Grieve to Win Again

Inspired by Kevin Prosen's February 2014 Jacobin article "Grieve to Win"

In 2014, living in New York City, I attended meetings and conferences of the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), the social justice caucus of the United Federation of Teachers, and the New York Collective of Radical Educators (NYCoRE), a group of educators and allies committed to fighting for social justice. During a MORE meeting, MORE member Kevin Prosen shared an article he wrote for Class Action: An Activist Teacher’s Handbook (a project of Jacobin magazine and the Chicago Teachers Union’s CORE caucus) called “Grieve to Win.” This article was discussed again in a session led by Brian Jones during NYCoRE’s yearly conference. Prosen shares how he used the grievance process “to educate, agitate, and organize” his colleagues (100). He states, “Despite the shortcomings of the grievance process, it can be a useful tool for educators looking to invigorate their union chapter” (98) because “fear, anxiety, and individual solutions have replaced solidarity and concerted action” (100). Prosen claims, “We grieve not because we believe in the process, but to prepare the groundwork to transcend it in the future” (100). I remember being very inspired by Prosen at the time and really enjoyed analyzing the article with educators in MORE and NYCoRE. This article has been saved on my desktop since then, and I reread it from time to time. However, over time, I have learned that Prosen’s ability to use grievances to organize his school building is not as easy as it might seem. The fear, anxiety, and individual solutions that Prosen mentions are very powerful deterrents in schools.

I have read and attended training sessions of Labor Notes’ Secrets of a Successful Organizer. My workplace was a good example of why we needed to organize and of the very real obstacles in organizing a workplace. Our principal used the fear of retaliation, pitted staff against each other, passed around alarming messages, and created a culture of hopelessness and powerlessness to keep us disorganized. This led to high staff turnover rates each year making it harder to organize as educators left the school out of extreme frustration, disillusionment, and anger. Educators that remained did not want to initiate or join organizing activities, like signing petitions or filing grievances, out of fear of retaliation on IMPACT and did not feel like anything could change after so many years of abuse.

IMPACT

Michelle Rhee was Chancellor of DCPS from 2007 to 2010 when DC’s education system was taken over by mayoral control. Her goal was to reform education through school privatization (charter schools), weakening teacher unions and teacher tenure, and creating teacher accountability systems based on student performance that teachers, parents, and students had no voice in establishing. These were common neoliberal educational policies at the time championed by both Republicans and Democrats. Rhee used DC as an experimental ground to enact these policies. In 2009, DC Public Schools (DCPS) began using IMPACT to evaluate teachers. To this day, each year, teachers receive a score based on multiple measures in IMPACT. “Highly effective teachers” can receive a bonus, while teachers who receive a developing score three years in a row are pushed out of the district. There is no official DCPS policy to support teachers who receive low scores and principals often lack the tools to support struggling teachers. 15% of IMPACT comes from student performance on standardized tests, many of which are not aligned with the DCPS curriculum (for example, we use the Eureka math curriculum, but we test students using the iReady math test). The rest of IMPACT includes formal evaluations from principals (based on a rubric of five Essential Practices (EP)), Individual Value-Added (IVA) student achievement data for grades 4-10, student surveys, Core Professionalism (CP), and the Commitment to the School Community (CSC). While IMPACT argues there is a standardized rubric principals follow to evaluate teachers, the application of the EP rubric is subjective and can be used by principals to instill fear in teachers and retaliate against teachers who speak up. To achieve a highly effective score on the CSC, teachers must commit to a lot of unpaid labor, such as sponsoring afterschool clubs, planning events for families, and attending optional PDs. Principals get to decide what and how much is needed to be highly effective in the CSC. Having experienced this system for the past 4 years, it is terrible. It gives principals too much power, forces teachers to teach to the test, and is the leading cause in DC’s high teacher turnover which is higher than the national average. Michelle Rhee set up IMPACT to be non-negotiable by the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) by keeping it out of the contract. Any action taken by the WTU against IMPACT can be interpreted by DCPS as illegal. While teachers can file grievances against IMPACT, the process is long and often teachers leave their school and/or DCPS before their grievance is resolved.

Not only did my principal use IMPACT to instill fear and retaliate against teachers who spoke up, she was supported for a long time by a corrupt DC instructional superintendent who received “consulting fees” from the Relay Graduate School of Education and imposed their programs on schools. This particular Superintendent created an environment for principals to be very abusive in their schools. She was fired from DCPS in June 2025.

As both Prosen and Secrets of a Successful Organizer argue, grievances are not enough because many of our problems are not grievances, can take a long time to win, and are often individual rather than group grievances. This is absolutely true. Nonetheless, we decided to use it as a tactic in our school because of an opportune confluence of events.

