Last school year, in my final months as a math teacher at Berkeley High, I was approached by a colleague I’ll call K. K needed a union representative for several meetings with administration. (Readers should be aware that all staff have the right to a union rep in any meeting which might result in any punitive or adverse action against them. This includes – and is especially crucial for – all evaluation meetings: your evaluator can say anything they like about you; a too common practice is to follow positive formative reviews with a devastating summative review.) What made K’s request unusual was that K is an IA (a.k.a. IAPP, or paraprofessional; working with special education students, often one-on-one, to provide services and to keep them safe). So K is a member of classified staff, and thus in BCCE, while I as a teacher was in BFT. K told me that there were (and still are) no BCCE site reps at our 3200+ student school. Berkeley High is allotted eight site reps, but the last remaining rep had recently received an involuntary transfer. Two other colleagues had recently quit, and no one wanted to take their place: there had been involuntary transfers and other actions which seemed to be retaliation – to which their union hadn’t responded.

BCCE had been declining for years. Berkeley is a very divided city: White families make one dollar for every 28 cents earned by a Black family. A Black resident is 2.3 times as likely to die in any given year of life than a White resident (Berkeley 2018 Health Status Summary Report). And in Berkeley public schools, “five grade levels separated the reading and math scores of white and Black students.” (Berkeleyside, August 30, 2023) But Berkeley institutions proceed as though entirely ignorant of these facts and the implications for employees and children, so when the Berkeley NAACP launched an investigation into both the City of Berkeley and BUSD ten years ago on behalf of employees and children, the district responded defensively. Some of the district’s loudest employee critics were purged over the years following. Meanwhile, the AFT’s strategy under Randi Weingarten of union-district collaboration was enthusiastically adopted by CFT at the state level, and by BFT and BCCE in Berkeley. The form it took was promises of labor peace by union leaders. BFT routinely accepted “good” contracts “to be proud of,” which in fact, coupled with rising costs of health care, lost BUSD employees 20-30% in constant dollars over two decades. And our unions accepted procedures which made it easier for the district to terminate employees – as K was learning.

K’s evaluation was quite negative – but there was a curious omission: the evaluator had not once observed K in a classroom or elsewhere, doing the job of working with students! K was dinged for poor communication skills, a reference to formal complaints K had made about contract and policy violations which included: not being given IEPs for students he was expected to work with, and for being given no paid time to discuss students or classroom procedures with general ed teachers, nor with the special ed case managers, nor to read and respond to work email. It developed that this evaluator had never observed most of K’s colleagues either, but had given them all exemplary reviews – equally worthless, and in violation of the BCCE contract, which calls for the primary source of an evaluation to be direct observation.

BCCE did nothing to help K. The president was unavailable to attend K’s evaluation. In the end, it was only through the intervention of a former colleague that a district administrator was obliged to order that the evaluation be re-done next year.

Exploitation and abuse of these poorly paid ($20-24/hour) but absolutely crucial educators is not just a Berkeley problem, but widespread throughout the country. EdSource reported (July 21, 2023) that WCCUSD had 200 unfilled paraprofessional positions out of 600 required. These were to be filled by contractors from outside agencies. Berkeley and Oakland – and probably many districts— employ these contractors too.

We educators need to be more courageous. Districts want an impossible job done for the minimum cost, so they routinely exploit weak unions. Employees are bullied, and our most vulnerable kids lose services. We need to be loyal to our colleagues, especially across the classified-certificated divide. We need to demand much more of our unions: transparency, democracy, open communication across sites, districts, and states. And our grievance committees need to stay busy!

           Dan Plonsey,  BFT retired