Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
A little extra perspective from Brungardt Law conveyed through conversations with individuals of various backgrounds exploring the interplay of practices, policies, and laws with decision making and leadership. An opportunity to learn how to navigate towards productive outcomes as well as appreciate the journey through the experiences and observations of others.
Brungardt Law's Lagniappe
Today's Toddlers Are Tomorrow's Thinkers: A Conversation with Paul Lemle
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In this episode Paul Lemle, president of the Maryland State Education Association and longtime public-school educator, discusses and assesses the role of public education in sustaining democracy, civic life, and economic stability. Drawing on his personal journey from Jesuit education and music to special education teaching and union leadership, he examines persistent myths about “failing” schools, the realities of funding and resources, the relationship between educators’ working conditions and student learning, and the implications of weakening federal oversight of education. The discussion also explores inequality, segregation, union advocacy, school safety, and why investment in public education remains one of society’s most consequential long-term decisions.
Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, once said, Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What you gain at one end, you lose at the other. He also quipped that, many public school children seem to know only two dates, 1492 and 4th of July. And as a rule, they don't know what happened on either occasion. Regardless of him making these comments in the 19th century, they reflect in part the oxymoronic sentiment in the United States today. Now, while we agree education is important, we also seem to believe learning does not occur in public institutions. However, what is the reality? How much do we value education in our society? How prepared are today's youth to not only confront the challenges of tomorrow, but also to innovate and be productive. Welcome to Bringart Laws Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective through conversations. I'm Maurice Brungart, your host. I enjoy engaging with experienced, knowledgeable, and passionate individuals for the opportunity it affords to enrich our understanding of the world through their eyes. The more we learn, the more likely we can become better versions of ourselves, guide others towards the same, and perhaps have a little fun along the way. Today's guest is Paul Lemmley, president of the Maryland State Education Association, a union originally founded in 1865 and currently comprised of approximately 76,000 members. Paul is a teacher of American government and law in Howard County Public Schools and previously was the Howard County Education Association president. Welcome to the program, Paul.
SPEAKER_01:Of course. Thank you for having me. And you know, we share a lot of the same goals. That little introduction sounds like it could have been written by a teacher.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I I appreciate that. Um well I'm aware that you are the beneficiary of a Jesuit education. Uh, you also are a self-taught musician. And could you share with us the trajectory from being a student, a musician, to a classroom teacher, and now a statewide leader?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Um, how how long do you want me to share that trajectory?
SPEAKER_00:Well, not too long. That way we can uh explore other topics.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So we went to high school together in New Orleans, Louisiana. And um, you're right, I that was uh a really interesting education for me, especially given that I'm a public high school teacher now. Um I went to two years of Jesuit University and then public university after that. And that eventually led me. I had a an illness in my late 20s where I had Hodgkin's lymphoma. Thought I had hurt my back lifting an amplifier, but doctors said otherwise. Um, and in that sort of moment, I realized, hey, you know, you're gonna need a career with health insurance, right? You're gonna need a career where uh, you know, you're not uh playing music late at night in smoky bars, and um went back to LSU to get a graduate degree, and I was writing for the student newspaper, and I covered a Justice Department lawsuit against the state of Louisiana for not providing the adequate public education that incarcerated kids still had right to in our uh juvenile detention centers, and that fascinated me. Um, first of all, incarcerated kids have a right to an education, and second of all, we're not giving it to them. Anyway, I entered the program I uh after covering it for the newspaper. I said, I want to apply to this program. Um, I became a special education teacher, and that really opened my eyes to the world of haves and have nots, um, to free and not free, to uh the the systems of education in the United States, from the elite one that I had to the um very challenged ones that I worked in, work in. And um that led me into union work too, and I really sort of discovered my love of civic education and and public advocacy through through union work and with my with my students, and so um that's that's where I am today. I was a local president for one of the unions in the Maryland State Education Association. It's really an affiliated federation, if you will, of about 45 unions. Um, and I'm the statewide president of those 45, and as you said, we're about 76,000 educators day to day, uh, making sure the young people are ready to join our society. So that's that's my background, and I went from special education to social studies because I really love um the questions that the fields of social sciences pose to us. You know, who who are we, what are we doing in our governments, um, you know, what's our recent and and not so recent history, and how does that bear on what we're doing today? So I love really all the social sciences and helping kids see the the value of those in their lives.
SPEAKER_00:Since uh much of my focus tends to be on institutions and how they shape the individuals that make up the institution and vice versa, how individuals can influence the effectiveness of their own organization. How much would you say the Jesuits influenced you to be where you are today?
SPEAKER_01:That's a really interesting question. Um it's never left me the idea that the more you are for other people, you know, the being the the man for others, that that was really where uh where it is, right? I I don't know what a Jesuit would tell you today um in terms of like who that how that benefits you, right? Is it your faith, is it your intellectual development, or is it just your personal fulfillment in life? Um but not only did I have an elite education that you know probably 2% of the American population gets, and you know, only about 10% of American kids attend private school anyway. So to attend like the best ones, the you get it, it's a it's a really rare educational upbringing that I got. Um I I think the the major takeaway for me is that the more I can bring any gifts that that had to other people, um, so I was challenged in all sorts of fields in literature and math and in science and in the social sciences. And I also recognize that that institution itself was deeply, deeply flawed. Um, you're probably aware uh that the victims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests keep a database of known, credibly accused uh priests. And at every stage of my life, from parish I was born into in Ohio to the one in New Orleans where I went to school, both high school and college, um, there was a credibly accused priest while I was there, every single stop in my life. Um, so I experienced really a first-rate education amidst um some of the worst crimes against children that we that we know of. And though that institution is not unlike other institutions, right? It's got uh major strengths, it's got terrible weaknesses, and um I I guess I I I know them all, and it's it's it's it's never neither of those things has ever left me the the potential for abuse and the potential for uh really huge public good.
SPEAKER_00:Hmm. Um interesting. Uh I I find it particularly ironic that for me at least, uh the outcome of a Jesuit education made me more of a humanist uh than anything else.
