacts, it unquestionably inflicts far greater harm on the lives of too many Black and Latinx students. 

We should not, therefore, automatically assume the mere existence of teacher unions will magically erase racist beliefs, or more importantly, lead to changes in behavior that would eliminate racial inequities in our classrooms. If that were true, the school to prison pipeline and the achievement gap would have been erased a long time ago. Schools are structurally unique workplaces where the experience of isolation—not to mention decades of systematic underfunding—make it incredibly difficult to avoid replicating the racially biased outcomes rooted in the larger society. For schools to ultimately become spaces that help achieve antiracist ends, we must demand more collaboration time, change our approach to student discipline, and then, most importantly, organize our communities in a larger political struggle to achieve a more equitable distribution of economic resources.

Towards Collaborative and Restorative-Based School Cultures

Unlike most other professions, K-12 teachers do not spend much time around other adult colleagues; instead, nearly all of our time is spent with children and young adults. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with this. The work of educating young people is important, meaningful, and deeply rewarding, and is the primary reason most teachers choose the profession in the first place. Teachers should spend most of their day working with their students. 

The problem, as outlined above, is that teachers are given very little time to collaborate with other teachers. If you teach at a relatively large school, it is not uncommon to go weeks, if not months, without speaking to some of your fellow colleagues, let alone meeting with them to plan curriculum and/or experiences for students. This needs to change. We must shift the structure of the school day so teachers spend more of the school day working in teams with their colleagues on curriculum. To that end, teacher unions should prioritize winning increased prep time during the school day for teachers to engage in such collaboration, along with the corresponding resources and increased staffing to make such an arrangement possible. Giving teachers increased collaboration time would not only lead to better student outcomes, it would also help foster healthier, more collaborative school cultures where teachers feel more supported. These efforts must also be paired with a similar push to bring more teachers of color i[1] nto the profession. Breaking teachers out of their forced isolation is all well and good, but it is critical that teacher workspaces are populated with diverse and divergent voices, especially if we want to mitigate white racism in both belief and deed. For that reason, it is just as important for teacher unions to demand more funding for pathways and programs aimed at diversifying the overall teaching workforce. 

Much as teachers need a more collaborative stance towards each other, we also need a less punitive approach towards our students. Without a change in our approach to discipline, one can easily imagine a diverse team of teachers collaborating harmoniously (to plan a culturally responsive curriculum no less!) and yet still perpetuate racist disciplinary practices. That is why in addition to shifting towards a more collective practice of teaching, we also have to rethink how we relate to our students. 

The culture of public school tends to incentivize control when it should really prioritize relationships. The unmanageable working conditions many teachers face (the large class sizes, the lack of resources, etc.) make it feel as though the brute exercise of power and control is the only realistic way you can accomplish any teaching. This holds true even when you are fully aware of how devastating that power can be on the lives of students, particularly Black and Latinx students (Asian students certainly face racism, but in terms of school discipline, it falls disproportionately on Black and Latinx students). The material conditions inside schools shape teacher decisions as much as student outcomes, and we cannot ignore this fact. Drastically reducing class sizes and giving educators the resources they need to succeed are key to eliminating racist and unjust discipline.

That being said, we don’t have to wait for the schools students truly deserve to make positive and proactive changes. While susceptible to being co-opted and not implemented with fidelity, restorative justice practices hold great promise to improve relationships between students and teachers. Locals like the Chicago Teachers Union and United Teachers of Los Angeles have made forceful cases in support of restorative practices, and districts like Oakland Unified have proven that repudiating punitive practices like suspensions and expulsions and replacing them with a restorative justice approach produces better outcomes. Restorative justice is arguably the single most important change schools can implement to improve the racial climate. Teacher unions should not only fight for it but should work to make RJ practices as central to the profession as academic freedom is.

To recap: more collaboration time, more Black and Brown teachers, and more restorative justice. It’s not an exhaustive list, and with respect to the larger structure of public schooling, these changes would actually be more modest than revolutionary. But all three would help advance racial equity in our schools.

Ending Racism Requires Redistributing Wealth

The agenda outlined above would lay the groundwork for more equitable outcomes in our schools. But in terms of eliminating the larger racial disparities in our society, it won’t be sufficient. Simply put, we cannot address the impacts and legacy of racism without redistributing wealth. Take, for example, the proposal to diversify the teaching workforce. The net positives that would hopefully result from more teachers of color in the profession, things like reduced instances of racist discipline towards Black and Brown students and more interracial racial camaraderie and solidarity amongst the profession as a whole, will not undo the damage done by racism, damage that is inextricable from capitalism and economic inequality. That is because the brunt of the racism suffered by the Black community, for example, comes down to economic exploitation, be it in jobs, healthcare, schools, housing opportunities, wealth, or the environment. 

