The Washington Post - USA (2020-07-27)

B2 eZ re the washington post.monday, july 27 , 2020

education

BY JON MARCUS

Stately and historic Power
Street in Providence, R.I., feels se-
date at t he b usiest of times, but on
a Friday in the midst of the pan-
demic, i t was as silent as a stopped
clock.
Then, over College Hill, came a
scruffy caravan of vehicles hung
with protest signs, blaring horns
and blasting the Woody Guthrie
lyrics of the labor movement bal-
lad “ Union Maid.” (“I’m sticking to
the u nion till the day I die.”)
Behind the wheels were gradu-
ate students from Brown Univer-
sity, trying to get the attention of
the school’s president, Christina
Paxson, with this noisy drive-by of
her official red-brick, white-
trimmed 1922 m ansion set behind
walls of s tone and w rought i ron.
The disruption of this genteel
neighborhood exemplified the
growing anger of students like
these, who, at Brown and else-
where, have been demanding
higher stipends and better bene-
fits in exchange for the work they
do as teaching and research assis-
tants.
Before the coronavirus pan-
demic, there seemed little chance
they would get anywhere. Con-
tract and c ollective bargaining n e-
gotiations had been dragging on
for years at the few universities
that would entertain them; other
schools refused to recognize grad-
uate worker unions at all. The
Trump administration’s National
Labor Relations Board, or NLRB,
had approved a policy change ef-
fectively denying graduate work-
ers a t private universities the auto-
matic right to unionize. Graduate
teaching assistants in California
who staged a wildcat strike were
summarily fired at the beginning
of March.
But quietly, and overshadowed
by everything else that has been
happening, graduate students in
the past few months have won
surprising victories that are the
culmination of decades of effort.
They and others chalk this up, at
least in part, to universities’ need
for t heir labor in what promises to
be a tumultuous fall.
Four private universities —
American, Brown, Georgetown
and Harvard — have reached con-
tract deals with their graduate
workers since the end of January.
That doubles the number of pri-
vate institutions at which gradu-
ate unions now have contracts.
(The others are Brandeis, Tufts,
the New School and New York
University.)
Columbia wrapped up its first
contract with postdoctoral stu-
dents and is in talks with its other
graduate workers. Hard-fought
collective bargaining agreements
have been approved during the
pandemic at public universities,
too, including Oregon State Uni-
versity.
Meanwhile, graduate students
at m ore than 75 universities i n the
United S tates and C anada have for
the first time organized them-
selves into a loose alliance de-

manding better pay and protec- tions, driven by anger over inci- dents such as the firings in Califor- nia and new momentum from the recent unexpected successes. “There’s this huge synergy because p eople a re r ealizing what w e can actually accomplish,” said Kaitlyn Hajdarovic, the graduate students’ bargaining committee co-chair at Brown, where she is a research assistant and doctoral student in neuroscience. Though none o f the universities would answer the q uestion o f why they have a greed now, of all times, to long-resisted contracts with graduate students, independent experts say the motivations in- clude p olitics a nd public relations. The schools “don’t want to look bad, and they especially don’t want to look bad with regard to their graduate students in the midst of a pandemic and a reces- sion,” said Gary Rhoades, the director of the Center for the Study of Higher E ducation a t the U niversity of Arizona. Graduate students have taken advantage of that fear with such spectacles as the noisy drive-by at Brown. There was also a car and bicycle protest outside the lead negotiator’s house at Oregon State, complete with a trumpeter playing improv jazz and military marches, and a campaign called Chop from the To p demanding pay cuts for top administrators to avert layoffs for the lowest-paid workers. “If I’m in t hose a dministrations, my s ense w ould be, ‘ Let’s take care

of this issue. We’ve got so much other stuff going on right now, this is an easy one,’ ” R hoades said. Public support for graduate workers was evident when, in March, the University of Califor- nia at Santa Cruz dismissed more than 40 graduate teaching assistants f or striking a nd w ithholding grades to demand a cost-of-living raise. Even though the students were in violation of a no-strike clause i n their contract, t he firings triggered protests across the Uni- versity of California system. (UC- Santa Cruz in J uly announced t hat it will let the fired students reap- ply f or j obs.) And when Trump appointees on the NLRB ruled that graduate research and teaching assistants should be considered primarily students, n ot workers — reversing their Obama-era right to unionize — “that mobilized even more people because the battle lines were clear,” R hoades said. “The larger political environ- ment is catalyzing the movement and makes management more willing to come to the table and acknowledge that they don’t want to be seen as being in bed with the Trump administration.” Graduate students who reached contract deals in the past few months speculated that their universities also wanted to avoid disruptions like the 29-day strike on the eve of final exams staged in December by graduate teaching assistants and tutors a t Harvard. They said negotiators seemed eager to make sure they had

