Delegates will meet next week in New Orleans in an effort to solidify the National Parents Union, an effort by education reformers to create a national counterweight to the influence of teachers unions.
The organizers, who include Andy Stern, former head of the Service Employees International Union and other SEIU veterans, say they want to use labor organizing methods to make parents into a force for education reform.
“In the beginning, there will be tension with the teachers unions as they adjust to this,” said Stern, NPU’s president emeritus. He said that parents need an organization of their own to represent their interests and those of their children.
Strictly speaking, unions are groups of united workers, not parents, but NPU’s organizers envision a national network of local groups that will function in the same manner as traditional unions. The group will organize parents at the local level to address issues in public education, including how funds are spent, how schools are organized, and holding officials accountable.
Teachers unions have considerable sway over these matters, boosted by a series of strikes over the last two years. Their interests don’t automatically align with those of parents, however, according to NPU organizers. The activists argue the conversation needs to be redirected away from adults and back towards children.
“Teachers can have a seat at the table, but it cannot be our seat,” said NPU president Keri Rodrigues. A longtime SEIU activist, Rodrigues founded the 7,000-member Massachusetts Parents Union after she became concerned that the state wasn’t doing enough for special needs students, including her son. She will be joining delegates from 49 other states in New Orleans in the hopes of creating a national network.
The effort has drawn a frosty reaction from teachers unions. The National Education Association did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner. A spokesman for the American Federation of Teachers pointed to comments earlier this year by Randi Weingarten, American Federation of Teachers president, calling NPU “a Walton-funded group dedicated to attacking” teachers unions and urging Stern to abandon the group.
Stern, 69, is widely credited with helping to grow SEIU into one of the most powerful unions in the nation, but is a controversial figure in labor circles, having clashed with union traditionalists. He pulled SEIU out of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor federation, in 2005, arguing it had lost direction. Since stepping down from SEIU, Stern has endorsed allowing states to request waivers from federal labor and workplace laws, a proposal opposed by other labor leaders.
The NPU is receiving financial support from the Walton Family Foundation, whose namesake retail chain was the target of a long but ultimately unsuccessful organization bid by the United Food and Commercial Workers. The Broad Foundation, an education-oriented philanthropy, is also providing support. Organizers say the foundations aren’t pulling the strings and the financial support was needed to get the effort off the ground.
The organizers envision localized, grassroots activism as the NPU’s focus. It will not promote any particular educational model, such as charter schools, the organizers say. Nor is there an overarching education policy strategy. The individual membership-based groups will instead focus on the relevant issues at the local level, in the same manner that individual unions negotiate with management. The NPU will “provide technical and strategic support to groups nationally in a way that will amplify and deepen all of our empowerment and advocacy efforts,” according to its mission statement.
Groups are expected to, for example, push for more public funding for education, but also for greater oversight over how it is allocated. “The teachers unions just wanted a blank check,” Rodrigues said.
Teachers unions have an inherent advantage in organizing because they are all in the same workplace, the schools, and can leverage their power by striking. Organizing parents will be a tougher effort, the organizers concede, because they’re spread out and, in poor regions, they often work long hours or hold multiple jobs. Stern is confident that they will become involved because there is a “hunger” for it. “I think there will be a huge shift once they see that it is a worthwhile effort.”