SPEAKER_01:Less religious.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. And it I I found that very um intriguing as I've reflected over the years. Uh the Jesuits never seemed to be overly focused on hammering religion into us. They wanted us to be thinkers, uh, despite some of the flaws that you've uh pointed out, the uh the tragedies that have occurred. Yeah, exactly. Um returning to the topic of education and specifically public education, uh, from your perspective, if you wouldn't mind sharing with us how publicly funded education is central to democratic stability.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I've been thinking about it a lot since you first posed the question. And I can't think of any uh stable democracies that don't have uh systems of public education. Uh moreover, I can't think of any stable democracies that don't have systems that they are really well funded, uh, that they care about really deeply. Um, and I'm not oversimplifying it when I say that what we do in schools is we prepare people to be members of their society. Um so we're working with families uh and communities at the same time to take the young people and and make them ready. And you know, I I think we could get corny about it in a way and you know, talk about you know, learning how to be a uh patriotic American or a um uh a productive member of society or whatever, but it doesn't really matter how you term what we do. There's no question in anybody's mind that the the public students of today are your employees, your neighbors, your uh doctors, lawyers, teachers, engineers tomorrow. Um so we we make people ready for that. We teach them how to vote. I actually, in when I was a first teaching in Seattle, Washington, our polling station where I voted was the same uh place where I worked. So I asked the poll workers, can I bring my students through the polls with me when I vote? Like, well, how many students do you have? Well, at this moment I have like 10, so can I bring them? And um, from that time, bringing my students with me to vote to uh having students facilitate uh partisan debates with me and um you know, doing Westboro Baptist Church counter protests. That's a hate group. If you don't know it, do the Googles. Um for me, education and democracy are two sides of the same coin. Um they're not, they can't be extracted from each other in any way. Um, they absolutely are um, you know, the the base education is the basic training for our our soldiers and our democracy tomorrow. I mean that literally and figuratively.
SPEAKER_00:Well, I appreciate you uh putting that door in front of me to open up uh because it goes to our historical foundation and uh that even our founding fathers expected education to be a governmental responsibility. And as I had shared with you uh in preparatory discussions with a previous guest, and talking about how it's a part of our constitution uh that there's federal responsibility for a variety of activities, such as uniform rule of naturalization, post offices, and the national defense, but not education. And it seems that at least in recent years, and I'm going out on a limb uh and perhaps projecting, uh, but I believe some people have taken this omission as a reflection uh that the founding fathers were opposed to public education when, on the contrary, that's not the case. Um, they simply placed responsibility at the state and local level and not the federal level. And there are examples of this. Uh there were colonial school laws, uh, state constitutions, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Thomas Jefferson's own uh proposed diffusion of knowledge bill, then you had the Northwest Ordinance and even George Washington's uh first inaugural address. Uh from your standpoint, this being uh obviously a historically based governmental responsibility, um, where do you see the role specifically for Maryland in educating uh the young population there?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so I think there's kind of two parts to the answer in a way. Um, one is that often we think about our government as one thing, and it isn't, right? It's a patchwork quilt or a layer cake. Uh, there's lots of different ways to conceptualize it. But um, what the authors of the Constitution knew and certainly envisioned uh for the United States is um a patchwork of governments um with a national government specifically written into the Constitution, delegated uh powers to it, um, and silent on many things that they knew would be handled either mostly or entirely by state and municipal governments, you know, city level type thing. So I think we kind of we kind of forget that when we say the government. Sometimes we're talking about the government we hate, uh whether it's our local one or whether it's our national one, um, or we're talking about the government we love, doesn't really matter. Um, it we don't really have one government, right? We have lots of them. Um, and then I think what's important and then a natural correlator is that they all really matter. Um, if you didn't have a national government uh defending the United States uh and you know working to alleviate the disputes between its states, um you wouldn't probably be worried about public education because you'd be overrun by your neighbors. Um if you didn't have a state government um uh collecting taxes and looking after the education and the Medicaid of its citizens, um you'd have some big problems there. And if locally your boards of education and your mayors or your county executives is what they're called here in Maryland, if they weren't doing their thing and collecting property taxes and building those schools, uh, because the federal government doesn't do that either, um, you know, we're missing important pieces of the puzzle. So as a resident of Anorundel County, Maryland, and Maryland and the United States, I really depend on my taxes and my governments to, you know, work as a team, if you will. And Maryland's role in it is the lion's share of the funding, right? The federal government pays between 10 and 14 percent or 10 and 15 percent of the dollars in your K-12 schools. Your states and your municipalities make up 80 to 90 percent uh the they do the rest. And um your states um decide what's gonna be a graduation requirement. They decide on who will be licensed as a teacher, and um you know that's that's the state role in a nutshell. Most of the funding and most of the decision making um about what a kid is to learn, that's that's where it happens in Annapolis and the capital of whatever state you happen to live in.
SPEAKER_00:Specific to you and the the union, and I was uh quite uh uh taken aback how old it was. I mean, founded in 1865. Um give us a bit of sort of context. Uh I mean, just the union itself, the one that you're president of. I mean, how large is it in terms of you know the staff? And you know, is it in one particular location, Baltimore, for example, or is it spread out?
SPEAKER_01:Sure, it's both. We are also a patchwork as set of 45 local unions. And we're headquartered in Annapolis, Maryland, which is beautiful. Come visit. And we're uh about a hundred staff, and so we support our members in uh collective bargaining, right? Negotiating with their employer over their pay benefits and working conditions. And unions like ours often began as professional associations and uh moved into collective bargaining as it became uh legal. Uh, and you know, there's a whole world of doing collective bargaining in places where it isn't explicitly legal or on the books, but I'll spare you that. Um, our association, our union, has a long history of advocating for kids and making sure that their learning conditions were adequate. Um, we were an integrated professional association uh before Brown versus Board of Education and before our national affiliate was. Um so we have that kind of history too. We're we're definitely, and you'll hear it from me in the subsequent questions, an advocacy organization that cares really deeply about the society where our the kids in our families go to our schools, and we want our the kids that we educate, you know, because I'm gonna say my kids and I'm gonna say our kids, and you know what I mean. Um we want all of those young people to make our society better and to get the rewards of that for those for those kids. So the the context that we exist in. Is really that one. It's cool if you think about it. Um, kids don't have lobbyists, they don't have political power, they can't vote, um, but they do have us. And our detractors would tell you we have too much power. I disagree. Uh, but we definitely work very hard to make sure the 900,000 kids that we educate uh you know get the absolute best that they can get.
