Administrators and The Big Chill

The Washington Post just covered a Rand Corp. report that provides unsurprising data: 65% of K-12 teachers restricted their instruction on "political and social issues." The paragraph that really jumped out at me was this one:

Teachers’ most common reason for curtailing some forms of education, the report found, was their worry that school or district leaders would not support them if parents expressed concerns — and teachers working in politically conservative areas were more likely to censor themselves.

In fact, the Rand report found that the percentage of teachers self-censoring was double the percentage of teachers working in a state that has actual restrictive laws forbidding woke DEI CRT race gender divisive concepts etc etc etc culture panic teaching.

I don't know if the culture panic crowd figured this out or stumbled across it, but either way, culture panic  has hit on an important tactic-- all you have to do to get a big chill is scare the administrators.

Far too many administrators operate from a simple vision-- a good day is a day on which the phone doesn't ring. And if it does ring, the easiest way to get the problem to go away is to make the teacher stop doing whatever it is that made the phone calling parent sad.

This is not a new problem. Every teacher knows stories of that administrator that folded like a wet paper bag when a parent called. Most teachers have given that advice to a parent: "This is what we need to do next for your kid, and I can try to get the ball rolling here, but things will happen much faster if you call the office."

But culture panic has raised the amount of background noise and added to the list of possible offenses. So in states that don't even have Don't Say Gay laws, administrators are making teachers take down any room decorations that some parent might think are just too gay. Administrators are having staff meetings to deliver the message, "I hear that parents out there somewhere are freaking out over CRT/DEI/LGBTQ stuff, so do us all a favor and just don't come near any of those topics ever." 

And in way too many districts, teachers already know that when push comes to shove, they are working for administrators who will not have their back. They've already adjusted their classroom style accordingly (e.g. adjusting disciplinary requirements because they know that when it comes to problem students, they are on their own), so steering away from the new list of Controversial Stuff is just more of the same. 

It's a great thing to have an administrator who will have your back, who will stand between you and the latest flap (and for administrators, it's a great thing to have a teacher who will take the steps needed to make defending them easier). But it's a luxury that many teachers don't have. The Rand findings are just a reminder of that unpleasant truth. Administrators set the temperature for a building; if those classrooms are extra chilly, the problem lies in the front office.

IN: From the AG, Another Edu-witch Hunt Site

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita has had a busy and varied political career, marked by a desire to go after targets. At the moment, at appears that he wants to go after public schools.

Most recently, Rokita won attention through his relentless pursuit and harassment of the Indiana doctor who performed a completely legal abortion for a 10-year-old rape victim who could not receive her medical care legally in Ohio. I mean relentless, going after her in every way conceivable and, according to the Disciplinary Commission of the Indiana Supreme Court, several ways that were not legal. 

Now Rokita has decided to join up the culture panic cause by setting up a witch hunt website. Didn't even touch base with the state's education department--just set up a website to allow anyone to report a school, district, or teacher doing Something Naughty. 

This guy

We've seen this movie before. In 2021, North Carolina rightwing Lt. Governor, gubernatorial candidate, and kind of a tool Mark Robinson set up a site to collect information about schools in the state. An awful lot of people contributed fake and/or unhinged reports, but by sifting through the remainder, Robinson's office was able to reach the exact panic-feeding conclusions they had planned to reach. In that same year, Idaho's Lt. Governor Janice McGeachin also set out to track down Naughty Indoctrinators with a task force and a website. 

Both of those official panickers were angling for the state's top office. Rokita already has a failed attempt behind him.

The site itself ("an official website of the Indiana State Government") is bold and imposing and full of--well, come choices were made here. "Eyes on Education" is the official title and only sort of sounds like "Big Brother Is Watching." There's a graphics attempt to combine IN (for Indiana) and a silhouette of the state with the slogan "Liberty In Action" but it ends up looking a lot like "Liberty Inaction." Also, "Office of the Attorney General Todd Rokita" appears as prominently if this were a campaign site.

