The Teacher Wars (11 page)

Over the next half century, vocationalism remained the ascendant education reform ideology among philanthropists and politicians, not just for black students, but for the children of white immigrants from eastern and southern Europe as well. In the North, white female teachers began to organize in opposition to this agenda. Their protests sparked one of the United States' most powerful and controversial labor movements: the unionization of public school teachers.

THE BIRTH OF TEACHERS UNIONS AND THE BATTLE BETWEEN PROGRESSIVE PEDAGOGY AND SCHOOL EFFICIENCY

One evening in the 1870s, in the prairie town of Morris, Illinois, Michael Haley led his three teenage daughters to the first row of the town's auditorium. They were there to hear a lecture by a famous phrenologist. Maggie, Jenny, and Eliza Haley did not know quite what to expect, only that phrenology was an exciting modern science, and that it had something to do with deducing people's inner qualities by examining the bumps on their heads.

Their father had been working since he was ten years old, when he was hired as a “
jigger carrier” to deliver whiskey to thousands of fellow Irish laborers as they dug the muddy Illinois and Michigan Canal. Since then, Michael Haley had survived a malaria epidemic, learned the skill of stonecutting, and gone on strike for higher wages. Now Haley had a successful cement-manufacturing business, but he hoped for a different life for his six children. They would go to school. Their labor would be easier than his had been.

As a proud Irish American republican,
Michael Haley believed in the promise of utopian socialism and equality before the law. So when the phrenologist that night launched into a reactionary attack on the women's suffrage leader Susan B. Anthony, Haley did something that shocked and embarrassed his daughters. He marched them out of the theater, in full sight of the lecturer and audience. Just outside, he lined the three girls up and addressed them solemnly. “
I don't know Susan B. Anthony and I suppose I never shall,” he said, “but she's a woman who is working for a cause, a just cause, and I
will not allow my children to listen to any half-baked nincompoop who sneers at her.”

In three decades' time, Susan B. Anthony would refer to Haley's oldest daughter, Maggie, as a “
dear friend” and would publicly hail her for continuing the fight Anthony had begun in the 1850s: the feminist organization of women schoolteachers. As the most prominent leader of the nation's first teachers-only union, the Chicago Teachers Federation, Margaret Haley succeeded where Anthony had failed. She won higher pay and significant political power for female teachers, in large part because of her canny ability to forge alliances with male unions, just as organized labor exploded in power at the turn of the twentieth century. Seven years after Anthony's death, in 1913, Haley even played a crucial role in winning Illinois women the right to vote.

But first, Maggie Haley was a teacher. At sixteen she graduated from a Catholic girls' boarding school, then taught in the countryside for several years. Frustrated that she earned only
$35 per month (she thought she deserved $40) and eager to improve her teaching practice, she enrolled at the famed Cook County Normal School, where she studied with
Francis Wayland Parker, the pedagogue John Dewey would celebrate as the “father” of progressive education. Parker, a Civil War veteran, believed that instead of reading aloud listlessly from textbooks, teachers should create their own teaching units and lesson plans, and that students should take classes in art, music, and drama. Haley left behind few written recollections of her teaching years, but she did express pride in belonging to the intellectual community gathered around Parker, which later included other educational leaders she admired, such as Dewey and the progressive Chicago schools administrator Ella Flagg Young.

In 1884 Haley was hired to teach sixth grade at the Hendricks School in the foul-smelling Packingtown neighborhood of Chicago's South Side, the area immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his muckraking novel about slaughterhouses,
The Jungle
. There she finally earned
$40 per month, but like many Chicago teachers, she began to feel she was vastly underpaid. Chicago was a prosperous, expanding city; between 1890 and 1904 it would gain
830,000 residents. After the economic crash of 1893, business boomed again. The city was
home to a thriving reform scene, driven by innovative thinking in the social sciences and progressive politics, much of it coming from the newly established University of Chicago. Yet you would not have known any of this from looking at the city's schools. Haley's students—between forty and sixty cramped in a classroom, sometimes with too few chairs and desks to go around—were the children of Irish- and German-born butchers; some spoke little English, and, in the absence of child labor laws, most would leave school permanently at the age of eleven or twelve to go to work. Each subsequent year brought a more challenging student population into Chicago public schools, from Italy, Russia, and Bohemia. Yet annual pay for entry-level elementary school teachers, 97 percent of whom were women, had been frozen for twenty years at $500 (about $13,300 in today's dollars). The school system's budget was so strapped that teachers were sometimes paid not in wages, but in “
warrants” promising future pay, which teachers had to cajole grocers and landlords to accept in lieu of cash. Education policy was set by a school board appointed by the mayor, and board members were lobbied aggressively by Chicago's business and media elite, who resisted taxes that paid for
“fads and frills” like foreign language classes. The
Chicago Tribune
editorialized against the preposterous idea of preparing “the children of working men” for college, and called summer school courses for poor students “alluring luxuries.” The situation in Chicago was similar to that in other American cities at the turn of the century. Prominent education reformers across the country, such as Columbia University philosophy professor Nicholas Murray Butler, the founder of the school that would later be known as Teachers College, lobbied to replace teachers' and politicians' judgments on curriculum with education policies set by college-educated bureaucrats. These administrative progressives forged an alliance with business leaders, who liked the idea of top-down, expert management of schools, yet deplored paying higher taxes to fund public education.
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In Chicago the most prominent reformer was William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago. Harper chaired a mayoral commission tasked with centralizing the curriculum, pedagogy, and administrative structure of the public schools. Like Charles William Eliot, the Harvard president, Harper believed Horace Mann's feminization of teaching had been a major misstep. His commission hoped to
freeze a planned $50 annual raise for female teachers, saying the city should instead prioritize hiring and promoting male educators. When a group of female teachers complained to him, Harper responded that they should be happy they earned as much as his wife's maid.