SPEAKER_00:But uh acting as a devil's advocate here, so do the kids truly have you? Because you represent a union, and the union is made up of you know the teachers and others that form the school system, and you represent their interest. Uh so explain to the audience how it is that you still have uh the school children's interest at heart when, as a pragmatic function of your organization, it's to represent the members.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, there's a famous uh quote by Al Shanker, who is uh union president in New York, and they were on strike. Reporter asked him, um, Aren't you hurting the kids? And he said, I don't work for the kids, I work for the teachers. Um, so that's the classic encapsulation of that idea, right? Um, we definitely want our members to have the best working conditions, the best pay and benefits that they can possibly have. And any serious uh economist, any person who studies uh how schools work will tell you that uh these things really matter for kids. You've got to have a good teacher. You have to have a professional who's willing to stay in the job for those kids to have good outcomes. So, you know, it's totally true uh that our working conditions are our students' learning conditions. Um do they have a math teacher who is licensed and understands the subject and has experience and knows how to work with young people? Um, you know, do they have custodians who keep their building clean? Do they have food service workers who feed them? Do they have health professionals in the schools who deal with injuries day in and day out among those students? Um, deal with the medications for those students, uh deal with the ones that get sick in the moment when they get sick. Um, so again, it's inextricable. You you can't uh you can't pull the two apart.
SPEAKER_00:How would you address uh the statement by some, if only we could get rid of the unions, you know, or the the other sort of uh observation, you know, teachers just don't get fired, you know. We we gotta we gotta tie their uh you know their employment to actual performance and our schools and our kids are failing. How do you address that?
SPEAKER_01:There's so much. Um first of all, all of that stuff is um not very widely held. Like if if you ask, if you look at public opinion polls, um people will sometimes say, oh yeah, my public schools are failing. But they have usually that same person has a very high opinion of their public schools, the ones that their kids go to. And as I said, 90% of Americans' uh kids, school-aged kids are in public schools. Um, our schools are by no measure failing at anything. Um secondly, um, if you got rid of unions, uh, we've got really good data that you lower teacher pay and you lower teacher quality. Um, there are states in the United States that don't permit the existence of collective bargaining in unions. We still have professional associations in Mississippi and Texas and Louisiana and the states that are uh euphemistically called right to work. What they actually are is banning employee organizations like us from existing, um, but or it's from collective bargaining, as I said, we we exist. Um but those states have, on average, teacher pay that's 25% lower. Um, and I'm not trying to bash them when I say this, their outcomes are not as good. Um, so ideally, I would say to anybody who thinks that um let's look at outcomes. Uh, let's look at the places where you actually have uh effective employee organizations. So and so the schools in your Marylands, in your Massachusetts, in your New Yorks, um, in your Californias uh tend to be uh better for their students.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Um you said schools and students aren't failing. Could you elaborate a bit more on that? Because uh plenty of folks would take an objection to that, especially especially in southern states. They'd be wrong.
SPEAKER_01:Um so the the United States is a patchwork of school systems, and there are there are challenges, right? Um, there are places that don't have adequate funding for their schools, there are places that have very overcrowded classrooms, um, there are places that like you and I don't have when we were in high school, don't have air conditioning and climate control in their schools. Um there's serious inequality that we'll talk about, there's serious segregation uh in our schools. Um but uh the truth is the United States remains a um sort of a crown jewel for uh people to send their students from all over the world. At the university level, um we've got the system that the rest of the world wants to be in. We have the world's biggest economy, or maybe the second biggest, it depends how you measure, but um it's still a place where people want to bring their kids, whether their kids are five or fifteen or or whatever age. Um and I'll keep I'll keep coming back to it time and time again. If our schools weren't producing uh Americans who uh could work, could earn, could could teach, could be doctors and engineers, our society would be um also falling apart. Um, if 90% of all Americans, and this statistic is ironclad and it hasn't changed over the decades, uh go to public schools, then and those schools fail, then what what should we say about, I don't know, the 275, 290 million Americans who went to public schools or or in them now. Um anyway, it's a myth. It's a myth that people who want to privatize certain parts of our education system uh push. It's a myth that uh conservatives tend to push in places where there's uh democratic control over schools. Um it's a it's um it's almost like conspiracy theory because there isn't really any data to support the idea that American schools are somehow failing.
SPEAKER_00:Okay, uh briefly for one moment regarding, say, the efforts at privatization. So uh a libertarian, uh, and you know, for any libertarians in the audience, forgive me if perhaps I'm framing this incorrectly, but libertarian uh would argue if you had a true privatized education system, then if someone wanted to send their school, uh send their kid to a school, that all they taught was based on a religious document, whether it's the Bible or the Quran or the Torah or on a spiritual bit of leadership. Um and that was it. Well, that's their right, and that's all the kid would learn, and the kid would either succeed or fail based on their entire education for the next 12 years of their lives, based on that. Someone else wanted to send their kid to a school that it only focused on teaching music. You know, it had all the instruments in the world, all the different types of musical teachers. It didn't teach history or anything, just taught music, right? So again, the free market would take care of itself, and over time, well, people will then realize their kids that came out of this school or that school are faring better than others, and those schools that perhaps offered instruction in one particular area over time lose students because parents start to realize uh their kids aren't going to be as well prepared. Uh, how would you address that considering you could eliminate many problems and it's a system focused on you know the actual demands uh of society?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I don't know. I don't know how you would um deal with the actual needs of actual populations in that way. Um I don't know how you would address uh the problem of poverty. I don't know how you'd address the problem of students with disabilities. I don't know how you'd address uh the challenge of um students learning English at the same time as they're trying to learn that content. Um and I I mean I love the sort of I'm I'm at least an amateur economist in in my day-to-day teaching um when I'm when I'm doing that. And I I love free markets as much as the next person, if if not more. But um someone would have to show me a system that really addressed the needs of everyone before I could take the chance that we dilute the the resources we need for our students by uh funneling them into uh private schools. Because I realize you didn't ask about vouchers or anything like that. You asked about a totally free market system. Um but you know that's not how the world works, right? Uh libertarians and free market people, uh it's it's theoretical um until it isn't. We don't have any places that don't have um any public education. Um, we don't have places that don't have any public health care. Even in the United States, something like 50% of all Americans or more, 60% of all Americans have publicly funded healthcare, right? Medicare, Medicaid, VA. Um, and yet we talk about our healthcare system as though it was truly a market system. It isn't. Um so I I would have to see it meet the needs of its people because that just doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_00:Well, it's kind of a chicken and egg. You wouldn't be able to see the system until you actually.
