A Quick History of Teacher Unions in Missouri

A lot of people have been asking about Missouri teacher unions and why they seem invisible during these times when schools are under siege by our completely disconnected ruling political party. 

There are three teacher associations in Missouri. Two of them are unions, and one is an association. They all sell cheap liability insurance. Unions represent employee groups with the aim of creating a written Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), which determines compensation and working conditions for employees.

Last time I checked, teachers in metro districts of St. Louis and Kansas City belong to the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). AFT has a national presence and an active, outspoken leader in Randi Weingarten. When you hear about teachers striking in Chicago and elsewhere, it's usually AFT.

To the overall detriment of teacher representation in the state, Missouri State Teachers Association (MSTA) and Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) actively compete for memberships outside of the two major metro districts. 

What's the difference between MSTA and MNEA?

This is where it's hard to be objective as a former MNEA member. A lot of people don't realize MSTA was a charter member of NEA way back in the 1850's, when teacher groups from all over came together in Philadelphia to form what became the NEA, to promote public education nationwide.

Sometime in the early 1970s, a large faction of MSTA objected to sending dues to their national association, the NEA, and divorce proceedings between MSTA and a newly formed MNEA ensued. The split was settled in 1973. MSTA kept the name, the nice home in Columbia, the getaway resort on Jack's Fork river, while the MNEA retained the affiliation to NEA. (I don't know who negotiated this deal, but MNEA should get its money back.)

From 1973, MNEA began to rapidly grow with charter locals popping up in St. Louis and Kansas City suburban districts, as well as Springfield and Columbia. From the beginning, The new MNEA tended to be the more activist organization than the old MSTA.

Politically, the two associations differ a great deal, though they do come together when the state legislature or Rex Sinquefield or some half-ass GOP functionary comes up with an ingenious plan to end teacher tenure, privatize schools or maybe even endanger the health of students and teachers during a pandemic. Too much to hope for? Probably.

MSTA is the more "conservative" organization and is dominant in rural Missouri. For example, when NEA members voted to support Roe vs Wade, MSTA used that as a membership campaign. One example of how they differ is that regional universities like Evangel, Southwest Baptist or College of the Ozarks promote MSTA membership to their education majors. NEA is not allowed on these campuses, as far as I know. Here's another example of how they differ:

In the early 2000s, a new superintendent in the Independence school district threw out the teachers' written employment agreement, which functioned as a CBA. The district argued that teachers had no right to bargain collectively, so the agreement was meaningless. MNEA attorneys filed a lawsuit against the school district of Independence, claiming that the state constitution provided collective bargaining rights to all employees. MSTA disagreed and filed an amicus brief, siding with the Independence district. 

In 2007, the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that Missouri teachers did indeed have a constitutional right to bargain collectively through a representative of their own choosing. MNEA won. MSTA lost. MSTA later issued statements that they had somehow endorsed bargaining rights for teachers all along. To this date, MSTA has never bargained a teacher contract in any Missouri district.

Even with the Supreme Court win, the state still had no law providing guidance for teachers to select a bargaining representative. The Missouri State Board of Mediation covered such elections for all other employee groups but didn't cover teachers. Besides, the Republican governor (Roy Blunt's son) had gutted the board of mediation, so it couldn't do much anyway. So, Springfield NEA (SNEA) presented a petition to the school board in 2008, signed by 1,100 teachers, to hold a representation election anyway.

The school board and administration were none too keen with this situation and advised that the teachers should wait until the GOP-led legislature provided a new law regarding teacher representation and collective bargaining. Fourteen years later there still is no such law.

The Missouri School Board Association, with obvious input from MSTA attorneys, came up with a couple of new school board policies that would "sort of" follow National Labor Relations Board and Missouri Board of Mediation practices but with a twist that would allow for joint representation between MSTA and SNEA via a confusing two-part election process. Springfield teachers shot this notion down in election #1 in late 2008, and elected SNEA as their representative in election #2. SNEA has been bargaining contracts for teachers since 2009.

