Union Challenge: Fight Or Collaborate?

The role of New Haven’s teachers union is being seriously debated for the first time in a decade, as its longtime president faces a challenge from within his ranks.

The primary question: With a new superintendent and a shrinking budget, should the union double down on collaboration? Or try out confrontation? Are teachers better served by working with power or fighting against it?

Cameo Thorne, director of the school system’s restorative justice program, announced this week that she’s challenging Dave Cicarella, the current union president. Cicarella has held the office since 2006.

The campaign for the presidency of the New Haven Federation of Teachers will unfold in break rooms over the next two months. (Kirsten Hopes-McFadden, a teacher at Engineering & Science University Magnet School, has also announced a run for the vice-presidency.) Teachers will receive ballots at their home address in early November, which they must return within the month. The votes will be counted on Dec. 4.

The election could have repercussions throughout the school system and labor force if the city’s largest public-employees union revisits those bargains and steps up other demands.

Anchor Lift-Off

Thorne announced her bid at a campaign kickoff Thursday evening at The Anchor Spa, where about three dozen educators clinked drinks in support. 

At the party, teachers said they felt they needed more support from the district, and they said that Thorne, as a one-time Teacher of the Year, understood the day-to-day realities. ​“The union has been good, but I think it could be even better,” said Victoria Raucci, a teacher at Bishop-Woods.

Other teachers said they envision the union stepping up its public engagement. They believe that the union should be advocating for public education at large, rather than just scoring wins during collective bargaining.

Leslie Blatteau, a teacher at Metropolitan Business Academy, helped organized the New Haven Educators’ Collective, a group that’s tried to put teachers’ voices at the forefront of education policy, independent of labor or corporate interests. She said that part of a teacher’s job needed to be protecting public schools, whether that meant lobbying for expanded magnet school seats at the legislature or pushing back on for-profit tech companies at finance committee meetings.

“We’re not just a union isolated from the rest of the city. We really could be a more community-based union,” she said. ​“I recognize that there’s a lot of work that has to go into that, I think that’s the job of the long-term protection of public schools. Advocacy just doesn’t happen behind closed doors where the decision-makers are. It happens at the grass-roots level with students and families.”

If the public knew about the struggles teachers face, which go hand-in-hand with the challenges students face, voters would rise up in support, Thorne argued in her pitch for teachers’ votes.

Collaboration

In Cicarella, the teachers union has largely stayed on good terms with the district’s leadership. There hasn’t been a widespread outcry over Superintendent Carol Birks’s personnel shakeups.

Take, for example, Birks’s direction that the district needed to cut nearly 135 teaching positions. Cicarella worked with human resources to reshuffle employees into vacancies, hoping to avoid layoffs while matching employees with a good fit.

When 16 school counselors, five library media specialists and seven teachers were let go in late August, Cicarella protested the hiring of multiple six-figure supervisors for bilingual education, which he said led to a lot of phone calls. ​“I don’t know how much more forcefully I could have been,” he said in an interview Friday.

Then he mostly continued working behind the scenes, trying to find spots to bring all the laid-off teachers back. So far, seven have been recalled to work, and many others have found jobs elsewhere.

“Showing up en masse to board meetings and aldermanic meetings, time after time after time, the way some groups do is less effective,” he said. ​“At a certain point, no one is listening. Right or wrong, it becomes white noise.”

Compare that to the role the teachers union played in 1975.

After years of flat paychecks and growing classrooms, teachers went on strike then in violation of state law. A judge immediately ordered them to return to work; 90 educators defiantly refused. So many were arrested on contempt charges that the city jail ran out of cells and bused the arrestees to a military barracks.

After two weeks of their picketing, other municipal unions threatened a general strike. The district relented, providing raises and agreeing to limit class size to 31 students, even if that meant opening up new classrooms.

“Teachers’ Voices Have Been Missing”

In this 2018 union presidency race, Thorne isn’t calling for strikes. But she said she wants to reinvigorate the base, empowering them to take their concerns to the superintendent, the mayor, the governor, and perhaps most importantly, the public.

“Teachers want change. We are the first line of defense for our students. And, yet, we are the last consideration in every district decision,” Thorne said. ​“That is why I am running for union president, to raise teachers’ voices and activate their advocacy so they can do the jobs they were hired to do: ensure students get an excellent and equitable education.”

For the last three years, Thorne has trained New Haven teachers how to address student behavior without resorting to referrals and suspensions. Before that, she taught English for almost two decades.

During that time, she said, colleagues have told her they feel overwhelmed by the job. They dip into their own bank accounts to cover school supplies. They don’t receive the training and support to deal with the gritty realities of urban education. They don’t have the time in the workday to plan their lessons.