We cannot educate the next generation of students out of this exploitation. Those who claim otherwise—whether through the language of grit, or no excuses, or teacher effectiveness—are wrong. To end this economic exploitation, which is racism, we need a policy response that massively shifts wealth and resources to marginalized communities and the working class more broadly. To be more explicit, we need an economic program focused on improving the lives of the working class while remedying racial inequity, the likes of which has already been proposed. Such a program would be anchored around universal policies like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, Baby Bonds, and a federal jobs guarantee. While it is important to recognize the legitimate push for targeted universalism to remedy historical discrimination, universal economic policies like Medicare for All are the best way forward politically. Not only are they conceptually aligned with the universal mission of public education, policies that ensure everyone gets something are necessary to build a movement strong enough to win the changes that will actually improve the lives of the working class and the poor.

Teacher unions should embrace such an ambitious agenda. Teachers are fond of pointing out that our working conditions are students’ learning conditions, and this is true as far as it goes. But what is equally true is that students’ ability to learn is also based on the material conditions of their home life and the overall wellbeing (or lack thereof) of their community. Student achievement has long been understood as correlated with family income, but the converse is equally true. Poverty, unstable housing, poor healthcare—or just the prospect of a future dominated by environmental collapse—all of these can undermine a student’s ability to learn.The same holds true for racism. As teachers, our concern for our students should not end at the classroom door. We must make it our business to demand that all students have the material and psychological conditions in their home lives to flourish in the long term. 

One might reasonably ask, “How are public school teachers, who are already asked to fix too many of society’s problems, supposed to win changes like Medicare for All in addition to everything else they are charged with?” As ludicrous as it may sound, teacher unions have exactly that potential. NEA and AFT, the two largest national teacher unions, have between them nearly 5 million members, which represents a large share of the overall teaching workforce in the United States. Based on these numbers, conservative teacher union critic Terry Moe has written, “teachers unions are among the most powerful interest groups of any type in any area of public policy.” Setting aside the hyperbole and erroneousness of the statement, consider Moe’s underlying belief: teacher unions have tremendous power. While they might not have the outsized influence Moe ascribes to them, teacher unions do have real power. The trouble is that for the most part, that power is either not recognized or not wielded, especially on economic matters that impact the working class. Union density is, of course, no stand-in for actual power; but it does represent a potential. If teacher unions awoke to this latent power, they could become a force that wins policy victories that advance racial justice as well as the interests of the entire working class. 

Building Left Organization Through the Schools

One of the more popular images from the 2019 Oakland Teacher strike, created during the Oakland Education Association’s pre-strike Art Build, was a screen printed picket sign that read “Public Schools Are the Heart of the Community.” This sentiment neatly captures the fact that when it comes to developing deep relationships with families and communities, there is no other institution quite like the schools, and no other profession quite like teaching. Despite the isolation we experience in our day-to-day work, teachers nonetheless form significant bonds with the families and communities we serve. Our contact with students and parents brings us close to the community, and along with that closeness comes high levels of trust. Given our presence in every corner of the nation, our proximity to families, and the trust that communities place in us, teacher unions are uniquely well-positioned to organize working and middle class people onto a Left economic program. Schools and teachers can be more than just the heart of the community; we can serve as the nerve centers from which the wider community is organized to engage in a political struggle to end both racism and poverty through a fairer distribution of the enormous wealth of this nation. The idea here is not that schools and teachers are responsible for solving economic inequality. It is that teacher unions should use the relationships between public schools and the community to organize for better economic conditions for everyone.

What this would look like in practice would be neither groundbreaking nor particularly complex: both AFT and NEA would explicitly endorse something like Medicare for All (similar to what National Nurses United has already done), and then work with local unions across the nation to organize and build support until such time as the bill is signed into law. This organizing would not focus exclusively on electoral politics, though that would certainly be a critical sphere of engagement. Rather, the policy platform would become a central bargaining demand for locals across the nation, a move that would help build the political power necessary (through popular education, parent and community organizing, and coordinated, large-scale strikes), to win the day. 

Realizing this strategy will not be easy. It will require significant time, effort, and resources. But it is precisely because of our relationship with the community that teachers are the best—and perhaps only—group with the relationships, the reach, and the power to pull it off. The real question is whether NEA and AFT, which have the resources and wherewithal to implement something along these lines, are willing to make it a priority.

The Society Our Students Deserve

If the ultimate goal of teaching is to help our students lead meaningful lives and contribute positively to our society, then we, as teachers, have an obligation to ensure that the society we are shepherding them into is economically fair and racially just. For educators, the most practical place to begin is at the school district level, with a fight for more collaboration time, increased racial diversity in the profession, and a replacement of punitive disciplinary policies with restorative justice. But it must not end there. Teachers, and our unions, must be willing to take on the bigger challenge of organizing parents and the community in the struggle to win a working class economic agenda that benefits all students, no matter what the color of their skin. We have the access, the trust, the credibility, and yes, the power, to win such an agenda. Obviously, teachers alone cannot end racism and economic exploitation in America. But we can and should use the collective power of our unions to help organize a working class movement capable of winning the kind of society we can be proud of—the kind of society our students deserve.

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