To this day MSTA is more anti-NEA than they are pro-teacher, as far as I can tell. MNEA has its own problems trying to be an advocate for teacher rights while tiptoeing around certain issues for fear of pushing "conservative" members toward MSTA, which is all too eager to raid their membership. So, when people ask why teacher unions in Missouri seem so meek and invisible, it's because there is a lack of unity, and a resulting lack of power. It's a microcosm of the political malaise that surrounds us, and it's a damn shame for public school teachers.

Growing Up in 1960's SGF (Ep. 1) - Baseball, God, Evangel

I am 70 years old, having just recently achieved this status.  Yes, I'm aging. So are you, by the way. But my skin has turned to crepe paper, and I find myself saying "when I was a kid" a lot. My parents used to tell me about how hard life was during the depression. By contrast, my kids hear how good is was during the 50s and 60s. Such is life in the here and now. 

So, I looked up Springfield, Missouri 1961 just for fun, and Google shows me a random picture of Katz Department Store on Glenstone. I used to buy albums there. Maybe it was a Cranks or Osco by then, but I recall purchasing the very first Grateful Dead album there. Hippies were kind of scary to me at the time, but I later learned to love them. In any case, the old Katz store is now vacant, which is pretty much how it was during its most recent incarnation as a CVS.

Growing Up In Springfield.

For some reason, the prevailing image of my boyhood during the early 60s in Springfield is playing little league baseball games at Harry Carr Park, near the corner of Fort & Grand. The Children's Home, as it was called, once occupied that spot. The Children's Home was a much smaller building than the current Great Circle campus, which currently occupies that space and beyond. Great Circle is a non-profit Behavior Health Provider, which now serves 40,000 kids on campuses across Missouri. In 1961, there was no need to accommodate such numbers of discarded children. 

Harry Carr Park, named after a former mayor, was a wide open space that took up most of a city block. There were no fences. Hit a ball past the outfielder and take off, which I remember doing several times. A pair of small wooden bleachers were behind home plate facing southeast. Games were played in early evening, and I distinctly remember a backdrop of beautiful sunsets from my shortstop's view.

I also retain the delicious olfactory memory of newly mowed grass blending with wafts of cigarette and cigar smoke. In 1961, the local Kiwanis Club sponsored little league baseball all across the city in every park. I played multiple games at Silver Springs, Grant Beach, Fassnight, Doling and Smith Park, all of which were nicely manicured with neatly striped baselines and equipped with real umpires in full gear.

To me, it was like the big leagues, traveling around town playing at different parks. The Kiwanis Club provided t-shirts. And if you weren't lucky enough to be on a fully sponsored team with cool uniforms, you could sign up to be placed on a team at the Park Board.

Pre-Springfield

For a minute, let's go back to 1947. My age at the time was -4. My Canadian parents, having been called of God to the mission field, moved their young family of five from Toronto, Canada to mainland China, near Canton. Along with the rest of their Pentecostal friends, they were earnestly unaware of the political situation in China. Within two years, fearing for their lives, they would summarily be kicked out, as the new Communist regime of Mao Zedong swept to power.

Either God didn't see that coming, or it was just a bad connection, perhaps a test of faith. Who knows? People who are called of God spend a lot of time discussing such things among themselves because it happens all the time. Undaunted, the family returned to Toronto, where Dad cobbled something together as a singing radio evangelist. This was the context in which I took that dangerous passage into the world 70 years ago. 

When I was three years old, God once again interrupted our lives to call the paterfamilias to Springfield, Missouri in order to join up with the Assemblies of God movement. They called it a movement at the time, as they were literally setting up shop to save the world. My parents were both ordained ministers. My mom was typically the church pianist and never actually gave a sermon, though she did write Sunday School lesson plans and little daily devotion books for many years.

The reverence my father had for leaders of the A/G "movement" was puzzling to me. The General Superintendent. The Head of Home Missions. I still remember their names. Live radio shows were broadcast every Sunday night from inside Headquarters, which is what Dad always called the Assemblies of God building on Division & Boonville. He was super creative, loved a crowd and had visions of Godly fame dancing in his head. Alas, those visions never came to fruition on a scale he had envisioned. Looking back, I think he probably would have been happier in the entertainment industry.

