Union’s call for ‘bold action’ is dicey proposition

“If we don’t get it, shut it down!” That was one of the chants when several thousand people marched in front of the Milwaukee Public Schools central office on April 24.

I discounted that as the kind of rhetoric you hear at such rallies. MPS teachers aren’t actually going to go on strike, are they?

Now I’m not so sure what to expect. The Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association escalated the tension around the MPS budget process — and perhaps around the future of MPS as a whole — with a statement from union Vice President Amy Mizialko Wednesday.

“We are asking every educator in every Milwaukee public school to search your conscience and consider how far each of you is willing to go to guarantee a just budget for students and educators,” Mizialko said. “We are asking every educator to sign and pledge their commitment to act this May. Your signatures are your commitment to take bold action.”

I would not define going along with the budget pretty much as is as “bold action.” Some kind of step, ranging from a “work to contract” campaign in which teachers wouldn’t put in more than their required eight hours a day up to and including a strike — that would be bold action.

(No, I’m not endorsing a strike. I’m just defining terms.)

(The leader of the MTEA’s substitute teacher organization proposed bold action at a School Board budget meeting Thursday night, saying he was going on a hunger strike until the board gives substitute teachers health insurance plans. My goodness. I hope he takes care of himself.)

What could the union realistically be aiming for? I wonder if it is backing itself into a lose-lose situation from its standpoint. I say that for several reasons.

There has been a strong wave of action nationally recently by teachers demanding better pay and better support of their schools. There have been strikes, some statewide, in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Colorado and Arizona, with tens of thousands of teachers protesting at state capitols. Teachers have generally won better pay and school funding.

Are Milwaukee or Wisconsin candidates for similar surges of support for teachers? The MTEA’s Mizialko told me a few weeks ago that she thinks so.

I doubt it. I could be wrong — I wouldn’t have predicted the successful surges of teacher activism in those other states.

But the Wisconsin Legislature won’t take up another state budget for almost a year.

How is anything going to change here in the short run?

Beats me.

The states where teachers rose up are each places where the situations of teachers were worse than they generally are in Wisconsin. I think there is a lot of need in Wisconsin to work on how to treat teachers better. But there doesn’t seem to be a high level of dissatisfaction and anger among teachers statewide currently.

Wisconsin teachers protested in a huge way in 2011 during the battle over the Act 10 cuts in benefits, union power and school funding. The teachers lost. The political influence of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the statewide union organization, is a sliver now of what it was then.

So I’m dubious about a large-scale mobilization of teachers beyond Milwaukee.

Another point: What options are available to the Milwaukee School Board to meet the union’s demands?

Consider a main union demand: No cuts in budgets for schools. The administration’s budget proposal calls for reducing the main allocation for each school by 5% per student. And this comes after cuts in preceding years, including a year ago. The administration says that, when other money that goes to schools is added in, it’s more like a 1.5% cut.

Cuts are bad news. But can the board really do anything major about them, given that the total amount of money available to MPS for next year is going down for reasons that include declining enrollment? Some ideas, like reducing busing, have already been taken off the table.

Pointing to central office as the place to cut is popular. But budget makers say cuts are already being made there and several new administrative positions in the budget are required by grants.

There will be proposals to alter the budget before it is adopted by the board at the end of May. But will they satisfy the union?

Then there are other questions: Are enough teachers in MPS willing to sign up for the “bold action” the union has in mind?

If the union doesn’t get its demands satisfied and undertakes a job action, who will this help?

Might one answer be: Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his re-election campaign, given the general unpopularity of MPS in the eyes of much of the rest of Wisconsin?

Despite Act 10 and the loss of power that came with the effective end of the era of union contracts, the MTEA has remained influential in Milwaukee education politics largely by its relationships with some School Board members and by fighting hard against things it opposes, like charter schools.

Could the union lose influence if it comes out of the current turbulence without enough changes in the budget? In that case, it might lose credibility if it doesn’t take action — and it might lose in other ways if it does.

Sounds like to me like a dicey position for the union. MPS itself is in dicey positions in a few ways — student achievement, money, declining enrollment, staff morale, leadership, competition for hiring and retaining teachers, the general state of children in the city. Dicey, dicey, dicey.

And the dice are being rolled in big ways right now.