Democracy and Value

Does the MTA create more value for members, or do members create more value for the MTA?

For several years, I’ve been studying democracy. I was a town selectman in Granby for 9 years. I have run a Facebook Group focused on town politics and governance for 10 or 11 years. I also spent a lot of time talking through decisions and how things worked in town with my friend — a Bernie Sanders supporter, chair of our town school committee, and continuous improvement specialist for Mass Mutual. Our conversations ranged from Turkish politics (he grew up in Turkey) to economics to his work in increasing the efficiency of the company’s he worked for by increasing value for customers.

Gradually, I learned the basic ideas of Lean Six Sigma and the culture of the customer. We discussed who were the customers of our school system. I said it was complicated. Students are the ultimate beneficiaries of public education, but the average 3rd grader doesn’t necessarily know what’s good for them. They may benefit from an improvement in their education, but they may not recognize it. As a selectman, I had it easy. My “customers” were the citizens of Granby. Not just the taxpayers, but everyone who lived in town.

As a selectman, the trick for me wasn’t getting Granby voters to do what I wanted them to do; it was getting the informed enough for them to do what they wanted to do. Like a good teacher, I anticipated what they didn’t understand and monitored a Facebook Group I created to identify confusion and clear it up and counter misinformation. I think it worked pretty well.

Large groups of people are never going to completely agree. Democracy is based on this fact. In most democracies, we resolve these disagreements by majority rule. Over my years as selectman, I came to believe that what I was trying to do was empower citizens to participate in our small town democracy. I had learned how our democracy ran. I listened to their questions and sought answers and provided them. When it came time to vote for a school project, they would vote as they wanted, but they had access to all the knowledge they needed to make an informed decision. For themselves.

This winter, I read a lot about John Dewey, the American educator and philosopher. Dewey believed that democracy was more than a system of government; in his view, it was a manner of living together, a system for individuals to contribute to society, and a means of individual fulfillment:

From the standpoint of the individual, [democracy] consists in having a responsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the activities of the groups in which one belongs and in participating according to need in the values which the groups sustain. From the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potentialities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and goods which are common. (The Public and Its Problems, LW2, 327–8)

Democracy goes hand in hand with people having the freedom to reach their potential. The “potentialities” Dewey talks about, the potentialities he wants people to be able to fulfill, are akin to the “value” to my friend was engaged in delivering to his employer’s customers.

At the moment, the MTA delivers value to its members in legal and contract services. Any other value is unevenly distributed or non-existent. The Annual Meeting has value for 1–2% of the membership. The summer workshops have value for a much smaller percentage. Our political power, particularly relative to our numbers, is anemic. Although I agree with most, perhaps all, of the social justice aims of the current MTA regime, a huge percentage of members does not. Those people are getting little value from the current direction of the MTA. In a democracy, there will always be people who don’t value the decision of the majority, but our MTA democracy has so little legitimacy that members have almost no “capacity in forming and directing the activities” of the MTA.

If we are to prosper as an organization and as educators, we must commit to a more progressive vision, one which provides more than the minimum value. We have to empower members in such a way that they can fulfill their potential as teachers, members, and citizens. There’s a bit of a paradox in making things happen. Members can’t envision their potential until they are involved in the MTA, but they can’t get involved until they see their potential in the union. Democracy, as Dewey perceives it, is a process that people need to be involved in, and our members have been shut out for far too long.