SPEAKER_01:Who's gonna do that?
SPEAKER_00:Um in the current climate, uh what do you see as say for lack of a better expression, the challenges now with the downsizing of the U.S. Department of Education? Um is this you know what problems does this create? We'll speak we'll speak specifically towards Maryland, because that's what you're obviously more familiar with. Uh and I'm sure we could extrapolate from there to other states. But specific to Maryland, what do you see as sort of the negative ramifications uh for Maryland? But what do you also see as the opportunities and the benefits that perhaps this brings?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I'll be honest, I don't I don't see a lot of opportunities. Um we we should tell people what the Department of Education did. Um It had a regulatory role in preventing discrimination in schools. Um, it oversaw federal student loans. Um it did something like 14% of national funding, um, Title I special education funding head start. Um so I don't see an upside. What the Trump administration has not done is uh backed away from onerous standardized testing requirements. Um what they haven't done is said uh, hey, here's how we'll do uh school accountability, which is not a super helpful term and construct, but um it's like the plan for healthcare, uh repealing the Affordable Care Act with something better. Um now that the Trump administration doesn't uh put that lipstick on this pig. They do not say they're coming with something better after the elimination of the Department of Education. Um but uh I I don't see an upside if uh there were you know massive grants to states and local uh localities that made up for the lost funding. Um maybe, but that's not the plan. But but didn't you say that most of the funding, 80-90 percent, is state-based, so it is, it is, but 10 10 to 15% is not nothing. Um if I'll give you an example in one county in in Maryland, if you're talking about you know a hundred thousand kids and a billion-dollar budget, losing a hundred million dollars is real. Um, and we don't just cut stuff, right? We don't just say, hey, young people, we're gonna stop teaching algebra or uh music or art, although there are some things that get cut sooner than others. Um what's gonna happen at your school level is you're gonna make classes bigger. Um we're gonna make workloads greater, you're gonna have a much higher number of students. So I'll give you a quick example about workload. As a high school teacher, I often teach 150 students. Um, and if I looked at their work, if I read their essays and gave them any constructive feedback for one minute each, in a week, I'd be looking at their work for two and a half hours. If I gave them one minute, if I give them three minutes, now we're talking about seven and a half hours. Um, so pile 30 or 50 more students on me. I'm gonna keep doing what I do, but it's the student who really suffers. Um, yes, it's hard for me, um, but what happens when you cut funding and you stop anti-discrimination programs and you stop the funding for our neediest kids in these Head Start programs? Um, you just you hurt the exact same people who you need to work for you in 10 years. Um, sometimes we think about schools as a really long game, and you know, they kind of are, but you're most American kids start school at four or five, and most of them are gonna leave our K-12 system around age 18. Um, this is not three decades down the road. The the kids that the Trump administration are hurting are in schools today, and they're gonna graduate this, you know, May of 2026 and 27 and 28, and they're gonna work for you. So um I would argue don't hurt them by eliminating important funding and and oversight.
SPEAKER_00:Uh, you've mentioned discrimination and sort of alluded to perhaps continued segregation in schools. Can you give us a specific example or examples? Uh so it resonates more for audiences.
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Um I think this is another sort of commonly held belief that it isn't supported by any data that um our schools aren't segregated, right? If you know your history, the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation or struck down the laws that required school segregation in the mid-1950s in the Brown versus Board of Education state uh case. Sorry. Um but 70 years later, if um if you take Stanford's research uh it and they've published this, so you go online and you look for the um what's it called? The segregation explorer, you can check your um your your county, your city, and segregation has grown um steadily, especially in our big school districts, or especially over the past 30 years. Um and we can define what that means, um, or you can define how it, you can understand how it's defined, are the number of kids who go to school with a population that's you know 75 or 80 or 90 percent the same race as them has increased steadily over the past 30 years. Um, and so one example of uh the kind of discrimination that we need the uh the Department of Education for is that uh don't let that happen. Not that the National Department of Education has great tools to do it. Um provide materials, for instance, in the languages that our students need. And even if you even if you don't believe that students need any learning materials uh in their native languages, and I think that they do, um, why not uh you're gonna need the regulatory and the forms and all that in their languages so their families can enroll them. You're gonna need information about the school's programs in the languages of the families. Um, you're gonna need those students to have uh People that advocate for them in the systems where they don't know the language. We could go on in great depth about what our students need, but they need to go to school in a place that's fair for them, that they can learn in, and that their families can access. And if you don't have those things, if you don't have a Department of Education to say this is what that means, these are the rules about it, you leave it to chance in states that have long histories of at best marginalizing those same kids.
SPEAKER_00:As a union president, uh right now, what are a couple of your top priorities?