The story behind the site is the standard-- "As I travel the state, I regularly hear from students, parents and teachers about destructive curricula, policies or programs in our schools," said Rokita via press release. Culture panic is always released per request of the masses, perhaps because that sounds better than "I calculated that there were political points to be made here." The website repeats the rationale-- "After our office consistently heard from student, parents, and teachers about objectionable curricula, policies, or programs affecting children, we launched the Eyes on Education portal." Because when people have concerns about school curricula, the state Attorney General's office is the first place they turn.

To turn in your local naughty district, all you have to do is click "submit to portal," fill in your totally not fake name and address, and attach the file image of whatever you're reporting. In this way, the portal collects and displays “potentially inappropriate” material in schools that are “real examples of socialist indoctrination from classrooms across the state.” 

When the site launched on February 5, there was nothing in place to insure against false reporting--you could attach any Indoctrinaty image you liked and claim it came from a particular school. Since that launch, the AG office has said that districts are allowed to respond to postings that are old or inaccurate or just plain fake, but apparently that is their problem and not the state's. And the AG will add the district's comments, but not remove the materials. Call me cynical, but I assume that's because it allows the AG to point at the sheer volume of postings as "evidence" that socialist indoctrination is rampant in Indiana schools.

The main point is not addressing culture panic; it's about creating more public distrust of public schools, the better to push dismantling public education. This is not the move of someone who is serious about public education in the state.

So far, the complaints on the site center on gender identity, a pride flag, DEI, CRT, BLM, 1619, and reading with sexual content. Much of it is unredacted, meaning the names of the teachers are still visible (in at least one case, the complainant's name, address, phone number, and email are also plainly visible), which in the current climate seems like a recipe for all sorts of harassment and intimidation. 

The site has improved slightly over the North Carolina and Idaho efforts in that it makes it marginally harder to clog the process with bogus and protest submissions, though you could certainly give it a shot right here at the submission page.

But mostly what this is going to do is add to intimidation of teachers, allow unsubstantiated slamming of schools, increase distrust of public ed, make some political hay for Rokita, and spread smoke without light. All that and waste the time of a lot of people working in public education (which school administrator will draw the task of doing the daily Check For Lies on the AG Website). What it won't do is improve the quality of public education in Indiana. 

I Was A Teenage Indoctrinee

Whenever the topic of naughty lefty teachers indoctrinating impressionable young minds comes up, I think of Lois Anthony.

It was the fall of 1972. Richard Nixon was up against George McGovern, and the election was all about Viet Nam, where things were not going so well. The draft was still in place (though it would be gone shortly), so the war felt pretty personal. There was political unrest in the country, and not the picturesque flowers-in-gun-barrels late-sixties type, but the ugly shooting innocent bystanders at Kent State type. We hadn't heard a whisper of Watergate, but it was still clear that some people hated--really, really hated-- Nixon.

In the fall of '72, I was a high school sophomore, and Lois Anthony was a fresh-out-the-package social studies teacher who somehow drew the short straw and got the 10th grade honors class. 

Every class has its particular challenges. The challenge of teaching sophomores is that they already know everything worth knowing and why are you, you old person, bothering them by trying pretend that you know things they don't?

But Miss Anthony was game. And boy was she a lefty. We studied the election as it unfurled, and she did her best to get us to understand that the war was wrong and we should get out as soon as possible, and Nixon was a bad, bad man and nobody responsible should vote for him. She even brought in speakers, including a local newspaper guy who had some Big Feelings about the war and the necessity of getting out. Of all the teachers I've known, not one tried harder to sell a particular point of view than Miss Anthony. 

I can't imagine just how frustrated she was by her complete and utter failure.

Nost of the students in the class brought their own set of beliefs from home, and while we would rather have died than admit that we were sticking to our parents' worldview, we were. Some tenderhearted folks were already in her camp. And then, well, she had me and a couple of my friends. We were, collectively and singularly, That Guy. 

We argued for the domino theory. We argued for American awesomeness. We were not far enough around the bend to adopt overtly racist stances, but mostly we were vocally supportive of everything Miss Anthony opposed. We argued just to argue. If she had argued against eating baby seals, we would have used our spare time after school to create a Baby Seal Cookbook. It wasn't that we had anything against her--we liked her just fine. But it was fun to adopt a stance and then charge hard at it, to turn ideas over and play with them. 

Miss Anthony tried really hard to infect us with a bunch of lefty ideas. She totally failed. Oddly enough, by allowing us to argue with her and by acting as if it were really, really important to convince us, and by not, as far as I recall, ever cutting our grades because we wouldn't agree with her, she gave us a certain amount of confidence and practice with a version of critical thinking, and all of that paid off down the line. I'm not sure that's what she meant to do, but it was a job well done, anyway.

I suppose we could have been indoctrinated by someone using other techniques or, more likely, by someone who saw us more often than 50 minutes a day, 5 days a week. I wouldn't argue that indoctrination is impossible. 

But when people argue that children are being indoctrinated just by being in a room with someone who has Certain Beliefs, I think of Lois Anthony. Indoctrinating the youths is a hell of a lot harder than culture panic folks imagine it is. I arrived at my own set of beliefs thanks to a long and complicated journey, and I know some cultural panic comes from the idea that I and others must arrive at certain destinations only if some underhanded pied piper is leading us down paths we would never normally travel. But I remain pretty sure that all the Lois Anthonys in the world can't lead students down paths they aren't willing to travel. 

New Anti-Woke School Board Association

Meet the newest culture war krew. It's the School Boards for Academic Excellence.

Their website, which is a bit sparse at the moment, presents a group that stands up for Really Good Stuff! Empowering school boards! A vision that is "focused squarely on academic excellence and student achievement, ensuring that every child, regardless of circumstance, is equipped to reach their highest potential." They believe that "the education of Americaʼs children is not a partisan issue" because Americans "across the ideological spectrum" all want an education system "focused on academic excellence and student achievement."

Education should be addressed at local level. Work with parents and teachers. Healthy, respectful debate! The "inherent dignity and value of all human beings." And for sure:

We value collaboration – regardless of political affiliation – to ensure that every child has the opportunity to succeed.

It all sounds great. And yet, their first big piece of press is an op-ed on the Fox News website headlined, "New school boards challenge woke bureaucracy that leaves kids behind." Well, let's dig a bit. Maybe we'll find something reassuring. Maybe their reasonable face isn't a bait and switch at all.

The "team" at SBAE consists of four individuals. 

Board member Lance Christensen is the VP of Education Policy for the California Policy Center, an affiliate of the State Policy Network, the web of right-wing advocacy and pressure thinky tanks. They put big pressure on the state to open school buildings and managed to create some NAACP infighting over charters. They brought a case to get a union thrown out as the bargaining unit in a district, and they run a "parents union" in four California regions. Christensen has also worked with the Reason Foundation and, according to the SBAE site, "was also one of the principal architects of the recent school choice initiative proposal in California."

Board member Ward Cassidy is on staff at the Kansas Policy Institute as the Executive Director for Kansas School Board Resource Center. KPI was founded by long-time Koch operative George Pearson; it hangs with the usual thinky tank advocacy groups like State Policy Network and ALEC. Cassidy served in the Kansas House of Representatives. Wasy back in the day, he was an actual teacher.

The board chair is Amy O. Cooke, Cooke was CEO of the John Locke Foundation in North Carolina, a post she took in 2020 after years as the executive vp of the Independence Institute of Colorado. She was also a senior fellow with the Independent Women's Forum. In other words, an entire career spent in right-tilted advocacy groups. The John Locke Foundation is tied to the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, State Policy Network, Franklin Foundation, Art Pope-- you get the idea. Her LinkedIn profile summarizes her years in Colorado fighting energy policies as "having more fun than the left allows." Her twitter handle is @TheRightAOC.

The executive director is David Hoyt. Hoyt has worked for the Heartland Institute, Young Americans for Liberty, America's Future Foundation, The Leadership Institute, and as volunteer manager for Ron Paul's 2008 campaign. He founded Liberty Development (a fundraising service for "liberty-minded" organizations) and the Cornerstone Classical Academy, a classical charter school, in Jacksonville, Florida. 

Yes, the board of SBAE runs the bipartisan gamut from A to B.

Hoyt is also the author of the Fox News piece, in which he talks about the genesis of SBAE as if he weren't the group's executive director. And the version of history that he employs will be familiar:

America's education establishment is slowly crumbling and the National School Boards Association’s public meltdown in 2021 paved the way. As the influence of NSBA wanes, a national network of reformist school board associations is rising to take its place, with a commitment to academic achievement and parents' rights.

Before its precipitous fall, NSBA worked behind the scenes for decades, quietly steering the nation's school boards to preach social justice, institutional racism, sexual nonconformity, and the "equitable" redistribution of students' grades, while remaining conspicuously unconcerned about student performance.

 The "meltdown: that he references is part of the standard narrative of culture panickists, that awful moment when NSBA asked the feds for some help with the out-of-control protestors at board meetings:

In NSBA's own words, criticizing critical race theory and mask mandates during school board meetings could be considered acts of domestic terrorism. As such, dissenting parents should be investigated under the Patriot Act by the FBI, Department of Justice, and Department of Homeland Security.

Well, no, unless you consider threats of violence legitimate criticism of CRT.  Buit, says Hoyt, this led to a plummeting of NSBA membership and SBAE heard the call to help "reformist school board associations" in several states replace "the radical ideology of the NSBA network with an academically focused competitor" 

Yeah, we can kiss that bipartisan conversation among many viewpoints goodbye, I think.

So who's actually behind SBAE? And what are they actually doing? Hard to say. 

They have a Facebook page that was created on October 15, 2023, but seems to have awaken at the beginning of this year. They've got 12 followers (the list is "unavailable), and three posts. Minnesota Parents Alliance, another culture panic group, likes their posts. So did Jacob Immel, a teacher at a Christian school and local conservative politician in Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin.

They have a LinkedIn page, listing their employees as 0-, but things are pretty quiet there.

On Twitter, we find that on October 24, 2023, Lance Christensen was asking

Want to lead a new organization that will help American schools be a model of academic excellence & student achievement? School Boards for Academic Excellence is looking for a bold leader to serve as the tip of the spear of a nationwide movement.

Plus a link to a now-defunct posting on Talent Market. Their twitter account (@SBAENetwork) has two posts to its name. Followers include Hoyt, Christensen, Terry Stoops (Personal account of "the most interesting man in the @GovRonDeSantis administration"), Minnesota Parents Alliance, and three other accounts. They are following 10 accounts, including Nicki Neily (Parents Defending Education), Matthew Nielsen (Education Freedom Institute), Dave Trabert (CEO Kansas Policy Institute), and  Carolinas Academic Leadership Network. 

There is a 990 file for an organization named School Boards for Academic Excellence that got their IRS non-profit wings in 2023; as a fresh group, there's no actual 990 form filed yet. However, to add to the mystery, the address is in Chicago-- Suite 1625 at 300 S. Riverside Plaza. That address is a large office building on Chicago's West Loop. That suite appears to be the home of both Bearing Tree, a company that manages "the operational complexities of running your mission-based organization," and Common Sense Reforms. Common Sense Reforms bills itself as a not-for-profit "dedicated to initiating conversations on the issues that matter the most to taxpayers, families and our communities" and has virtually no website beyond its plain front page4 (and no 990 page).

Bottom line-- School Boards for Academic Excellence is looking pretty dark, opaque, and mysterious at the moment. If Lance Christensen was an early hand in the launch--well, he's well-connected to a variety of right-tilted activist organizations that would be happy to astroturf themselves a tip-of-the-spear culture war movement to tear at public schools on another front. This direction of attack has been tried before, most notably in Florida, where Moms for Liberty future founders first whet their appetite for right-tilted disruption with an "alternative" school board group. 

That Florida attempt fizzled, and it would appear that SBAE is in the very early stages of its mission to disrupt, so it may be that they have a bunch of fizz in their future. But if they turn up in your neck of the woods wearing their special reasonable mask, do not be fooled. This is yet another bait-and-switch version of the right-wing, culture panic, let's burn down public education shtick we've seen elsewhere. 

The Jazz of Teaching

I grew up listening to swing and jazz thanks to a father who was slightly out of synch with the music of his own times. When I had the chance in fifth grade to start learning an instrument, I picked trombone, because that was what Glenn Miller and Tommy Dorsey played. 

When we started learning recognizable tunes in lessons, I started trying to "jazz them up." And I started trying to play tunes that I knew even though I didn't have music for them. I was fortunate to have a teacher encouraged this kind of unrestrained blatting, even told me that there was a name for trying to play a tune by ear-- faking it. 

I've been playing now for about 57 years or so, any kind of playing there was to do (my fifth grade teacher was also my middle school and high school band director and a regular working sax player, and one of the things he taught us was music is music and don't be a snob stuck in a particular rut and playing always leads to more playing) and my playing has always included some form of jazz, Mostly I have stuck to the traditional improvisational style, what folks who don't listen to it much reflexively call dixieland.

So when Larry Cuban ran this piece-- "Playing Jazz, Rebounding Basketball Shots, and Teaching Lessons: Instant Decision-Making"-- it spoke right to me. A month later I'm still thinking about it. Because teaching, on my best days, felt exactly like playing jazz, on my best days.

Improvisation is freedom, and it isn't. You can't just pick up an instrument you've never touched before and just start winging away. Learning to play an instrument is learning not only another language, but another way to speak, so that when you reach for a note, it is there. And what you play rests on an underlying structure of chords and progressions and musical lines (your relationship with that structure is a big part of what characterizes the style of jazz you're playing)-- even if you have control of the horn, you don't just honk randomly. And! On top of that, you're also working things out in relationship with the other people who are playing at the same time. And!! On top of that, even as you are racing forward into the next note, you are also casting back, an ear on what you just milliseconds ago did. All while in a feedback loop with your audience. 

Cuban focuses on the idea of decisions-- thousands of decisions made in an impossibly short period of time. Maybe we shouldn't say "decision" because for folks who aren't in it that conveys a slow consideration, and that's not it, exactly (though it can be), as much as it's just reaching a point of action and acting in one of dozens of available directions. Your brain is just firing--bam! bam! bam! bam!--so quickly and fluidly. Being in the zone often feels as if you've disappeared, you've become Emerson's transparent eyeball, and you are just a conduit and a powerful Something is flowing through you into the world.

As Cuban points out, neuroscientists have done some studying of musicians and the micro-decisions, and he ties it to basketball, though I think many sports fit (sports add an extra dimension with the addition of opponents). 

And teaching. There is certainly an underlying structure and order to what a teacher does in a lesson. But researchers tell us that there's a lot going on. From Cuban's piece:

*Researchers Hilda Borko and Richard Shavelson summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

In short, teaching because it is a “opportunistic”–neither teacher nor students can say with confidence what exactly will happen next–requires “spontaneity and immediacy” (Jackson, p. 166, 152).

Nancy Flanagan, spinning off Cuban's article and a tweet from Ed Fuller, notes that this offers an explanation for why teaching requires so much mental energy. Those little micro-decision points come at you relentlessly in a way for which your college courses do not prepare you (college education students--play jazz or basketball or racketball). 

There are thousand strands running through that room, and your job is to stand at the intersection of them all, keeping them balanced and connected, and it takes a million little adjustments and movements, like riding a unicycle on a tightrope while juggling monkeys with your hands and balancing a broomstick on your nose. 

Teaching, as Flanagan rightly points out, is not the only profession like this, but it is certainly one of them.

The requirement for immediacy, spontaneity, improvisation, deliberate presence-- all of those are more reason that scripted lessons and demands to implement materials With Fidelity are just obstacles to better teaching. 

But wait, someone is about to say. Don't types of music that aren't jazz require players to just follow the notes as written, just like following a script with fidelity? Don't actors on screen and stage follow a script, with fidelity?

There's two answers here. First, there's way more improvisation involved (those Baroque players, for instance, rambled all over the place, just in a Baroquey way).  And no acting script gives you everything on the page; it is the job of actors and directors to fill in the rest.

But second, of course people don't just follow the marks on the page. If they did, there would be no difference between any two recordings of a particular work, or between recordings and live performances. Not every player is a technical whiz or an improvisational genius. Some are just what a friend of mine calls blue collar musicians--they're capable and they get the job done on a regular basis.

That's one more way the mental load of teaching resembles playing. Working musicians find themselves covering the same territory time and time again, and part of the mental discipline is clearing your head so that you can approach the thousandth time while staying fresh and immediate and deliberate and in the moment, true to the path you know well, but open to the opportunities and options that appear in the new moment. 

You can get tired and coast in your ruts. You can get over-excited and try too much at once and drop a bunch of monkeys. And some days you just can't quite connect with that sweet spot and so you fall back on some tried and true routine, which may not be exciting or surprising, but it can get you from Point A to Point B. As I've argued before, teaching is both art and science. But it definitely can be jazz.

ICYMI: Sleepover Edition (2/11)

One of the VP's from one of the Institute field offices is here for the weekend. The Board of Directors has been beside themselves with delight. Exciting times. Yesterday we went to look at dinosaur stuff. And at night, everyone sleeps, some, sort of. 

But I've still got a reading list for you from the week. Share!

“Apples to outcomes?” Revisiting the achievement v. attainment differences in school voucher studies

Josh Cowen has updated his summary of research about voucher effectiveness for Brookings. Excellent source for just how vouchers fall short of what their supporters promise.

Why John Dewey’s vision for education and democracy still resonates today

Nicholas Tampio at The Conversation with a nice consideration of the value of John Dewey (and what some folks get wrong about him).

Is Eliminating Property Tax the Next Step Toward Defunding Florida’s Public Schools?

God bless Sue Kingery Woltanski, because keeping up with the dopey ideas rolling out of Florida's legislature is a lot like playing Whack-A-Mutant-Mole. Latest genius idea? Eliminate property tax.

In Red States, the Bill for School Voucher Bait-and-Switch Is Coming Due

Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire writing for The Nation look at how voucher programs are racking up big time budget-busting costs. Who was surprised?

State vouchers expand, and one Charlotte school remains elusive

A while back. Kris Nordstrom found that some voucher schools had more vouchers than students. Now one reporter is still trying to find one of those schools, or get answers from people supposedly running it. A mysterious saga, indeed.

TFA CEO Announces Exit As Recruitment Falls Below 2007 Numbers

Things continue to go not-so-great over at Teach for Awhile America. The indispensable Mercedes Schneider breaks down the latest news.

How the Far Right Took Over a Pennsylvania School Board—And How Parents Took It Back

For Vanity Fair, Kathryn Joyce provides quite the full history of how Pennridge Schools in Bucks County, PA, got rolled by a MAGA board, became the first district to hire fly-by-night Vermilion education consultant outfit, and managed to sweep all of that mess out of there. 

High School Students Walk Out Over Cellphone Ban

Cellphone bans are all the rage. In one Texas district that's going about how you'd expect.

On Professional Developmentg and the Places We Don't Have

Jose Luis Vilson has some brief but intriguing thoughts about continuous growth for teachers and pedagogical homes. 

“Back to Basics” Again! What Does it Mean for Students and Teachers?

Nancy Bailey has noticed the return of an old favorite education rant--let's get back to basics! What does that even mean?

Ohio’s Gerrymandered, Supermajority Republican Senate Wields Intimidation to Impose Its Will

Jan Resseger reports from Ohio, where a gerrymandered GOP supermajority intends to rule with an iron fist.

Teaching is Hard

Maybe TC Weber isn't saying anything you don't already know, but that doesn't mean it's not worth saying on a daily basis.

‘Enshittification’ is coming for absolutely everything

From Financial Times, the best (so far) explanation by Cory Doctorow of enshittification-- how it happens, what causes it, what stops it, what to do about it.

At Forbes, I wrote about new research from Chris Tienkin showing--once again--that the Big Standardized Test doesn't measure what folks insist it does.

Join me over on Substack. Free and easy!

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.