In a remarkable feat that contributes to the historical subfields of education, labor, and civil rights, Jesse Chanin offers a well-researched and insightful history of the successes and failures of the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO) between 1968 and 2008. The book offers several key interventions. First, it tells a story of the formation of UTNO in the 1960s on the coattails of the civil rights movement and around the principles of cross-class and cross-racial alliances that could achieve Black Power. The union formed around a core group of well-educated Black women who led a community-wide coalition that included White and Black families, business owners, and Black churches. During a strike in 1974, UTNO members were able to convince the city, including the school board, that they as teachers represented the needs of their students and the broader community and deserved a long-term contract. As Chanin put it, “The union offered a place where both Black and white teachers could experience a genuine sense of interracial democracy and decision-making, in a way that city and state politics often did not” (p. 59).
The union would struggle both to maintain these resources and these community alliances in the 1970s and 1980s, but it would do better than many other teachers’ unions that faced a climate of austerity and “financial crisis” in other cities. When union membership grew in the 1980s, the teachers used dues to create professional development programs that helped union members get additional instruction and training and access to more teaching resources. These additional professional development resources connoted respect. Teachers also worked to create spaces for “participatory democracy” within the union. However, the union faced a political environment that was increasingly hostile to the power of teacher unions, within both schools and communities. Chanin emphasizes the popularity of the report A Nation at Risk (1983), which critiqued majority-Black schools as “failing” and suggested that teacher tenure was at the heart of the problem. Even Al Shanker, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, affirmed many of these ideas.
Second, Chanin argues that despite rising anti-teacher-union sentiment and the rise of the right-to-work labor regimes in states like Louisiana, UTNO was initially successful at resisting threats to substantial reform. The teachers, Chanin argues, offered a consistent “redistributive agenda” that countered what she calls “neoliberal multiculturalism.” UTNO worked with the city to create ballot measures asking for voters to support public education through a new property tax millage, sales tax increases, and the sale of municipal bonds. Teachers did earn some raises, and 68 percent of union members participated in a strike in 1990. All this success, Chanin suggests, was the result of building a democratic, broad-based coalition that represented not just teachers but the community.
The final third of the book offers a rare exploration of the 1990s and 2000s in which we see UTNO confronting a neoliberal political environment that called for more standardized tests as well as merit-based pay to replace teacher tenure, and that pushed for the growth of charter schools, which operated without accountability to the city. City financial planners liked charter schools because they allowed the city to break the terms of citywide teacher contracts as well as the solidarity among different types of schools across the city. Chanin finds that while the union in the 1990s was relatively successful at limiting the growth of charter schools in New Orleans, union members also became much less confident in UTNO’s ability to represent them and their students. If teachers had previously thought of their union as an organization that they invested in and in turn invested in their welfare, this began to change. As Chanin interprets the story, UTNO devolved in the minds of teachers to a provider of “services, such as protection against unjust termination, but [they] did not see it as an active, democratic project that they had a crucial role in building” (p. 145). That is, the union’s power declined when its members lost hope in its role as a civil rights coalition that represented the community and instead started treating it as a professional association that supported them as individuals.
Chanin sees Hurricane Katrina, which struck in 2005, as a disaster that accelerated many trends that were already underway. In the efforts to quickly rebuild after the hurricane, the city shuttered many public schools, and thousands of teachers lost their union jobs. Charter schools—which rolled back decades of hard-earned stipulations within teacher contracts, including lunch breaks and prep periods—replaced many public schools. The 1990s had already seen the introduction of visiting teachers through Teach For America, but the post-2005 environment saw the rapid displacement of seasoned union teachers with Teach For America volunteers who had no deep commitments to the community. Chanin shows that while civil rights unionism held on longer in New Orleans than some may have expected, it ultimately met a major defeat about twenty years ago.
One of the book’s strengths is its careful attention to detail. It builds not only from UTNO’s preserved and published records but from fifty-one separately archived oral histories that the author collected herself and analyzes judiciously. In a profound afterword, Chanin elaborates on these sources and her methodology and positionality. She articulates in fine detail how charter schools differ from public goods in workplace discipline and thus why they constitute profoundly different types of “public” institutions. As a civil rights history, too, it is the detailed critique of “colorblind” union rhetoric used by both the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association in the 1990s and 2000s that makes the book outstanding. The book is recommended to all audiences and is sure to become a model for excellent union histories.
