The history of the AFT-420 and Saint Louis Public Schools
A two-decade story of surrender and collaboration by a labor union
If you want to understand Saint Louis Public Schools (SLPS), you need to understand the union that represents its teachers, the AFT-420. I joined the union when I started at SLPS in 2020, but I left in 2023 after repeated appalling treatment by them. I was stunned by how close they were with the administration and how little they regarded their members. I started digging into the union's history to try to understand why how they could operate this way and survive. What I found is the history of a uniquely awful organization that lost its way long ago.
Telling the story of what happened to the AFT-420 requires going back at least to 2007. I am not a proper academic, but I do have a history degree and have written some research papers, so I decided to try to write it up. A proper accounting would take much more than a single blog post, so I will try to space this out (and make it more fun to read). In this post, I want to lay out a rough outline of how and why the AFT-420 went from being a labor union to a part of SLPS Human Resources. I’ll move fast and use a lot of links, then do some deep dives in later posts.
The last state takeover of Saint Louis Public Schools
In 2007 SLPS was a much bigger district, but it was a big mess. That year, the state stripped its accreditation due to a host of issues the board of education seemed unable to address. A low graduation rate and test scores were significant issues, but money was the deciding factor. The district was $25 million in debt and seemed unable to balance their budget. Missouri appointed a Special Administrative Board (SAB) to supersede the elected board, and they immediately set to getting finances straight.
Superintendents at SLPS had been coming and going quickly, and one of the SAB’s first acts was to appoint Kelvin Adams to the role in 2008. He would continue as superintendent until 2022, earning a reputation for getting the finances straight, micromanagement, and cronyism. News stories about his tenure often start with his financial successes and yadda yadda the rest of his legacy. The Adams years were not good times for anyone at SLPS but the finance department.
During the period of state control, the AFT-420 made an offer to Adams that set their course for the next two decades (at least). They agreed to freeze the salary schedule for their members (meaning teachers do not get raises for experience). They added language to the union's agreement with the district, giving the board complete control of teacher wages. I could find no news stories at the time that directly stated this, but I will document later in court cases and statements by union officials that show this to be the case.
Pennies from Heaven, mandates from Washington
Despite recent breathless reporting on SLPS overspending, the district has been in the green for a long time. It was not Adam's spending cuts or the wage freeze that turned things around, but a 2011 desegregation lawsuit. The lawsuit awarded the district $96.1 million and was an interesting story on its own. It wiped out the district’s debt and gave them money to spend (theoretically). However, the district was shrinking and leaders worried that an action like restarting the salary schedule would burn through cash that they would need later. Teachers were out of luck. The AFT-420 during this time often said that the situation was unfair but seemed unable (or unwilling) to do anything about it.
This happened during Obama’s presidency and amidst his education reform efforts. Obama and his reformers had lots of ideas to improve schools, many of which were implemented, but many more have been forgotten. None has been memory-holed quite like the idea, popular at the time, that schools could improve by getting past tenure and firing bad teachers. Obama's "Race to the Top" reforms offered federal money to states that implemented teacher evaluation systems that made removing “ineffective” teachers easier. At SLPS, this requirement was met by something called The Saint Louis Plan.
The Saint Louis Plan was big news locally and among education reformers. The national AFT labor union was particularly excited. National President Randi Weingarten called for the plan to become the "model and not the exception." News articles mention the strangeness of a union being so into "collaboration," but most write-ups were hopeful. This article in the Post-Dispatch is titled, "In St. Louis, teachers union plays role in getting rid of bad teachers." It's a weird article from a weird time. Apparently, deals like this were the future of the labor movement. Here’s a small snippet of an HR worker and union official from the article:
This will get a deep dive in another post, but for now, the critical point is that the Saint Louis Plan saw the district pay the AFT-420 directly to help run this teacher evaluation system that bypassed tenure. In it, a union official named Ray Cummings went to schools with a district Human Resources director to identify bad teachers and put them on a "Performance Improvement Plan." While this can be helpful to teachers, it is also a step towards firing them, which education reformers were weirdly into. Later, reformers would focus on the help, not the firing.
Cummings, in particular, was bizarrely excited about helping to fire members of his union. A non-paywalled article that covers my feelings on this is titled "Another AFT Surrender to Education 'Reform'". Although I am no socialist agitator, I fully endorse what this one has to say about a system that sees a labor union working with management to fire tenured workers - It’s antithetical to the labor movement. It is also still going on.
Bad times pile up
I will talk about some underreported twists in a moment, but what happened to SLPS from 2010 to 2025 is pretty easy to summarize: the district shrunk, the fiscal surplus grew, and student outcomes tanked. The state fully reaccredited SLPS in 2017, but student learning and graduation rates are worse than ever. Another state takeover seems unlikely, though, since finances are fine this time. At last reckoning, the district has more than $230 million in its general fund. The salary scale for teachers is still frozen, and adjusted for inflation, teacher pay has gone down. Despite shrinking enrollment, we now have a massive teacher shortage.
In 2015, there was a burst of interest in the plight of SLPS teachers. It had been years since the budget had called for the cuts that saw the scale frozen, but pay was low and conditions were terrible. Why? Couldn’t that money be spent on teachers?
Arguments against paying teachers focused on the potential to need the savings if the district shrunk further. Whether or not they used the term, it was a policy of managed decline. The union's role was ambiguous for much of this time. The 420's president, Mary Armstrong, made statements sympathizing with teachers, but she did not seem to believe the union could do much to help them.