The Lord's plans for my dad at A/G Headquarters didn't pan out as expected. A year later, he was called by God to Southern California to work for a radio evangelist, who, shockingly enough, turned out to be a complete shyster. Dad was appalled to be complicit in bilking money from old people. I have few memories of North Hollywood. I learned the word smog. But dad moved the whole family of six back to smogless Springfield a year later, slightly humbled but still pious enough to rejoin the movement, albeit with a lesser job. Lord's will? It seemed God kept sending Dad off on missions that didn't work out for him, but who's to question? Mysterious ways, right? At least He wasn't suggesting he could murder his son, for which I am grateful.

Back to baseball

To summarize, I grew up in an extremely religious Canadian family in the Queen City of the Ozarks. My dad, who was born in England, didn't understand baseball. He really didn't want to. Rounders was the game he understood, which, conversely, I had no interest in learning. Who plays rounders? As far as I could tell, baseball was the most perfect game. Unfortunately, I found my dad to be an annoying fan on the occasions he would stay for my games, and I found it baffling how many people seemed to enjoy his company. He was the kind of guy that needed an audience, and regular Ozarker men of his generation didn't quite know what to make of him. You couldn't always tell why they were laughing, and he didn't seem to care.

Up until I hit the bigtime little league at Harry Carr Park, most of my baseball was played on the playgrounds at Mark Twain Elementary school and at a big open field just west of South Haven Baptist Church. Kids would play pickup games back then, and even school recess always started with picking captains and choosing teams. Sometimes the teacher would be the "Steady Pitcher".  If we didn't have enough for a full game, we'd play Fly Knocker or 500 or Indian Ball, invented variations that usually involved chasing batted balls and arguing over rules.

I was always the teacher's pet in elementary school. It was probably the worst epithet I endured, which isn't too bad by today's standards. I was smallish, quiet, polite and spoke a more proper form of Canadian English than most of my classmates. Words like "house", "about", "sorry" always drew comments. But I never felt ostracized or bullied by my classmates. All my friends moms loved me, which is always a good thing.

When my playground friends asked me to try out for their baseball team, the Yellowjackets, I was pretty excited. This was a team with very cool black and yellow uniforms, black hats, yellow bills. They were really good and almost always won their age group. My friends' dads were the coaches and wore the same hats, very cool.

Tryouts at East Nichols Park on a Saturday, and I never really heard why I didn't make the team. Not to brag, but I could hit, pitch and outrun just about everybody. Maybe dad talked to the coaches too long. In the end, I didn't care that much. I signed up at the Park Board and got on a team that was coached by a couple of Evangel College students, probably as part of a college PE class, but they were into it. The Falcons. White hats, red bills, emblem of swooping Falcon with menacing talons. We bought our own baseball pants or wore jeans.

The Falcons were quite a ragtag bunch, very much a local version of Sandlot. Poor kids, kids like me who didn't have connections, one Hispanic kid, Jaimie, who everybody called Jamie. We only played one year because our coaches graduated and moved back to Michigan and Illinois. At that time, most Evangel students came from out of state. We practiced at Smith Park, and often hung around Evangel's campus, which was a bunch of old army barracks with faded asbestos siding.

Evangel College 1961

Evangel College, where two of my older siblings graduated, was a former US Army hospital that had been gifted to Assemblies of God by the Truman administration for the price of $1. In the 60s Evangel was still a series of incredibly long hallways connecting former hospital rooms and barracks. They had an intramural basketball gymnasium that was so small, the walls served as the out of bounds. It was quaint, and the students seemed to love it there. At the time, Evangel was a bunch of A/G kids, a lot of them pastor's kids, far away from their parents for the very first time. It was probably the wildest school in town, even though you could be expelled if you had the misfortune of being caught going to movies or dances.

Because of the absolute prohibition of all things deemed "worldly" by family and church, I didn't see my first movie until the age of 14. It was "The Great Race", at the Gillioz, with Tony Curtis, a campy movie with villains and heroes. But I was amazed by the sheer magnitude of images and sound and soon placed the value of movie theaters far above church. Oh, it wasn't even close. Alas, my ultra religious upbringing had trained me to be less than forthcoming with my parents. Lucky for me, they had already raised three children and were too tired to closely monitor my comings and goings. I often think of my poor older sisters and what they endured. Thankfully, my parents standards had slipped over the years, and I was the beneficiary.