Thorne pushed the union leadership and the district administration to get more feedback on teacher morale, focusing in particular on how many hours they put in and how worn out they felt. Thorne said Cicarella didn’t support the idea; Cicarella said he heard Thorne mention it only once, when she dropped off the results.

Eventually, after Thorne went to Dolores Garcia-Blocker, the district’s chief of staff, the school system distributed a wellness survey in 2015. About 550 teachers filled it out, representing around one quarter of the faculty.

The results showed that even veteran teachers were so hampered by stress that they were thinking about calling it quits. A majority said that stress from work affected their mood, their personal health and their ability to teach. About 55 percent said they considered looking for work in other districts; 40 percent said they considered changing careers.

Thorne pointed out that the survey was administered before a superintendent was canned, before the school board bickered for a year over his successor, before three schools were closed, and before three dozen teachers received pink slips.

“White Noise” vs. Results

Cicarella said he believes that people mostly have their minds made up about teachers: Either they’re dedicated and hard-working, or they’re lazy and incompetent. Advocating too vocally often sends people back to those camps to hunker down, and nothing gets accomplished, he said.

“I try not to march, not to chant. That might get a little attention, but the next day it’s forgotten. If we were out there every month marching on different issues, people would say, ​‘Here they go again. My god, what do they want now?’ Even when it’s a legitimate cause, it doesn’t get any attention if it’s the 97th complaint you’ve made,” Cicarella said.

“We have a job to do. People should know what we do and how we do it, but we should get consumed with that.”

Cicarella said he believes the union needs to guard its limited political capital, wielding it judiciously. To him, that means taking a public stance only on ​“big-ticket items,” as he did in opposing Achievement First’s attempt to open a new charter school.

The rest of the time, Cicarella said he feels that it’s better to talk business with administrators and politicians without making a scene.

“It is important to show up for the Board of Alders or the Board of Education, but as a union, you cannot conduct business at those meetings,” he said. ​“You cannot go there, in three minutes of public comment, and try to affect some policy. You can raise awareness, but if you do that at a Board of Ed meeting, you end up calling them out.”

When Cicarella was first elected in 2006, he ousted a leadership that the membership had come to see as ​“apathetic.” Cicarella came in swinging. He filed grievances about every part of the contract that had gone unenforced, focusing in particular on overcrowded classrooms. Management came back at him with complaints, tit for tat.

“The first year was very acrimonious, and that was deliberate,” Cicarella said. ​“I had to show that this was going to be a different day, that all this stuff that used to be okay was not. Downtown had to see it was different leadership, and the teachers had to see it was different leadership.”

After a year of confrontations, Cicarella took a different tact with then-Superintendent Reggie Mayo. They sat down to talk about improving working conditions. They ended up finding a way to drastically cut down on paperwork that teachers were required to fill out.

By 2009, Cicarella hammered out school reforms with then-Mayor John DeStefano and Superintendent Mayo, establishing goals that still largely guide how the district functions. National teachers union President Randi Weingarten came to New Haven to hail the agreement as an example of how school boards and teachers could work together to improve schools rather than fight over corporate-style ​“reform.”

The collective bargaining agreement traded big salary increases for more rigorous evaluation of teachers and shakeups at failing schools.

The evaluations, known as TEVAL, do look at performance on standardized tests, but they also weigh that against significant input from the teachers themselves. Unlike in some districts, they won’t be terminated just because their students don’t hit a certain score on standardized tests.

The reforms drew national attention. Cicarella prevailed against a challenger that year, and no one has run against him since.

Cicarella said his he’s campaigning on his track record. ​“If there’s anytime where we need stability and experience, it’s now,” he said. ​“Things are very difficult for us in Washington and Hartford. This is no time for us to see a change and have someone inexperienced take the helm.”

Wary On ​“Politics”

Even some outspoken teachers who regularly make appearances at school board meetings said they agree with Cicarella. They aren’t so sure the union should try to mobilize into a political force.

“A lot of teachers will never go to the Board of Alders and complain about their boss, nor should they be expected to,” said Jessica Light, a teacher at Worthington Hooker. Right now Cicarella ​“takes the heat for the teachers who don’t feel like they can speak.”

At public meetings, Light has often spoken against the Board of Education’s decisions, leading to tensions with one board member.

“I knew the union would have my back. I knew there was no way to let that cause me professional harm,” she said. ​“The grassroots is all about making more people involved, but to do that, you have to feel safe in your job. I’m not going to feel safe unless I have a president or leadership that can ensure no retribution against me, and I wouldn’t know that with someone new.”