This month, a Wisconsin circuit court overturned several controversial labor laws restricting teachers’ unions. The most well known was Act 10, which sparked weeks of protests from teachers when it was passed more than a decade ago.
The statute limited collective bargaining for most public employees in the state, capping pay raises, for example, to the rate of inflation, and requiring 51 percent of public workers represented by unions to vote to recertify their local unions every year. It also barred unions from collecting dues automatically through workers’ payroll deductions.
While the legal wrangling continues—the GOP-controlled legislature has appealed the Dane County Circuit Court ruling—the experience has been something of a case study for Matthew Ziebarth, a high school social studies teacher in the Beaver Dam district, and one of the teachers named in the lawsuit against Act 10.
Ziebarth had been teaching for a dozen years, first in English and later in history and government, in the nearby Hartford district when former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made Act 10 a keystone of his legislative agenda in 2011.
In this conversation with Education Week, Ziebarth shares how he got involved in the lawsuit, and what he thinks will happen next. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
It affected me pretty dramatically as a teacher because I was in Hartford [Union High School District] when Act 10 was passed. We, in Wisconsin, have a tradition of pretty much local autonomy compared to other states. The way that the law was written and the way that it played out varied depending on the school districts.
Some districts, like Hartford, [after] Act 10 was passed, changed their policies, changed their pay structures, they changed the ways that you could get credit for compensation for education.
For instance, I was in the middle of working on my master’s degree. It was an interesting situation because I had a friend who is a colleague, who was getting a master’s degree from a fairly easy program to get through; it took him maybe a year to do it. I’d applied at the University of Wisconsin Madison in their educational policy studies program—and for a regular guy like me who’s not brilliant, to be accepted into a pretty competitive program like that was an honor and a privilege. ... but it it wasn’t designed for practicing teachers. I had to really work to get classes working in my schedule, because I couldn’t be there during the day. And so it was a fairly complicated process for me, and it took several years to do it.
And I was working on my thesis [when Act 10 passed] and the district administrator imposed a deadline on when you could get your master’s degree [before new compensation rules took effect] ... and then after that, a master’s degree wouldn’t help at all for compensation. My friend was actually more livid than I was about the fact that he completed this fairly easy master’s degree program [in about a year] and got a substantial pay bump. And I missed the deadline because I was finishing up my thesis, even though it was more complicated.
That wasn’t the only reason I left [Hartford], but ... I lived in Beaver Dam. I had no problem commuting 30 miles a day one way to work in Hartford when it was a good situation. But Act 10 changed that situation because the district administrator, the policies, and the board changed so dramatically. I was involved in the teachers’ association as a union representative. So I would go in and represent teachers at meetings ... and I think I was involved enough to see under the hood of what was going on, where other teachers may not have been.
Joining the lawsuit was rooted in family support for labor
I grew up in Minnesota and my parents were teachers, and they were involved in the Minnesota Education Association [Editor’s note: The organization is now called Education Minnesota]. They walked the picket line in our home school district because of contract issues. So I kind of grew up supporting labor. When I became a teacher ... I got involved fairly early and was pretty active, and still am.
When I got to Beaver Dam, I got involved here with the [Beaver Dam Education Association] and got onto the negotiations team. I guess we kind of made a name for ourselves here in Beaver Dam in our approach to negotiations and response to the board [in part by launching a public awareness campaign of teacher workplace issues]. We were a little more assertive. ... I think that it, it sort of breathed a little life into that process. And because of that, [the lawsuit plaintiffs] wanted to include BDEA as one of the plaintiffs, and they also wanted some individuals to be plaintiffs as well. They asked if I would do it, and I said that I would.
How Act 10 affected teachers’ unions
Based on what I know about labor, [Act 10] was sort of unprecedented. It creates not just red tape; it creates a barbed wire fence rolling across the landscape. There are so many things that are so time-consuming that you have to do every year. First, each local association has to pay $500 bucks to recertify. And the [Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission] then sets up the voting procedure—either a phone or website secret ballot system that they contract out for—and then, we have to file more paperwork.
You have to continually remind everybody of [the vote] and check in with them, and I think a lot of districts’ teachers’ associations—even if they’re interested in doing it—it becomes a real uphill climb. This year we just finished up our [teachers’ union] recertification and got 84 percent of teachers voting “yes” for recertification. We didn’t have any “no” votes, but we still had people that didn’t vote—and if a teacher doesn’t vote, it counts as a no vote.
But our support staff didn’t initially recertify, and I think there’s interest among the support staff for recertifying, but at this point, they have to do [the recertification vote] on paper. It’s even a bigger hill to climb if you let it lapse, and then you have to start the process over again.
The idea of it is to make it too inconvenient, too burdensome to carry out the [unionization] process, which is frustrating and infuriating. It reminds me of historic tactics that politicians have used to keep people from taking some kind of collective action, by making it so arbitrarily burdensome that it’s just too hard for regular folks to find the energy to do.
Affecting his work as a social studies teacher
I haven’t really broached the lawsuit in class or with students. It’s pretty fresh, the decision, and I just have been thinking about ... the value for me to bring up this particular lawsuit [in class]. And I think that I will be bringing it up when we get to labor issues in the 20th century ... when we talk about how government leaders sometimes use tactics to achieve their political goals, like literacy tests and grandfather clauses [used during the Reconstruction Era post-Civil War to prevent Black voters from casting ballots].
[Act 10] is not to the extent of literacy tests or grandfather’s clauses or those sorts of things, but it’s in the same spirit.
How Act 10 has affected teaching in Wisconsin
[Wisconsin] became sort of the Wild West of compensation schemes. Within a 30- or 40-mile radius of Beaver Dam, there are at least six different models that districts operate on. And the biggest change that was consistent is a lower top level and a slower ladder to climb [for pay].
Beaver Dam was pretty good when I got here, for the most part ... and we worked pretty cooperatively with the board for the years to try to maintain that traditional salary schedule. But because of the state funding process, money got squeezed tighter and tighter for our district. They finally got to the salary schedule and said that the salary schedule, as it is, is unsustainable. And so they changed it and came up with a 30-step schedule. [The new schedule reduces options to earn pay for additional credits, instead emphasizing years of experience].
So in order to get to [the highest salary tier], you have to be born and die in this district; it takes you 30 years to get to the top [of the salary plan].
How the lawsuit might affect broader teacher labor issues
Some initial predictions were that by dismantling the public education unions and allowing more flexible pay schemes, that that would increase student achievement. It would provide competitive incentives for teachers and that type of thing. And I don’t think that that’s played out. [Editors’ note: Some research suggests that districts that moved to new pay models did modestly boost student achievement.]
They could say, well, all of those old teachers who have old-teacher ideas will disappear; they will retire; they will quit. And then the “real teachers” out there will show up, and we’ll have a competition model and make [education] run like a business. But that’s not how teachers’ brains work. We have a cooperative model rather than a competitive model. People are saying, “Ooh, we should have competition” at the same time we are just trying to get teachers to get out of their individual classrooms and start talking about test scores and formative assessments and cooperating in teams—it doesn’t mix well [with competitive models].
There are people that are happy and congratulating me [on the ruling] and I’m not unhappy, but I’m not that optimistic yet. We still have more road to travel.