enough g raduate workers for a fall semester already expected to be challenging. “On the G eorgetown side, there was t his pressure to wrap u p these negotiations and just have it set- tled,” said Jewel To masula, a doctoral student and research fellow there and incoming president of the Georgetown Alliance of Grad- uate Employees. “The sense I had was that they just wanted to get this done because they have other things t o deal with.” At Brown, Hajdarovic said, the university had stopped meeting with the union in January and February and canceled further sessions at the start of the pandemic shutdowns. Then the talks were suddenly put b ack o n a week- ly schedule, and they began to make progress on stipends and other financial issues that had pre- viously s talled. “Their tune on that really shift- ed,” she said. “My view was that they wanted to get the financials locked d own.” In this crisis, university administrators “ understood just how important and essential the g raduate workers are,” said Randi Weingar- ten, president of the American Federation of Te achers, which helped organize the graduate unions a t Brown, Georgetown and Oregon State. ( Harvard’s graduate workers are affiliated with the United Auto Workers; American’s are with the Service Employees International Union.) “Teaching assistants, who are mostly graduate workers, a re basi-

cally the muscle of what makes things w ork i n a university,” Wein- garten s aid. “They know w here t he keys are.” The pandemic created height- ened urgency for t he g raduate students, too. Most have had to teach online, or their labs were closed, jeopardizing deadlines and financial aid. Some were called back to help with coronavirus-related research, and they were concerned about their health. International graduate students fear they will lose their visas or be deported. Usually buried in their lab work, graduate research assistants have traditionally been less involved in union efforts than graduate teaching assistants, or TAs, Hajdarovic said. “Most of the organizing comes from TAs. They can see how they’re being pushed around by the university, and how the university benefits from their work.” But when the pandemic de- scended, she said, “more people started to realize that maybe the university didn’t have their best interests in heart, that it wasn’t going to take care of them. I had people in my d epartment w ho had never been interested in the union before, who reached out to me to say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do about that?’ ” Existing or anticipated budget cuts on some campuses added yet another layer of anger and deter- mination t o this m ix. “Crisis does radicalize people,” said Alexandra Adams, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at

Rutgers University at Newark, which has declared a financial emergency and a nnounced layoffs and a s alary f reeze. Graduate students at Rutgers, which is a public institution, already have a union and a contract that took 14 months to hammer out, shielding them from losing their jobs and health-care cover- age, though a scheduled cost-of- living raise may be postponed. Seeing how a contract can protect them at a time like this, Adams said, is m otivating graduate union organizers elsewhere to redouble their efforts. At Georgetown, after five years of organizing and 13 months of collective bargaining, graduate workers got between 12 and 15 percent increases in their stipends, plus paid parental leave and dental insurance for doctoral candidates and cost-of-living rais- es in the contract’s second and third years. Harvard graduate workers, who started organizing nearly f ive years ago and spent 19 months negotiating, won a 2.8 percent raise, funds to help with health and child care, and protection from harassment, including from supervisors. Brown’s deal includes a 3.7 percent stipend increase, an appoint- ment extension for some graduate workers — to m ake up for the t ime they lost to the pandemic shutdowns — and full reimbursement for coronavirus testing and treat- ment. Graduate workers elsewhere also have been making g ains. A bill was introduced in the Georgia General Assembly proposing that student fees be waived for research and teaching assistants. Graduate s tudents a t the U niversity of Colorado at Boulder helped launch an all-worker union, the United Campus Workers Colora- do, across every campus in the public u niversity system. Several private universities s till refuse to negotiate with graduate workers’ unions, including the University of Chicago. Because of the NLRB decision, those that have agreed to c ontracts are under no requirement to renew them. And the Harvard deal is for one year, n ot several years, a s the graduate workers’ union there had wanted. Still, said Aparna Gopalan, a doctoral student in anthropology at Harvard and an active member of the u nion on that c ampus, graduate workers during the pandemic have gained a big foothold. “This year is going to be the most volatile year any of us have ever had,” Gopalan said. “A t least we’ll have the contract to fall back on. A nd w ho k nows w here w e’ll be in a year?” [email protected]

this story about graduate student workers was produced by the hechinger report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

Pandemic leads to long-sought gains for graduate students

steven senne/associated Press

Graduate student workers at Brown University and schools around the country have spent years demanding better benefits for their labor.