SPEAKER_01:Um yeah. So I want education to be a viable career for the people who choose it. Um there's a nationwide teacher shortage. Um teacher pay has fallen um relative to inflation for the past 15, 20, maybe even longer, 30 years. Um, and that has manifested uh along with um uh burnout, right? A lot of teachers leave the profession about half in the first five years of their of their careers. Um so it's a profession that is difficult. I already told you about what grading looks like. Um and it has never been super lucrative. Um, so we have we have a real challenge. I want our the I'll tell you a quick story. Um I don't know, two, three years ago, I asked a group of students. Um, we were having a sort of free discussion, how many of you are are considering education as a career? And out of 30 in that room, not a single hand went up. I said, whoa, uh I need someone to come replace me, y'all. Um I won't do this forever. What if you knew your economic needs were going to be met? How many of you would consider teaching? Um, and now you know, five or six hands in that room go up. Um, we I want education to be what I what it has been for me, for anybody who goes into it. And that's the the health insurance that I needed, that's the the pay that you know allows you to support a family, um, and that's the security in retirement that like Social Security allows you to not be poor when you stop working. Um so there that's a big challenge. My my priority is to not have a teacher shortage, to have people know that, like in Maryland, we start teachers at 60,000 annually, which doesn't make anybody rich, but the average teacher's salary in Maryland is about 93,000. Um, it's a 10-month job. It does provide great insurance and it does provide security in retirement. But I need people to know that. So big part of my mission um is to make sure that shortage um turns into a not shortage um so that every kid in Maryland has a quality teacher in that classroom. Or two, you know, we got kids who need, as I said, to learn English. We got kids who have special education needs, and often it's multiple professionals that work with that kid in that same uh classroom. So start with meeting the needs of the people who do the job and you know, make sure that that every kid has access to a high quality education. And you know, Mark Twain wasn't wrong. Um, he's talking about prisons when he when he made the the quip that you had at the top. But a good economy uh runs on employees, right? It runs on people who can work, who who can produce, who start small businesses. Um that's that's how you build a good economy. You have a good system of public education.
SPEAKER_00:Do you know, perhaps off the top of your head, uh, like among private schools, uh if they experience the same retention issues in the first five years as in the public education system, or you're unaware?
SPEAKER_01:I don't know the answer to that question. The reason we do know it for our public school educators is because our state departments of education track it. Um so I'm sure that private employers have an idea of that for themselves, but it's required oversight. It's the kind of thing that departments of education do.
SPEAKER_00:Now, obviously, all the members of your union are not just teachers. Uh, there are administrators uh in that group, custodial staff, um, I assume perhaps even nurses. Um, what is your priority for them?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and so the them, the term we often use is support professionals, so education support professionals um and administrators. So this is anybody who does anything, right, in a school, from counseling to psych to occupational health, um, to your speech language pathologists, to your counselors, um, and you already mentioned some of the other ones: custodians, food service, bus drivers, nurses. There's you know, all the all the people in the village uh work in the school. Um I think the the you got to look at them differently uh too. We don't have a starting salary in Maryland law for our support professionals, we don't have that for our administrators. Um we don't have uh uh workload protections in our law either. Um, we tend to do that in our contracts and our bargaining agreements. Um but like I said, if I went from 150 students to 200, um, there's no protections there, there's no extra pay for that. Um so as we look at the different jobs that make a school, I'd love to have workload protections for uh the people who uh need them for our registrars and our psychologists and our media specialists who are psychologists, they can have caseloads that are really, really big. And um they can they can be you know one nurse to 500 students or one media specialist to 500 or 750 students. Um for the people who are not directly doing the classroom teaching. I think those two things, like having that and that starting salary and the the workload protections are probably the biggest things.
SPEAKER_00:What would be your response to perhaps some claims that uh public schools overemploy support staff, administrators?
SPEAKER_01:Um so I'd love for someone to uh to see it for themselves before they made that claim, of course. Um the the numbers are pretty astounding when you think about how many kids we serve. Um like I said, there's almost a million school age kids in Maryland. Um and in a typical school uh where I think people really have numbers that they can understand, um, class sizes in a high school are about 30. Um, and we know that 20 to 24 would be much more ideal. Your primary grades, where our kids are learning to read, class sizes are 22 to 25, and we know that we need 12 to 18. Um and in the school I just worked at, Reservoir High in Howard County, um, there was one principal to almost 2,000 students. That principal had four assistant principals. Um, but I don't know how many organizations expect to manage 200 to 250 employees with five people. Um, maybe you'd have to tell me or have a business specialist, a system specialist on to tell me if that's an inordinate number of managers. I didn't feel like it was. I felt like those administrators worked really hard uh to make sure we were enrolling everybody and teaching everybody and graduating everybody and every everything uh in between. Um I don't know. I I I don't see it. I I certainly don't think we're packed with people who uh don't pull their weight. It just doesn't that's not how schools work.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna put you on the spot for a moment, and I want to phrase this as carefully as possible. Um where do you find that perhaps some of the demands or requests by your membership are unrealistic? And let me caveat unrealistic description as not necessarily there being too ambitious. It could be unrealistic because of current resource availability, uh, the timing's not right. What is something that you would like your membership uh to better understand?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um I think our members really understand their needs really well. I think they really understand the needs of our students really well. We understand what it feels like to work in classrooms that have 30 or 35 students in them, and there's a lot of needs in those classrooms. Some students, uh, like I said, have disabilities, some students are learning English, some students have behavioral challenges. Um, they they're very realistic about what they need.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:100%. Uh, we don't make uh unrealistic and excessive demands in collective bargaining at all. I think we make very reasonable uh uh asks in collective bargaining. Um I already told you that we've lost ground relative to inflation in the education profession for decades. Um, and uh quick story, I met a teacher from La Crosse, Wisconsin, after uh they lost their ability to negotiate their contracts under Scott Walker when he was governor. Um, it is illegal in Wisconsin for a association to ask for more than inflation, and they never get it. So if they ask for 5%, because that's what inflation was that year, they may get one or they may get two. That teacher's taken a pay cut every year, essentially, since 2011. Um, that teacher earns 40,000 a year, and she's in the 20th year of her career. Um, so we we really understand the conditions that we're working in. We understand um, you know, what, like I said, what what students need. Um, but I want to play fair with you and and try to uh answer the question to what what do what I wish people are my people understood um a little bit better. Um I think we sometimes we say that every teacher has the hardest job in the in the county, meaning that sometimes they'll say, hey, I need a workload cap or a cap on my caseload, or I need fewer students, but but that kind of uh teacher doesn't. Um and I wish that they understood that um every job is super demanding in education, um that we're all uh really, really lifting heavy to make sure our our students um experience school in a really positive way. Um no one comes to work thinking, you know, I'm gonna crush my kids' dreams today. We wake up with, I mean, I hop out of the bed thinking, man, I've got a great lesson where you know my students are gonna uh attack the problem of gerrymandering, and they're gonna ask Republicans and Democrats if they're willing to stop doing it. Um, and they're gonna play with the lines themselves so they really understand it. Um we tend to approach education with a lot of whistle while you work, with a lot of enthusiasm. Um, and I just want every person in education to know that about all of their colleagues. And you know, it's you're often working on an island in your classroom and you don't get to see the amazing things that your colleagues do. So um that's that's something that I wish for our members is that we had uh the time to visit other classrooms during our workday, that we understood each other's roles uh that much better.
