Education Week - September 11, 2019 - 7

National Principals' Union Chases More Members
Surge of teacher
activism helps
fuel efforts
By Denisa R. Superville
A national union for principals is
campaigning to increase its membership, drafting in part off the momentum created by the surge in educator
activism over the past two years.
The American Federation of School
Administrators, which has been a relatively low-key outfit, most recently
added the local union that represents
the San Diego school district's principals, vice principals, as well as supervisors in charge of food, transportation, and police services.
The union's efforts have involved
cold-calling local principals' groups
and attending principal-focused conferences to get face time with school
leaders and prospective members.
The union's push is also a response
to last year's U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Janus v. American Federation
of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which many saw as a blow to
union membership.
The principals' union has largely operated in the shadows of the two education labor juggernauts-the American
Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association. Its membership-around 15,500 active members and 5,000 retirees-is dwarfed by
that of the two teachers' unions.
Less than a third of the nation's
90,000 or so principals are represented under collective bargaining
agreements. Most principals are part
of professional associations that provide professional development and
advocate for policies that affect principals. And in some states, principals
do not have the right to collective
bargaining.
Whether the push by AFSA will
lead to big membership gains is yet to
be seen. Membership has remained
relatively stable over the past two
years, according to the organization.
The union will have to convince
principals, who may see themselves
as "free agents" or "agents of the
[district] administration" that joining
a union would be beneficial.
"It's always a cost-benefit analysis," said Robert Anthony Bruno, a
professor of labor and employment
relations at the University of Illinois
at Urbana-Champaign."If you judge
that you can see yourself properly as
part of a collective organization and
you believe that that organization can
be effective, then your probability of
joining goes up significantly."
In addition to San Diego, with
about 500 members, the much
smaller administrators' union in
Nashua, N.H., with about 50 members, joined AFSA this year.
Scott Treibitz, a spokesman for
AFSA, said the union has gotten an
increase in calls expressing interest,
including from places that aren't traditionally union strongholds or where
collective bargaining is banned.

The union's effort to enter the charter school sector-last year it passed a
resolution to kick off a program to go
after charter school leaders-has not
been successful so far. While there
was some interest, no new members
have come from the charter sector,
Treibitz said.
The union set up a booth at the July
conference of the National Association of Secondary Schools Principals
in Boston.
"The first reaction [from principals] was 'I didn't know we could
have a union,' " said Treibitz.

More Than Pay
Ernest Logan, the organization's
president and a former New York
City principal, said that most principals who are interested in joining the
union are motivated by more than
pay. (Public school principals make
an average of $98,000 annually, according to recent federal data.)
It's also about the conditions in
children's lives, like housing, health
care, jobs, and apprenticeship programs for students.
The union last year encouraged
assistant principals and principals to
run for local and statewide office and
that will continue to be a focus this
year. Its priorities also include school
safety, funding for professional development for school leaders, and school
leader training.
"[Principals] realize that they cannot meet the challenges that people
are asking them to meet running
schools without coming together
and demanding resources across the
board," Logan said to explain why
San Diego and other local unions
have expressed interest in joining
AFSA, which is affiliated with the
AFL-CIO.
Donis Coronel, the executive director of the Administrators Association
of San Diego City Schools, agreed.
"It's not just about wages," Coronel said. "It's about work conditions,
work-life balance, quality of life in
general in terms of benefits, and always being guaranteed a voice at the
table."
Jon Shelton, an associate professor
at the University of Wisconsin-Green
Bay who studies public sector unions,
is not surprised that there would be a
push to get some principals to unionize
after the victories from teacher strikes.
Some of the same conditions
and issues that drove teachers to
walk out-including overall education funding-are also important to
school leaders and would make their
jobs easier.
Through their strikes and other activism, teachers were "able to shine a
spotlight on the state of education in
this country," he said.
"You can imagine that a lot of
principals also feel like there is a
moment where more intentional
and sustained action could very
well lead to better conditions," Shelton said. "I think there is a greater
sense of what's possible now after
the teacher uprisings."

But whether the national push
gains any traction depends on local
politics, he said. And principals'
unions could face the same criticisms
that teachers' unions do: that they
protect poor performers.
There's also the hurdle of overcoming a culture where principals,
who are seen as supervisors, are not
traditionally union members. State
labor laws, which vary but are largely
based on private sector labor laws
and therefore bar supervisors like
principals from collective bargaining,
could also be major challenges, said
Shelton and Bruno.
"For the most part in the United
States, we have accepted the fact that
[teachers] should be allowed to form
unions and collectively bargain,"
Shelton said. "But principals, as su-

pervisors, they are seen as needing
to kind of stay above the fray."
Coronel said San Diego's affiliation
with the national union will save money
and provide better benefits to members.

Liability Insurance
After the Supreme Court ruling in
the Janus case, Coronel approached
the San Diego union leadership about
affiliating with the national union.
"I felt that our organization was [a]
stand alone [entity} and we needed
to be part of bigger organization that
had national ties and ties with other
administrators' unions outside of
California," Coronel said. Being affiliated with the national union will
give the local union a collective voice
on the national level, access to a staff

attorney and to discounted benefits
like liability insurance, Coronel said.
The national union provides access
to a $1 million professional liability
policy for principals in the event that
they get sued, Treibitz said.
"Those benefits are much greater
than what we, as a 500-person
union, could offer our members,"
Coronel said.
The union was also required to have
an insurance policy for the directors
and officers, at about $20,000 a year,
which AFSA will now provide. The
cost of being part of the national union
comes to less than $8 per member.
The union will cover that cost, Coronel said.
"It was affordable to us," she said,
"and the return on investments
seems like it would be well worth it."

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Education Week - September 11, 2019

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