Some context: Why is there a need for a social justice union caucus in Baltimore?

Public school teachers around the country are engaged in strikes. They are walking out of their classrooms and schools to gain attention from state legislators, and not just for better salaries and benefits for themselves (although most American agree that teachers need to be paid more). Teachers’ main demand is for funding for public education. Teachers are calling our attention to a sticky problem that we have in American public education funding: It has remained inequitably distributed for decades, no matter what new initiative comes down the pike. Moreover, this inequitable distribution of funding falls along racial lines.

In Maryland, just like every other state, faces this inequity. The state has repeatedly and consistently underfunded Baltimore City Public Schools (BCPSS) in violation of their own constitutional definition of adequacy, upheld by the courts multiple time. According to Corey Gaber, teacher in Baltimore City schools, “When adding up this gross underfunding of BCPSS, which is nothing short of the crime of theft being committed against the predominantly Black youth who attend these schools, we reach a very rough education debt to Baltimore City of 3.2 BILLION DOLLARS!”

There have been commissions appointed, like the one formed in 2000 named after Alvin Thornton, the Howard University professor leading the commission, that recommended equity in school funding across the state. Following the commission’s report, there would be a phase in process of millions of extra dollars into districts like Baltimore that faced budget challenges every year.  In 2008, the state claimed that there were no funds to provide equitable school funding because of the 2008 financial crisis. Since then, every spring, there is an assembly of hundreds of parents, teachers, administrators and advocates rallying for additional funding from the state to ensure that schools in Baltimore schools can keep their doors open.

In reality, the funding inequity dates back to the Jim Crow period during which Blacks paid taxes in Maryland, but received nothing in return to fund their schools. There were Black schools, but since they did not receive public money, they had crumbling facilities, second or third hand books, and poorly compensated teachers, (Baum, 2010).  In this way, governments “reasserted Black inferiority and proclaimed white supremacy the cultural and economic law of the land and the preferred social order,” (Rooks, 51). Not much has changed since. Nowadays, Black school systems still suffer from unequal funding, have inadequate facilities, like in Baltimore where they cannot even provide heat in the winter to the students.

Part of the problem is that after the Jim Crow era, the state still has not invested in the city and its Black community. A clear example of this was when Spiro Agnew was governor of Maryland. Riots followed after the death of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968, and Agnew summoned Black leaders to the state capitol to demand that they help restore order, but offered nothing to the city or to help Black communities in any way, (Baum, 2010). This lack of investment reveals a clear disdain for the city of Baltimore. Interestingly, Agnew went on to become vice president under Richard Nixon and continued this policy of “benign neglect” of urban centers for decades to come. Cities like Baltimore around the country, therefore, lived with this divestment which compounded over four decades. We can trace the problems that many cities face today to this period.

This disdain for the city became clear when advocates appealed to the state for funds to fix its crumbling school buildings. In 2012, the ACLU’s education reform project along with others proposed leveraging bonds to pay for school renovations that were long overdue. The state agreed as long as the city promised to shut down 26 of its 200 schools. Sheepishly, the city agreed to this, but the process of closing schools has been more difficult than the city bargained for. The city used metrics of under-performance and under-enrollment to close schools. Given the historic lack of investment in the schools and neighborhoods of Baltimore that has occurred over decades (Baum, 2010 Pietila, 2010), the blunt instrument used to determine which schools to close led to closures in the most low income and the neighborhoods with the most Black people, what is now commonly known in Baltimore as the Black Butterfly.

In 2015, public outrage blew up when Freddie Gray, an unarmed Black man, died in police custody. Schools shut down while the city dealt with the public uprising. People poured into the streets demanding justice not just in this case, but justice for the decades of disinvestment into Black communities that resulted in the conditions that created neighborhoods in which poverty was endemic and police brutality was a daily reality. The state, once again, responded with disdain for the city. The governor called the mayor to task for not getting her city under control, and demanded that there be law and order.

A few days later, schools opened again and teachers resumed their work without paper for photocopiers, without heat in the dead of winter, and without support for students experiencing trauma. In spite of this, teachers had discussions with their students about structural racism, the police and police brutality, inter-generational poverty, and how to get involved in making change in the city.

Suddenly, it seemed as if advocating for more school funding was important, but not enough to ensure justice for the teachers and the children of Baltimore. The organizing work at the state level to ensure equity in funding was certainly on everyone’s minds, but there was a sense that more needed to be done, and that the leaders that had been at the helm were not going to be able to bring more back to Baltimore. A change was coming.

The role of the teacher’s union

For many years, the Baltimore Teachers Union (BTU) has argued for more funding and increased salaries for its members. It was so committed to the latter, in particular, that it negotiated a contract which included merit pay. The 2010 contract was hailed by groups across the country promoting school choice as a ”progressive contract.” Many teachers were unhappy with this contract negotiation, and thought it did not address many of the issues that were important to teachers. In fact, teachers voted against the contract in the first round and the AFT (the national teachers’ union) sent in organizers to persuade teachers to agree to the contract. What is more, the superintendent at the time, Andres Alonso, who was instrumental in expanding existing alternative certification programs (i.e. Teach for America), rallied those teachers, in particular, to support the contract, which promised items inline with his neoliberal approach to reform, like an end to seniority as the only way to earn more.

Although there was a public statement expressing excitement about the new contract, city teachers were much more divided than the press about the contract let on. Mirroring union members around the country that were disaffected with their union leadership, many Baltimore teachers wanted their union to fight for more than the bread and butter issues for teachers. They wanted a union that would fight for better conditions for teachers, students, whole schools and communities. These teachers wanted a social justice union, focused on justice for Black students whose neighborhoods have been disinvested in for too long.

Like union leadership in other cities, the leadership in Baltimore’s Teachers Union (BTU) has been the same for many years, elected by a tiny slice of the rank and file membership. Only 1200 or 6000 members voted in the last election in 2016, giving the current president, Marietta English, her eighth term in the position. In the last recent attempt, in 2016, teacher Kimberly Mooney lost to English by a small margin. Among teachers, she lost by only seven votes (paraprofessionals also vote in the election), suggesting that there was and is dissatisfaction with current leadership. Mike Miazga, a veteran teacher, said,“I make more money than I thought I would ever be able to make as a teacher, but there are too many things I don’t hear coming from the BTU. I feel like their focus is not the focus of the teachers and students a lot of times, and I wanted a different voice.”

Over the last several years, there have been groups of teachers trying to organize and present alternative visions of what the union could be, but none have had grown beyond a few members. In 2015, a group of teachers decided to be a little more deliberate in their efforts. They came together informally, just like some groups in the past, but began by learning. They read common texts, visited union caucuses in other cities (i.e. CORE in Chicago), and regularly discussed their vision for schools in Baltimore. Through this process built durable relationships with each other, reached out to others, and began to identify leaders among them. This group called themselves, BMORE, the Baltimore Movement of Rank and File Educators.