SPEAKER_00:Um where do you find specific to your your association, your union, you have the greatest difficulty in getting things done?
SPEAKER_01:Um well, do you mean in terms of union work, getting the union work done? Or do you mean in in education generally, uh the the work of educating our kids? Tell me what you mean.
SPEAKER_00:All right, well, we'll split it. Then uh getting union work done in terms of when you're advocating for your members, uh where are your greatest obstacles? Is it dealing with uh school boards? Is it dealing with uh the state legislature? Uh again, I don't know, but that's why I'm asking.
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah. Um so you know, this union work is really rewarding work in the sense that as we uh negotiate for, you know, like I said, better pay in working conditions, and we try to improve the learning conditions for our students uh at the same time, you know, with the same exact tools, um we do run up against really difficult resource allocation problems. Um we do run up against um you know funding limits, right? Uh every every person in our society deserves to have their tax dollars used well, um, and everybody has an opinion on what that means. So, you know, how how high of taxes am I gonna pay and how great are the services that I'm I'm gonna get? Um we it's the the question is so big. Um I think our biggest challenge is really educating our local politicians and our local public on a lot of the things that we're talking about. Um, what kind of class size do you want for your student? Um, you know, how important is it to have uh great counselors that help deal with mental health issues in the building? How important is it to have you know a library in the building and Chromebooks for kids? Um these are serious questions for serious people, and it it isn't easy because everything sounds like oh, you know, more money, more money, more money. Um and that's that's real. You know, you you have to you have to provide what what kids need or they don't learn well um and they're not um as successful as you want them to be. Um I think the major challenge in your day job and your your in your work with kids is time. Um I typically taught 150 kids, um, as you heard. I typically wrote about 50 letters of recommendation every year, whether that was for scholarship, college recommendation, job, entrance into the National Honor Society, whatever. Um so you know, you know I'm looking at the work of these students five, six hours a week. That doesn't count planning for those uh presentations. Um that doesn't count, you know, the time on those letters of recommendation. That doesn't count any family contact. So um I'm gonna call home, I'm gonna write home, I'm gonna answer the emails from parents. Um and I didn't even begin to start working with my colleagues in the time I just described, right? My colleagues that are also teaching American government, or maybe my colleague that's teaching a book in English that I'd love for my students to understand a little bit better. Um I didn't I didn't include the first meeting or uh collaboration in the time I I just described. So um there's good research that says teachers work about 60 hours a week on average. Um that's that's the biggest challenge in terms of getting it done. The volume.
SPEAKER_00:From your experience and now going to the greatest challenge and creating a working environment for the teachers that translates into learning for the students. Uh what do you find is the greatest difficulty to make that happen?
SPEAKER_01:Limited resources.
SPEAKER_00:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Um definitely. The the biggest challenge is the just the limit on resources. There's you already heard me say it, a lot of students that need it, uh, that need our that are the consumers of our education system. Um and you know, there's downward pressure on teacher salaries, there's downward pressure on education funding generally from the federal government. Um, as the federal government shifts Medicaid costs onto the states, that's serious downward pressure on uh education as an investment in our kids. Um yeah, that there's that's by far the biggest challenge.
SPEAKER_00:And when you're talking about limited resources, uh I take it part of that uh is salary. Salary?
SPEAKER_01:Sure. Yeah, without without a doubt. Okay.
SPEAKER_00:Aside from salary, what are some of the other limited resources you all have to contend with? I guess one is time. It's probably consumed with a lot of administrative work, because you had alluded to that sort of at the beginning of our discussion.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I think the two biggest pressures on schools on school budgets. Is that what you're asking about?
SPEAKER_00:Well, again, I'm getting towards when you say limited resources for your membership. So we've identified salary and I'm trying to get from you what are the other limited resources?
SPEAKER_01:Healthcare. Healthcare is huge. Our boards of education pay the healthcare costs or a large percentage of the healthcare costs of their employees. So this is true if you get a job at a law firm or at a at a school or you know, engineering, defense contractor, healthcare costs. The healthcare costs of employers, whether private or public, have far outstripped uh inflation over the past 10, 20 years, too. Um, those are the biggest uh drivers of costs in in boarders of education budgets. It hasn't gotten less expensive, for instance, to drive students to school, right? Their transportation. Um it has become uh the the norm that every student's provided uh a computer. Um that's expensive too. I I thought when I started teaching uh social studies, we got new government textbooks that year, and that year was 2005. I ironically, we're both uh New Orleans native. Um I started teaching social studies on August 29th of 2005, which was the date Katrina hit New Orleans. Um, I also got new textbooks that came with a CD-ROM that had a digital version of the textbook. And I my thought at the time was wow, you know, we're gonna be obsoleting the textbook costs. It didn't happen. Um, it's more expensive now to provide textbooks to kids, and we still use both paper and digital.
unknown:I thought that that would be much cheaper.
SPEAKER_01:Anyway, um everything would that involves education takes money to do from buying the Chromebooks to buying the textbooks to you know providing the health insurance of the people who do the do the work.
SPEAKER_00:Uh in your work so far as an educator and as a county-level association president and now a statewide president, have there been school systems elsewhere in the United States that you've looked at and gone, oh wow, they are they are really doing well uh that others could learn from?