Grieve to Build Solidarity

Last summer, Laura Fuchs and the Educators Taking Action (ETA) slate won the WTU elections. They reorganized the union to focus on organizing in schools and hired grievance specialists to help move along grievances. We were assigned a seasoned organizer who had many previous successes against DCPS. We were also assigned a new superintendent who seemed committed to finding actual solutions to help students rather than imposing draconian measures on schools and expecting miraculous results with no extra support. I also went on parental leave and had to find someone in the school building to be my replacement as the WTU building representative during my absence. While no one wanted the building representative job, two of my coworkers said they would work together, if needed. This ended up making all of the difference as there were now three of us working together, as I continued to organize while on parental leave. Having a team of building reps was key to organizing our building. As Prosen states, “Having more than one person circulating the grievance helps show that it is a collective process” (101).

The 2025-2026 school year began as usual with our principal pitting staff against one another, instilling fear, gas lighting staff, and refusing to find collective solutions, instead saying she would only work with individuals and then failing to give any support to those individuals. The two mental health providers in our school were constantly blamed for behavior issues in the school and often berated by the principal. Therefore, one of them asked me, as the building representative, to be present in her meeting with the principal out of fear of her professionalism being questioned and being unjustly disciplined. The principal refused and shut me out of the meeting. This led to our first grievance of the school year, which was an easy win for both myself and my coworker, as this was a clear violation of our Weingarten rights. My principal chose to ignore the grievance, as she often ignored her emails, and so after a week, it went to the new Superintendent, who could not ignore it. This allowed us to speak with the Superintendent and share some serious concerns at the school and forced him to speak with our principal and have her trained in our Weingarten rights.

As issues, which have been going on for years at our school, continued to occur throughout the Fall of the school year and our principal ignored staff concerns, our new union organizer and a union grievance specialist suggested that we file grievances for everything, whether or not it would be taken up by DCPS as a grievance, “to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall until it sticks.” Prosen similarly argues, “If the particular grievance isn’t covered by the contract, file it anyway, as a letter of protest or complaint to the principal” (101). Using our example with our grievance about Weingarten rights, my coworker and I were able to show our other coworkers that filing grievances would get the attention of the Superintendent and could force our principal to hear our concerns, even if the grievance did not continue up the steps. Our union organizer also requested a meeting with our Superintendent letting him know that we were prepared to file a lot of grievances but that this could be prevented by having a meeting with a group of staff members to hear our concerns which the Superintendent could then work on with our principal. We met with the Superintendent in November and provided documentation to back up our concerns. We had been following the contract and meeting monthly as a group with the principal to find solutions, but we were constantly ignored and told to schedule individual meetings. Getting this meeting with the Superintendent also helped build confidence with my coworkers that change was maybe possible. When our principal had not changed her ways by mid-January and had failed to share the IMPACT CSC expectations in a timely manner, my co-building reps and I were able to convince our coworkers to file a group grievance. As Prosen says, it’s important to “infuse the process with a sense of collective action.” Once again ignored by our principal, the grievance again went to the Superintendent. We had started the Fall filing individual grievances and were able to work toward filing a collective one. We continued to file individual ones but the collective one united the building and stripped some of the fear away. It also “provide[d] an opportunity to train staff to read and interpret the contract, a skill which does not come naturally to anyone” (Prosen, 100). In all of our grievances, we made it clear to the Superintendent that we feared retaliation in our IMPACT scores. Making this explicit and having it on record served as a paper trail and a sort of protection against retaliation. The Superintendent began to get annoyed by how often he was meeting with us and our union organizer, but we made it clear to him that this was the only way anything was getting done at our school, since our principal was so difficult to work with. In addition to filing grievances, we also testified at the DC State Board of Education to get the attention of our elected officials and ask for a meeting with them to share our concerns.

Victory!

In April we learned that our principal was being asked to resign from DCPS. This was a huge victory for our school! It showed our coworkers that change was possible and that being organized can lead to victory. A few of our coworkers that had decided to leave the school due to our principal’s constant abuse changed their minds and decided to stay. This is great for students as teacher retention is directly linked to student success. In addition, while in the past I had to beg my coworkers to join WTU in-school committees because it felt hopeless trying to work with our principal, we actually had to have building elections in May because there was so much interest in working with our new principal. This shows how organized and invested my coworkers are now in the school and in the process of finding solutions to improving our working conditions and student learning conditions. Our principal’s resignation also didn’t end our need to organize and file grievances as our principal continued to unjustly lead the school until the end of the school year. The building remained united until the very end. While we still have many issues to work on for improving our school building and need to use our collective strength for issues facing our students and their parents beyond the school building, there is now hope for the future and solidarity to face future challenges. As Prosen makes clear in his article, the grievances were small steps in the right direction.