What If We Treated Everyone as If They Had a Union Backing Them Up?

What if every teacher in your district was treated as if they were unionized, even if they're not?

Or what if your district treated every teacher as if they didn't need to work, even if they do need to work?

This was actually kind of my situation as a principal with a good proportion of my staff.

We were a union district, so teachers were unionized and had a pretty good contract and a pretty good union.

And in my school in particular, a number of teachers did not actually need the money.

They didn't need to work.

They worked because they enjoyed it.

It was rewarding.

And they had spouses who made more than enough money at Microsoft or as attorneys or whatever that they didn't actually need to work.

And that was something that was an inescapable fact to me.

Nobody like laid that out for me and said, Justin, your teachers are going to quit if you're mean to them because they don't need the money.

But it was obvious to me that this was a professional environment and that people needed to be treated like professionals, not only so they would stick around, but to do professional work.

I believe very firmly that if we want people to do professional work and We have to treat them like professionals.

And even if people are new to the profession, even if they're not being very professional at the moment, I believe the best way to get people to be professional and to be professionals and to stick with the profession is to treat them like professionals.

And I didn't think this was a radical idea.

I knew not every place was a union state.

I knew that the status of the profession varied from place to place.

But I've been really astounded over the last couple of years as I've seen the way that teachers are treated with just such disrespect in so many places.

And it is no wonder to me.

that it is difficult to muster the funds to pay them properly when there's not that respect there.

And it's no wonder that it's difficult to keep people when they're not treated as professionals.

So let me know what you think.

Would you do this job if you didn't need the money?

I saw a video the other day from someone I follow here on TikTok about finding your why.

And the why, of course, was health insurance.

You know, your why is you need that health insurance to keep covering you and your family.

And, of course, that's funny, but I think we really need to make this a profession where people would do it even if they didn't need the health insurance, right?

And it's not to say that this will ever be not a job.

I'm not saying this should be a calling that people should do for free.

I'm saying something a little bit different, that when we think of people as needing a job, needing this job, we tend to treat them worse.

We tend to treat them less like the professionals that they are.

And when we remember...

every day that people can walk away, that they don't necessarily need this job.

They might need a job, but they don't necessarily need this job.

When we remember that, we make better decisions as leaders and we hang on to people better and we create a better professional culture, even if there's no union fighting for rights, fighting for certain working conditions.

If we as leaders can say to ourselves, you know what?

I don't want somebody to have to fight for rights that I agreed that they should have.

Like we should just put those in place as working conditions.

I think the profession would be much better off.

Let me know what you think.