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Editor’s note: This is the final column by Mike Wooten who is adding the title of education activist to a resume that includes passionate teacher and military vet. Because he will be leading a specific organization, his writings on teaching and education will move from Civil Beat’s news pages to our Community Voices section. We are using this opportunity to open our Hawaii Teacher column to an array of new voices, rather than the same writer every week. If you know — or are — a teacher with salient things to say about your profession and your workplace, email us at news@civilbeat.com.

During my first year of teaching, in the days of furlough Fridays, I hated the Hawaii State Teachers Association.

Like many educators, I blamed them for the lost instructional days, their protection of bad teachers and the general lack of planning and collaboration time in our schools.

I fumed at every banal professional development meetings that I attended. I wondered how they could allow schools to consume so much teacher-planning time while simultaneously constricting required work hours so that teachers don’t have time to collaborate significantly within their content areas.

I should mention, I’m usually very pro-labor. I see the decline of union membership in the private sector as a factor that is linked to the decline of the middle class. And I think our country is going to be in big trouble if we don’t do something to address rampant economic inequality.

But when it came to Hawaii’s teacher association, I felt that I would have preferred to suffer the wrath of having no union at all rather than to hear the public voice for teachers push for an agreement that took learning time away from students.
When it comes down to it though, I’m a realist.

Even though I furiously regarded the furloughs as absolutely unacceptable at the time, I came to understand that the union, in its capacity as a labor organization, was trapped. The HSTA didn’t want to hurt students, but it also didn’t want the state to trample on teachers.

This problem bugged me. I started talking to everyone I could about it. The more I talked to teachers about the problems in education and about our union’s role in solving them, the more I came to realize that most of us already know that the policies we need are going to require us to work more — policies that our union has trouble politically advocating for because of the nature of its role and its structure.

For example, great teachers know that if we really want to do education right, and be serious about the results, we need to be working during the summer in our departments to collaborate and plan, in detail, for the school year. But there is no way that our union can acknowledge that we need to work more while also remaining an effective bargaining entity whose job is to ensure that our good intentions aren’t abused.

And the fact that teachers don’t have a public voice that allows them to singularly articulate a desire for higher standards in education leaves most of the rhetoric about improving education to those who don’t have the experience or the knowledge to know how to improve it. Maybe that is a factor that helps to explain why teachers are ignored in the conversation about education policy; we don’t own the winning rhetoric.

I’m tired of our voices being marginalized. It often feels  as though education policy makers believe that special interest groups know more about education than we do.

Even when teachers do get to express their opinion on school policy, we’re often treated as nuisances rather than the leaders that we are. The teachers at our school just overwhelmingly voted to keep our uniform policy in place — a decision that should have been embraced by the whole school — but instead our administration began the year by saying that they didn’t agree with our decision. In doing so, they undermined the high standards for school culture that teachers were asking our leaders to help us create.

That example is indicative of the attitude that teachers face at nearly every level of education policy right now.
In reality, teachers are the experts, and we need to find our voice, and create the forums that will allow us to start writing and promoting the policies we want.

I came to understand the important roll that our union plays, but it isn’t all encompassing. While invaluable as a labor association, the HSTA can’t effectively be the one and only voice for teachers in terms of education policy. And, from a few conversations I’ve had with union representatives, they seem to know it.

Several months ago I reached a tipping point. I’d had enough of teachers not having a voice in education policy or education advocacy. I started working with a few other educators to develop a professional association of teachers as education advocates. We’re calling it, Learning First. We want to use the association to create focus groups and online forums for teachers to come together and write education policy and issue papers.

Then we want to take those suggestions and get them out to the public by creating a network of political and community connections. We want to go to our representative, our neighborhoods, and our Department of Education to open up a document and say: “This is what the teachers in Hawaii think this policy should look like.”

All over this island, we have education-oriented parent groups, community groups, early education groups, and nearly any other stakeholder group that you can think of — except for teachers. How can we not have an association that focuses solely on being advocates for education?

I’m ready for teachers to take control. We know what is best for our students and for our classrooms, we know how to fix education, and we should be writing policy. Let’s take our rightful place.

Michael Wooten is a former sergeant in the U.S. Army and University of California Berkeley graduate who came to Hawaii as a Teach For America teacher in 2008. He earned his masters degree in education from the University of Hawaii and currently teaches English and film at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach.