WSJ Runs Anti-Union Choice Spin

Speaking of saying the quiet part out loud...

Choiceworld, like other reformster movements, has always included a healthy dose of anti-union and anti-teacher sentiment, and there's nothing like a teacher strike to bring that out. Massachusetts is an anti-strike state, so the recent Newton strike referenced in the op-ed was seen as doubly-naughty by folks who want teachers to just behave themselves and take what they're offered. 

Teacher strikes are no fun at all. I went through two in my career, once as the local union president, and I will say this with absolute certainty--teachers do not want to strike. Strikes do not happen because a handful of teachers get cranky. They don’t happen because a union somehow cons teachers into walking out. Most teachers really, really, REALLY don’t want to strike. They are by nature team players, good soldiers, and respecters of authority. They don’t want to break the rules. No strike has ever happened because the teachers, at the first sign of negotiation trouble, got together and said, "Well, let's try striking as a first resort."

As I've written before, it takes just a few elements to precipitate a strike:

* A lack of good faith bargaining

* A long pattern of disrespect

* Teacher concern about the future

* Meaningless local laws

* A situation in which teachers see no other options

Note that the list does not include "not getting exactly what they want." The last item--the no other options one--is critical, because teachers will push their leaders hard to Find Another Way. Strikes are called by members who have been convinced that there is no other way to get the board to work for a settlement that is fair enough

But Corey DeAngelis (noted choicer evangelist) and Dean McGee ("educational freedom attorney") see a different problem:

The teachers get what they want, every time. The result is a vicious circle. Teachers unions periodically hold children’s education hostage in exchange for ransom payments from taxpayers. The unions are never fully held accountable for these disruptions. Nor do they ever allow meaningful change to the system.

One would think that teacher strikes are rampant, or at least should be. After all, if a strike get teachers every thing they want every time, why doesn't every local just strike for every contract negotiation. The answer is A) they don't want to and B) mostly other options, pursued with a good-faith board negotiation, work well enough. 

It's that last sentence--the "and they keep standing in the way of voucher policy" of it--that is the heart of the argument here. If only the parents of Newton had access to "alternative schools or educational paths, "they would have been able to avoid the disruption the strike caused. And the unions would have a weaker incentive to behave disruptively in the first place."

There it is. One quiet promise of school choice has been that it can weaken the unions and give teachers less negotiating leverage, so that they will simply take what we want to offer them and be grateful we gave them even that much. Reformsters have long sought to break unions, strip them of negotiating, power, and find ways to defund them. 

It's a version of what we just saw in Covid America; after hailing teachers as heroes for about the first fifteen minutes of the pandemic, the usual suspects shifted over to blame and op-eds like the piece by Matt Bai declaring that teachers are servants and they should start acting like it. Yeah, he said "public servants," but do you think that really makes it any better. "You guys are servants, but, you know, the noble kind."

An essential feature of Betsy DeVos-style education policy has been classism, a foundational belief that people should be prepared for and accepting of their proper station in life, and that includes teachers. In a world run properly, visionary school leaders would be able to hire and fire teachers at will, as well as setting pay levels as they think are appropriate. Teachers should not try to set school policy, and they should be implementing the teacher-proof materials they were given "with fidelity." And they definitely should have no say in how the school is run. 

And they should never, ever be so impertinent as to strike in an attempt to dictate to their bosses how the school should be operated. And school choice, as envisioned by some leading choicers, would get us closer to that world, creating schools that were run the Right Way, with properly submissive teaching staff, while simultaneously reducing the negotiating power of teachers in the public schools.

Look, I totally get it. Teacher strikes suck. They disrupt the school year, the community, and sometimes relationships within and around the school. They create a cascade of pains-in-the-ass, from disruption of students' year to finding child care coverage. Teachers strike are miserable, unpleasant, sucky things.

That's why teachers are so highly motivated to avoid them. Really. 

DeAngelis and McGee are either naive or silly in their assertion that choice would mean that "every child can go to school without fear of being caught in the crossfire of a labor dispute," as if choice schools are immune to such things as teacher strikes (there's a charter school strike going on in Chicago right now). Children are also "caught in the crossfire" when a school's staff turns over regularly because working conditions and pay are lousy, but there's no way to address the problem except by looking for work elsewhere. The writers might also share some concern for the students who are caught in the crossfire of choice school policies that discriminate against them based on religion or LGBTQ status or whatever. I mean, if the goal is to make, as they say, "children the center of the system," maybe the 
system should work harder to center marginalized children rather than expelling them for being gay or having special needs or not loving God the correct way. But I digress.

The "solution" to teacher strikes is not to find ways to systemically strip them of more and more power so that they'll just knuckle under. The solution is to bargain in good faith and work toward contracts that both sides can live with. As I said roughly sixty gazillion times during our strike, “The contract is not a battle to be won by one side or the other, but a problem to be solved by both sides together.” That can only work if you believe that both sides deserve to have a say.