A ray of hope? Nope
As the district kept squeezing teachers out with low pay, the union kept forcing teachers out through the Saint Louis Plan. The years after the Saint Louis Plan was implemented were unpleasant teaching times at SLPS. In 2017, change seemed possible when teachers elected a fresh face to be president of the AFT-420. Sally Topping was a former lawyer and was new to education and organized labor. She seemed less interested in "collaboration" and more interested in doing something for her members, even if it meant fighting management (which is what unions are meant to do).
This led to a series of union lawsuits against the district, including this one, which prevented the district from charging $3,000 to teachers who quit before the end of their contracts (very common at SLPS). It was hardly a big win, but it showed a union fighting for teachers even after they had left the district, and it highlighted the hostility the district showed towards its teachers. Solidarity was in reach.
Another big lawsuit was over the randomness of teacher pay. While the union could not insist on a restart of the salary schedule (only the board of education could do that), they sued because some teachers were being paid much more than others for no evident reason. This lawsuit got only a bit of press when it was launched, and I could find nothing about how it ended. That is crazy, because understanding this lawsuit illuminates what is happening at SLPS like little else.
Topping and the AFT lost the suit in arbitration, but for a wild reason: the arbitrator found that the union had given the district full discretion to pay teachers however they wanted back in 2007. Basically, the arbitrator found that he could not rule on whether paying select teachers much more than others was fair, he could only rule that it did not violate the terms of the union agreement, which it plainly did not. This finding should have been hugely embarrassing to the AFT and the district, which is likely why it was buried. Another reason is that this was all happening in late 2019 and early 2020, when attention was elsewhere.
A quiet coup
What happened after this is hard to trace with official documents or even news stories. I moved to Saint Louis and started work at SLPS in 2020, and I had no idea what was up with the union. The first time I heard about a union president, his name was Ray Cummings. Looking back, he did have an "interim" in front of his name when I first got emails from him. That is because he was not elected to the post.
Ray Cummings had spent the last decade firing teachers and getting paid by the district for it. He was not an elected union official, but he was influential with the “Old Guard.” He was no fan of Topping, who had upset the status quo and exposed him to criticism (if anyone had cared). There was an attempt to vote Topping out led by Cummings and his supporters in the summer of 2019, but it failed. Nevertheless, by 2020 Sally Topping was gone and Ray was “interim” president.
An important note is that Missouri became a Right to Work state in 2017. That means that no teacher can be forced to pay dues to the AFT-420 anymore. The combination of the loss of teachers through attrition and the inability to mandate dues to the remainder should have put heavy financial pressure on the AFT-420. To stay afloat, direct payments from the district were needed. As near as I can tell, the district cut off funding to the union under Topping, which basically made the union insolvent, forcing Topping to resign in late 2019. Ray Cummings somehow became interim president, and the union was suddenly solvent again. None of this is covered in the news, so I had to do some Facebook research (and talk to some teachers) to learn this.
Ray Cummings is still in charge of the union (as of 3/4/2025), but it increasingly does not resemble a union so much as a branch of the administration. They face zero scrutiny in the press, and union officials are frequently quoted as though they speak for teachers. The AFT-420 is weirdly quiet about conditions for its workers, except when it annually comes out to boost a "raise" that actually keeps salaries moving down relative to inflation (still no raises for experience). Union leadership never criticized former superintendent Keisha Scarlett until it was clear she was going to be fired, at which point they immediately declared her a "rogue," and insisted everything is fine now that she is gone.
Watch this video of Byron Clemmons (AFT-420 Spokesman and not a teacher) giving a press conference at the beginning of the 2024 school year to see how bizarre things have gotten. When asked (at 5:20) if teachers are concerned about the upcoming year (with no superintendent and no buses), he waves the question off and claims to have just gotten 50 new members. When asked at (at 8:18) about the much-discussed budget deficit, he simply claims that there is no deficit because a "rainy day fund" will cover everything. He means the general operating fund, which is not just for rainy days but does have about $240 million in it. No one thinks to ask him why teachers still have their salaries frozen when the district has so many reserves. What does a "rainy day" look like to the AFT-420? One where the district stops paying them, I guess.
What does the AFT-420 do today?
I hope this gives a general idea of what happened to the AFT-420 over the past few decades and some resources if you are inclined to research this yourself (I would love help). Considering their unique history and position in the labor movement, I think they should be getting much more scrutiny. A union that does not have the support of its workers but does get along with the administration deserves a second look. If the Saint Louis Plan and union and administrative collaboration were the future in 2013, why is no one talking about how the plan works today? I think I have some answers, but it will take some long posts to unravel.
I am approaching this from the perspective of a teacher, a union supporter, and someone who the AFT-420 personally harmed. If you do not share my views, I hope you can see other reasons this story should be covered.
If you care about education reform, the AFT-420 helps trace how an Obama-era reform project meant to improve teacher quality was corrupted and backfired.
If you care about public finances, The AFT-420 shows how public money ends up in the pockets of corrupt union leaders.
If you care about organized labor (one way or the other), the AFT-420 shows how a union can corrupt itself by becoming entwined with management.
And if you care about education and the kids in Saint Louis, the AFT-420 helps explain how corruption is keeping the district from fulfilling its mission to educate our children.