SPEAKER_01:Um you know, I I wish we had more um resources everywhere. Um the the places that I've been fortunate to work, so Seattle Public Schools um and now Howard County in Maryland really do a great job of providing the things that our our students need. Um there's innovative things that I wish I knew more about in other places, but um Seattle did um academies within high schools that uh provided sort of a smaller experience. Here in in Maryland, we're doing really innovative career and technology education because as you probably know, um the United States has great uh college options, but not great uh career options for students, um apprenticeships, and we're trying to do that a lot better. In Maryland, I don't know if you know this, it might be true in Virginia too, but we're starting to dual enroll more kids in high school and college at the same time. Um, we're paying for students to sort of transition better into a college education or a career education by letting them take classes at the college level that's fund publicly funded while they're in high school. Um, I love the idea, and it's not a new idea, of easing that high school to something else uh transition in that way. Um so for me, I'd like to see every kid have access to that kind of thing. Um but uh the yeah, that's that's probably the biggest thing, helping kids transition from one level to the next.
SPEAKER_00:Uh speaking of students, um, and then at you know looking at other school systems in the states, now examining beyond our borders and these international assessments and how US students perform uh around the you know OECD average in reading, below average in math, uh slightly below average in science. Uh what kind of information or what would you like audiences to know about these international comparisons and what they're actually measuring?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the um the PISA test is largely a measure of childhood poverty rates. Um and we see this in um the fluctuation of childhood poverty rates being tightly correlated with test scores. When uh they when we have more income in families or like a bigger earned income tax credit, those kids tend to do better in school. And um when income goes down, uh those kids do worse in school. Um, so I have said this a lot. In the United States, we uh educate everybody, and that means um students that are uh very poor, that means students who are learning English, that means students with disabilities. And um not every uh OECD country does that. Um we really do well in terms of providing access to education for for all our students. Um and you know it's it's worrisome that uh global, this is true for all countries, have been declining in an absolute sense since the introduction of uh cell phones. Um the the hypothesis, of course, is that uh that's a major distraction and maybe even a mental health challenge for students. Um but I I think I speak for a lot of educators and a lot of Americans when I say that I'm super proud that we educate everyone. I'm super proud that we uh provide an open door and access for every kid. Um and would I love to be Finland? I would. Um, Finland provides uh a higher salary and more time for its teachers to work together. Um that is something that's in Maryland's law, but it isn't funded yet.
SPEAKER_00:Is the student-to-teacher ratio better in Finland than it is here or in Maryland?
SPEAKER_01:It may well be. I'm not sure. Um, I don't think it's dramatically different, but it may it may be better. Um what education professionals think is that the ability of educators to work together on designing better lessons is one of the major differences. Um that was uh studied as part of the preliminary work by the Kerwin Commission to create the blueprint for Maryland's future, which is the law I was just talking about. And um that's the reason for us to try to fund um more time for teachers to um collaborate, to work together. Um you probably know this um because you got school-age kids, but um if we're offering American government at you know, first, second, third, and fourth, and fifth and sixth periods, as we are, because we've got 2,000 kids in that school, um, there are there are no time, is no time in that day for those teachers of American government to say, hey, I've got a great First Amendment lesson, but my one on searches and seizures isn't great. What do you have? Um, and to say to each other, hey, we we can we've got the lesson material that can support each other in Finland and Japan. What they're doing is scientifically testing which lessons work better. Um and you need time to do that.
SPEAKER_00:Coming back locally and a problem in the United States, and as a union president, I'm sure it's come up in discussions, school shootings. No, uh what are what what do you see the the role of teachers, support staff uh to alleviate or address this?
SPEAKER_01:Sure, yeah, and uh it's bigger than uh just gun violence, it's all violence. Um, you know, I won't bury you in statistics. You already know that the levels of gun violence in the United States are very high compared to other market democracies. Um, I think our role is um to make sure that our schools are as safe as they can possibly be. Um so, like I said, our kids don't vote and they don't hire lobbyists. Um, we have to do that. Um it was us after the Newtown, Connecticut shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary that uh presented the opinions of something like 2,000 educators to our local government um saying, hey, these are the things you can do uh to make schools safer in in our jurisdiction. Um and you know, at the end of the day, we're the ones really between uh students and people who would hurt them. Um so we try to have better planning for emergencies and evacuations. We push for um you know proper equipment to evacuate students with disabilities safely, and um there was a a bomb threat called from one of these international uh sort of operations that were doing this to harass schools in the United States. One got called into my school, and we evacuated our students into the local middle school and elementary school across the street. Um, so it's always us your rank and file teacher, your your union member, and um you know those support professionals and administrators that we work with who are doing the work not just of educating kids but of you know keeping them safe. So our our advocacy is really designed to make policymakers understand what schools need, what their vulnerabilities are. Um hate to give many examples of that, um, but as schools become more crowded, rather than building more capacity, we tend to put portable buildings outside them. Um, those are buildings that are not within the locked doors, right? Those are buildings that you don't necessarily have to go through the office to get to. Um so no matter what the vulnerability is, um, we live it and we want our decision makers to know about them.
SPEAKER_00:What what are your thoughts on arming educators?
SPEAKER_01:Um it's crazy that we even have to contemplate the question, right? Um we have something like three to four hundred million guns in the United States. And if more guns were the answer, this would be the safest place on the planet. Um, it's not. Uh, it's the opposite of that. Um I would like to see there be far fewer guns and our students to be much safer. And my own kids, my the kids that grew up in my house, uh were lucky when my wife was stationed in England. Um, we lived in the UK for four years, and they got to experience uh a whole society where gun violence is absent. Um and that means other types of violence are conspicuously absent as well. Um, sometimes people will say, oh, there's there's lots of stabbings in the UK or there's lots of knife crime. That's not true. Um, we have more uh stabbings and knife crime here by rate. You know, I'm not talking about just absolute numbers. Um anyway, I wish every American a safe school. Um, I wish every kid in the world a safe school. And the way to do that is less guns, um, better background checks, better red flag laws, um, better safe storage laws. If we don't agree on uh having fewer guns, uh, maybe we can agree on who should have them and where they should have them. And that's another place uh where I think unions are really important. Uh we have the resources to uh inform people on the scale that the National Rifle Association has the resources to inform people. So um I'd like there to be uh much safer uh schools, and more guns is not the answer to that.