“Senior of the Year.” She is policy coordinator for the mayor of Pittsburgh and will enter the University of Pittsburgh’s law school in 2021. Her story will help undermine what her father calls “the narrative of underachievement” that has limited opportunities for black children at her old school district. Walter Fields and district communications director Anide Eustache both said the Black Lives Matter movement encouraged important conversations about race in their community. T he school board voted 9 to 0 in favor of the settlement. More needs to be done to persuade schools to offer challenging courses to students who don’t speak up for themselves or have parents who didn’t go to college. If a student with a family as supportive as Jordan Fields’s had to suffer under a discouraging teacher, what hope is there for those elsewhere who have nobody telling them how good they can be? [email protected]

undemanding lower level options, but most schools have yet to adopt that attitude. Better data, like that being collected under the South Orange-Maplewood settlement, may help reveal that schools with similar student bodies can have widely varying success challenging students. By standard measures in 2017, Columbia High was a near twin of James Hubert Blake High School in Silver Spring, Md. Columbia’s enrollment was 1,850. Blake’s was 1,600. The portion of black students was 45 percent at Columbia and 41 percent Blake. The portion of low-income students was 21 percent at Columbia and 35 percent at Blake. Ye t at Blake, where taking AP was actively encouraged, the AP exam participation rate was 50 percent higher. A higher portion of Blake seniors than Columbia seniors had passing scores on AP tests. Jordan Fields, who eventually took AP courses in calculus and English, graduated with honors this year from the University of Pittsburgh and was named

each of the other four. Schools officials promised improvement, but progress was slow. High school officials told one African American student that h e couldn’t take honors history and barred another from honors geometry, e ven though the students had teacher and counselor support. When a school dance group performed to Billie Holiday’s song about lynching, “Strange Fruit,” a group of white teachers complained it made them feel unsafe in the auditorium. The settlement approved by the school board on July 13 and other actions by the district are designed to improve the school culture, as well as integrate the elementary schools and facilitate black students’ overall enrollment in advanced classes. Sadly there is still no obvious legal bar in the United States to the widespread tendency to hold back students with just average grades — whatever their ethnicity — from advanced courses like AP. Good teachers know struggling in such classes is better preparation for college than leaving students in

group tried to work with the district but did not get what they wanted. They sought an end to steering black students into lower level classes. They wanted desegregation of an elementary school system where 58 percent of students in one school were black, compared with less than 20 percent black enrollment in

and thought students in her class (such as Jordan, who had already lettered in basketball and track) should avoid them. Expensive prep schools know that selective colleges love athletic prowess and would never have hired an instructor with such strange ideas. Jordan ignored the anti- sports dictum, but she struggled in the class. The great teachers I know would have helped the student master the subject. This one told Jordan’s parents “she just doesn’t seem to get it” and suggested she forget her dreams of becoming an engineer. Her parents had experienced enough uncomfortable moments in the racially mixed district to wonder if the teacher’s biggest problem might be that Jordan was black. Walter Fields, a longtime journalist and civil rights activist, founded the Black Parents Workshop Inc. and with his wife filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights about black students being put onto lower academic tracks. Before later filing a federal lawsuit, Fields said, the parents

An unusual legal
settlement just
announced to end
discrimination in
a relatively
affluent New
Jersey school
district traces its
origins to a family
moment six years ago. A well-
educated couple, Walter Fields
and Donna Wharton-Fields,
began to wonder why their
bright daughter’s Algebra 2
teacher had given up on her.
Jordan Fields, then a
sophomore at Columbia High
School in Maplewood, had
scored advanced proficient on
state math tests in middle school.
She received an A in Algebra 1 in
eighth grade. Her parents were
puzzled when she was not
recommended for the ninth
grade geometry course that
would keep her on track toward
Advanced Placement Calculus,
but a word with the principal
and the math department chair
got her in.
The next year she was in
trouble. Her Algebra 2 teacher
announced on Parents Night that
she disapproved of school sports

A family’s uncomfortable moments led to big changes at daughter’s school

Jay
Mathews

Family Photo Jordan Fields, in front of the Supreme Court, celebrates her admission to law school.

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