These were the events that motivated, in 1897, the founding of the Chicago Teachers Federation, the precursor to today's American Federation of Teachers. The National Education Association, in which Susan B. Anthony had organized New York's female teachers, dated back to 1857 and included teachers, administrators, and even college professors and presidents. The NEA was genteel. It conducted research on education and advocated politely for school funding. From the start, the Federation intended to be a totally different animal: a militant organization modeled after the male labor unions to which the fathers and brothers of Chicago teachers belonged.

The purpose of the Federation was to aggressively advocate for higher teacher pay and for teachers' freedom on lesson planning and student discipline; the organization sought to counter the influence of school reformers who believed non-college-educated women were unqualified to make autonomous choices within their classrooms. The Federation held its first meeting on March 16, 1897, and by June had attracted over 2,500 members, about half of the elementary school teaching force. Two years later, after a painstaking
organizing campaign throughout Chicago neighborhoods, Margaret Haley presented the Illinois state legislature in Springfield with a fifty-thousand-signature petition against William Rainey Harper's school reform bill. The legislation would have given the school superintendent the exclusive right to hire and fire teachers for neighborhood schools, while keeping teacher salaries frozen and assigning every Chicago child to either the vocational or academic track, which would have been segregated from one another. The bill was defeated. Teacher unionism had arrived as a potent force in American civic life.

At her 1899 inauguration, the Federation's longtime president, Catherine Goggin, sketched a vision of a political, not just an educational, organization:

Goggin's explicit threat to the city's moneyed interests—that they should support teachers or be made to pay—captured the spirit of early teacher unionism. While the stunted pre—Civil War efforts to empower female teachers had been led by women like Anthony who were born into relatively privileged and well-educated families, the Irish Catholic–dominated Federation had a more innate feel for working-class politics. Haley, in her job as the Federation's business representative, was known as the union's heavy, a five-foot-tall “
lady labor slugger” with penetrating blue eyes, unafraid of knocking heads at city hall or in the state capitol. At the turn of the century, before women could even vote, it was shocking to see female schoolteachers organize into a fighting force for higher wages. The
Chicago Chronicle
editorial board typified the reaction of the popular press, calling the Federation “impertinent” in its demands for
better pay, and complaining that “
school ma'ams as lobbyists left an unfavorable impression.” Observing the Federation from afar, the
Atlanta Constitution
wondered, “Does Unionism Make Girls Masculine?”

Haley seemed to delight in such criticism. She identified as a proud “fighting Irish” and a feminist, too: “To win rudimentary justice, women had to battle with brain, with wit, and sometimes even with force,” she wrote in
Battleground
, her autobiography. “If you happened to be born wanting freedom for yourself, for your group, for people at large, you had to fight for it—and
you had to fight hard.”

Haley's combative posture would not always serve the long-term interests of the teachers union movement well. But at the birth of the Chicago Teachers Federation, she stage-managed several spectacular political victories. In 1900, at the age of thirty-eight, she took what would become a permanent leave of absence from the classroom in order to investigate why, at the height of the late-1890s economic boom, the city of Chicago claimed it had too little money to unfreeze teachers' wages and secure their newly established pension system. After immersing herself in the details of Illinois tax, corporate, and real estate law, Haley discovered two startling facts. First, land granted to the common schools system under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 had been rented by the Chicago school board to some of the city's major corporations for far below market rates, on ninety-nine-year leases with few opportunities for reassessments of the properties' real values. The
Chicago Tribune
, for example, was paying the school board about
half the market value for its headquarters in the desirable Loop district. The
Chicago Daily News
enjoyed a similar sweetheart deal. The underpayments became a scandal when the Federation publicized the fact that the president of the school board was also the
Tribune'
s attorney. All in all, if the downtown square mile owned by the Chicago Public Schools had been competently managed, each year it would have brought in
$200 million in rent, which could have been used not only to pay teachers more, but to improve every aspect of Chicago public education. While the Federation did not succeed in raising the suspect rents, its campaign on the issue helped attract early support from the city's
influential good-government reformers, like Jane Addams, the settlement house crusader, and Carl Sandburg, the socialist journalist.

Haley's second major finding had even greater implications for the Chicago public sector and won her the admiration of populist progressives across the United States. She discovered that the state of Illinois was not enforcing its own laws on corporate taxation. Seven for-profit public utilities, including streetcar, gas, electricity, and telephone companies, paid no taxes at all on their corporate franchises, costing the city millions in lost revenue. On October 29, 1900, the Teachers Federation hosted a dramatic mass meeting to publicize the lawsuit it had filed to compel the state to collect these taxes. Hundreds of teachers and other interested citizens crowded into the Central Music Hall downtown. The tone of the meeting was indignant. Female activists accused male businessmen of knowingly dodging their taxes over the course of decades, as politicians looked the other way. After Haley gave an exhaustive report on thirty years of Illinois tax history, the stately Jane Addams rose to frame the fight in more visceral, sentimental terms. Additional tax revenue could pay not only for higher teacher salaries, she said, but also for better public sanitation, to protect poor children's health. When businessmen evade taxes, “
property … loses its moral value,” Addams said, and she called on the entire community to unite to “bring [businessmen] back to a sense of moral obligation, in order to make it seem righteous to pay taxes—because I imagine that to many men, it seems righteous to evade taxes if you can do it in the interests of the stockholder.”