by Eric Freedman
December 16, 2008

What’s a former special education teacher doing as the head of the most politically targeted union in the state?

Iris Salters, Michigan Education Association President

When that ex-teacher is Iris Salters, Michigan Education Association president since February 2006, the answer is pushing, pushing, pushing and stepping on toes, even those of Democrats whom the union usually favors. In fact, the public perception — and the frequent argument of legislative Republicans — is that the MEA is more or less an arm of the Democratic Party, despite Salters’ assertions that “education shouldn’t be a political football.”

More than 157,000 teachers, college faculty and support personnel are represented by what calls itself the state’s largest single public employee union and the nation’s third-largest education union.

The union-affiliated Michigan Education Special Services Association (MESSA), which provides health insurance for about 45 percent of the state’s public school personnel, has been a particularly favorite political punching bag. For example, last year’s intense budget debate found the MEA on the opposite side from the state’s second-largest education union, the Michigan Federation of Teachers, as well as opposite the legislature and Democratic governor. MEA, which suffered a rare political defeat in protecting its turf, argues that lawmakers made a political rather than a truly budgetary decision in requiring MESSA to provide school districts with health claims data. That information, backers of the legislation argued, will help districts shop for better rates.

Sen. Wayne Kuipers, the Holland Republican who chairs the Senate Education Committee, calls Salters a “great advocate for her union members” and “a tough negotiator, but also practical." "There are times when we frankly will never agree, but we still talk,” he says. “From my standpoint, all you can hope for is dialogue.”

For example, Kuipers recalled the heath benefits disagreement during last year’s budget settlement debate. “It was a difficult issue” and the MEA and Senate failed to reach a compromise “despite countless hours” of negotiation. On the other hand, the two sides started at different points on the question of enhanced high school graduation requirements and, over time, the MEA “recognized the necessity to prepare kids for jobs in the 21st century.”

Whether it’s political critics or public critics, Salters vows, “We don’t have to take a back seat to anybody.”

She staunchly defends the importance of her members’ work, despite a frequent lack of public understanding and empathy. “Educators and school employees have always been easy targets,” she insists. “People expect school employees to be lesser professionals than anyone else. We equate them with babysitters and tend to think they should do things from the goodness of their hearts: How dare you want a lower class size? How dare you want better working conditions?”

There are times for reality over ideology, whether it comes to the amount of state aid lawmakers provide to public education — policymakers “aren’t going to shut down everything else so education can be funded at the level I’d like” — or the continuation of taxpayer-funded charter schools — despite her critique that they’ve not proven to be the innovators that proponents promised.
           
Personal perspective
Salters, now 64, recognizes the potential influence of a single teacher. Her own inspiration came in the form of Manuel Pierson, a high school social studies teacher in Covert, her first minority teacher. “I thought the sun rose and set on that gentleman. He encouraged me that I could go on and be a teacher.”

Michael Flanagan, the state superintendent of public instruction, credits Salters with bringing a classroom teacher’s perspective into policy debates. “She’s very caring,” he explains. “Her teacher background comes out. It’s not just about union protection. Some association leaders lead associations where they never did the work the association is responsible for.”

Salters’ great-grandmother learned to read as a “companion slave” for her master’s children in Mississippi before the Civil War. Her grandmother became a teacher but was forced to resign when she married and was thus deemed a “fallen woman.” An aunt became the second generation to teach, and Salters is the third, although her two adult children are following different career paths.

Raised in South Haven and now a self-described “Kalamazoo girl,” her original career plan was speech therapy, not teaching, because a close friend in elementary and secondary school had a bad stutter and “I decided by junior high school that I could help folks like that.” But after a few years doing that kind of work, she returned to her alma mater, Western Michigan University, for graduate studies.

She remembers the first class of her own, in Portage: “It was a little scary to know I was the only one in there and how much of their success depended on what I did and how I did it.”

She spent most of her career in middle schools in Kalamazoo, where she also served seven years as president of the Kalamazoo Education Society, sat on the MEA executive committee and was MEA vice president before rising to the post of top political and policy leader in East Lansing. (Lu Battaglieri, MEA president since 1999, moved to the more business-oriented post of executive director in 2006.) Despite the passage of time in Kalamazoo, she says she still felt excited to be in the classroom at the start of the school year — “an opportunity to start over, to adjust, to throw out what hasn’t worked and to try new things.”

She had no master plan, figuring she’d spend 30 to 35 years in the classroom and then retire. She soon recognized, however, that major decisions about education are not made in the classroom or even in the school district, but in political bodies such as the legislature. She’s currently on sabbatical from Kalamazoo, with the union paying her salary.

In her spare time, she plays Bingo — “a non-thinking kind of thing” — starts but doesn’t finish knitting and crocheting projects, and even reads Money magazine while confessing that “I can’t believe I’m reading it.”

Longtime Democrat
It’s about a month before the election and Salters is sitting in her East Lansing office in the sprawling MEA complex. Art collected on her travels to South Africa is on the wall, as are memorabilia from the 2006 Super Bowl XL in Detroit — her husband and son attended, but she didn’t. She’s wearing a “Women for Obama” button — “I came to the presidency as a member of the Democratic Party. I’m not ashamed of being a Democrat” — but adds, “I have also supported, occasionally, some Republicans,” including U.S. Rep. Fred Upton of St. Joseph. She attended the Democratic National Convention as a Clinton delegate, although neither she nor the MEA endorsed either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

“There’s not a politician I find we don’t have disagreements with,” she says, acknowledging that she’s “always been opinionated,” exercising her voice and views, whether in front of her own school board or the legislature. “Every educational decision is a political decision because it’s made by some political decision-maker.” And she admits she loves the politics and the advocacy that come with the MEA presidency.

Looking at the roster of this year’s candidates backed by its political arm, MEA-PAC, electoral success and Democratic dominance are evident. Ninety-three of the 103 MEA-backed candidates won, including 11 Republicans and 60 Democrats running for the state House. For the U.S. House, eight of the nine endorsed candidates won — with Upton the only Republican among them.

Even so, the MEA hosted pre-election fundraising events for the GOP and Democratic caucuses of both the House and Senate, and all four legislative leaders attended, as did most of their members.

The Republican Kuipers says Salters’ party allegiance isn’t a problem from his perspective. “I have some very good Democratic friends in and around the legislature. I don’t think Republicans have all the good ideas.”

And Kuipers notes that in the political arena known as the Capitol, both he and Salters are partisans. “She will advocate her position,” he continues. “At the end of the day, whoever can win the votes will win the debate.”

Similarly, Flanagan says Salters’ party ties don’t affect state Board of Education decisions, although Democrats hold the majority. “There’s not a hint of partisanship at our meetings,” he insists. “We have a job to do no matter who is governor and no matter who controls the House and Senate.”

Despite their periodic disagreements, MEA access to Granholm is much easier than it was to Republican Gov. John Engler, but Salters adds diplomatically: “I respect them both for taking on that responsibility” as governor.

In her view, despite the trials facing public education in Michigan, despite the funding problems, despite the political attacks, the MEA will stand resilient, always a survivor. Engler once predicted its demise, she recalls.

“Well, Engler is gone and we’re still here.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Eric Freedman is an associate professor of journalism at Michigan State University and director of its Capital News Service. His most recent book (with Stephen Jones of Central Michigan University) is African Americans in Congress: A Documentary History (Congressional Quarterly Press).