SPEAKER_00:Um I've recall asking my own kids when they said, Oh, they had a uh lockdown drill or whatnot. Um if they've ever been asked or if they ever recall being asked their suggestions how to deal with school shootings, and you know, the response of all three of them was no, no one's ever asked our opinion. And my question to you, uh, because you've been part of the education system for 20 years, do you think that is perhaps a problem we need to address that we're not actually asking for the students' input? And some might think that's perhaps naive or sophomoric, considering they're so young. But again, uh have we taken the time to get the input of students relevant to those instances when school shootings were committed by a fellow student?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um we I think we could do a better job of that. I have been asking that in my social studies classes for 20 years, absolutely. Um and it's not necessarily that a student's gonna have the idea that saves us all. We have to listen to them when they say, hey, you know, we're telling you that there are these vulnerabilities every day that everyone knows about that could be addressed. We have to get policymakers um to listen to their students like they are future voters and and future employees and members of society. So yeah, it it's not that they're gonna solve the problem, um, but not listening to them is part of the problem. Um are the the kids who harm each other and themselves in our schools are the people that we're not listening to. So I've always viewed my mission as a teacher to catch that kid before they start feeling violent and ask them. I had a student um on, and it wasn't the exact same set of questions, but it was a related set of questions where a student said to me, I I don't feel like my school cares about me as an individual. Um and that that gave me two uh things to do, right? Um one, ask that student, hey, tell me what you mean, tell me why, tell me what makes you feel that way. And two, work harder to help that kid see me that way. Because I know I've got that kid every day in my class. Um, so I'm gonna greet that student by name. I'm gonna ask him how he's doing. Um, I'm gonna learn a little bit more about that kid so at least one person um that at least they feel that way, they've got one person who may care about them. Um, and that's the work, right? Uh yes, I'm teaching students about their government, but I have to build relationship with them or they will not listen to me. Um and you know, that's that's I think what we strive to do and we always have to do better at.
SPEAKER_00:Um now that you've been in the chair of uh leadership for the union about a year now, right? Uh a year and a half. Um I always like uh I believe in uh some introspection here. Where do you think the union and then you could do better?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I you know, I think we can fight harder. Um we're putting resources into um the things that uh are difficult fights. So to th this'll help this you'll like this as a lawyer. Um these are arbitrations, these are uh Impasses in negotiations, um, and to your audience who doesn't have your your legal background, um when something goes wrong in collective bargaining, we we have processes that um are designed to help us solve the the issue. Um when something goes wrong in somebody's employment, um we have you know arbitrations for a fair person to hear the case. Um and I think our unions need to be more uh ready for those fights, if you will. Um there was a nurse in our schools who um was working with some students with disabilities. She um had a student who wore a helmet already but had fallen and hit his head. And um she recognized at the time that she handed him off to his parents who picked him up that he was starting to show some concussion symptoms. And she said, you know what? I think something's changed between the fall and now, and I think you should take him to the emergency room. They did, and an ER doctor didn't get to that student as quickly as they could have, um, wound up flying that student to uh uh emergency surgery by helicopter and just narrowly saving that student's life. Um, they had a brain bleed from that fall, and that nurse got fired um for some failure of protocol. Um, same failure that the the ER doctor probably had, or the you know, whoever took that kid in in that hospital. Um, but that that nurse got fired. Now we took that case to a fair uh hearing and won it. Um we need to be ready to do more of that. Um, we need to fight harder for teachers to and everybody in education to have um the the wage that brings people into the profession. Um so my and keeps them in the profession. My my thinking is I have to challenge our, and maybe that sounds um strange to somebody who hears about unions but isn't in them. I have to challenge our members to be bolder um in advocating for their kids. Um, because that nurse saved a kid's life that day, and that's not the only uh educator who I've personally known who who's done that. Um so I I want us to work that much harder to make sure you know every student has those people working for them.
SPEAKER_00:And you, some introspection. What do you think you could do more effectively?
SPEAKER_01:Um so I'm I'm that previous answer too, right? I need to be a bolder advocate for kids and for um their families and for the people that I work uh directly for. Um and it's in a way it's it's good in Maryland, right? I've got a very supportive governor, we've got a legislature that um works very hard to fund schools appropriately. They did the hard work of revenue increase during the last session. Um but uh the aforementioned Trump administration and uh dismantling of the Department of Education means um we have to shoulder some of that work here in Maryland. So I have to make sure our governor and our general assembly and our state superintendent of education, our state board of education um do everything that they can uh to not have the damage uh from the national government affect our kids. Um so it's you know it's always more, right? That's the answer in the CCR song, more and more and more. Um, but I have to uh I have to be ready to take that part of the work on myself.
SPEAKER_00:Keep it in mind uh our toddlers of today are gonna be the thinkers and tinkerers of tomorrow. Um what are any parting thoughts that you would like to leave with the audience?
SPEAKER_01:Um so I think there's some things that uh we should know as Americans are really that uh are really important, right? Um I already talked about school segregation getting worse. I didn't mention inequality, but it's been growing economic inequality um in the United States since 1980. Um we about well I'll I'll I'll stop with uh the statistics. I I would like every American to have a great health care, a great public school in their community, um, and great job options. And I think that our public schools are big employers and they are an engine for those toddlers to become those those thinkers and tinkerers. And um I would like everybody to think like um an investor. Um we know that every year of education has a return for that person, that kid's lifetime earnings. If you you know go to 12 years of education, you'll earn 10% more on average if you go to 13 years, go to 14 years. Um and so I I just want I want for everybody to invest in their society and in their kids um the way those those kids deserve. Um, and I think when we when we really think about it, uh the fight isn't so much over um you know what our kids are learning, or you know, is you know, should there be unions in this state or not? Um, the fight is really are we putting the resources into our own society the way we would want and the way we would want for our kids? So I want I want everybody to think about that fight.
SPEAKER_00:Paul, I appreciate the time, your insights, um, and to all the teachers, staff, personnel doing their best to also prepare the next generation. Uh, we appreciate you uh listeners. Thank you for joining us on Brungart Laws Lanyat, where we provide a little extra perspective because the devil is always in the details. Please invite others to listen for our next episode and give us your suggestions. Paul, again, hey, it's been great. Gratitude. Well, I appreciate it.