Striking Out
For more than a year, the teachers in my wife’s school district have been locked in unmoving negotiations with their administration. Tomorrow, it appears likely they’ll go on strike simply to maintain their level of health care benefits and receive a raise that still leaves them behind the curve of inflation.
The experience, from where I sit, has been a bit like watching a massive ship steam inexorably toward the dock while its captain blames landfall for the impending collision.
It’s going to be messy. It will impact hundreds of teachers’ families and thousands of students’ lives at a time when that’s the last thing they need. And it will present the community a crucial question: how much do we really care about teachers?
But the worst part for me is what’s it’s doing to my wife. She’s a teacher’s teacher. The best I know. A safe space on campus for students. A source of counsel administrators seek out regularly. The kind of teacher students actively stay in contact with years after they graduate.
I’m worried that this will sour her on the job she’s done so well for decades. That students will lose her because of the selfishness of a small group of people gaslighting her and her peers by implying they are the self-interested ones. That the damage this is doing might become irreparable.
I can hear the question here: If this is so simple, why hasn’t the district simply found a way to meet teacher’s needs? I have some thoughts.
In opening of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, education historian Diane Ravitch discusses how she went from being part of the federal move to impose No Child Left Behind on American students to repudiating that same body of policy as harmful.
What is most relevant to the situation in my wife’s district is how Ravitch ended up supporting NCLB in the first place. Working as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education, she describes being pulled into what she describes as “thinking like a state.” In short form, this view of education from 30,000 feet turned educators and students into numbers and those numbers became ledger items to be addressed in the most broadly efficient ways.
But efficiency and humanity are rarely congruent aims when people are simply numbers, especially when learning is the goal. Further, thinking like this encourages decision-makers to ignore the real, human impact of their choices in favor of serving the bottom line. It also creates the need to contort the message around those choices as being focused on “student success.”
This is a recipe for the kind of impasse happening in Covina. The district administration and school board have intentionally chosen to treat teachers and students as simply budget items. And, as they have proven with many other budgetary decisions, they have made poor financial decisions they are now looking to blame on others.
Frankly, the disrespect this has caused is both breathtaking and, sadly, a banal form of reality replaying in communities around the country.
The superintendent and her cabinet have made specific spending errors over the past few years that, handled differently, would have rendered this fight unnecessary and then passed the bill for those choices on to teachers and green-lit misrepresentations about the costs of the core issues they are being asking to address.
There’s a reason well over 90% of the teachers in the district voted no-confidence in the superintendent’s leadership. Taking the long view, she should never have had the interim label removed from her title, let alone been given a contract extension in the middle of stalled negotiations by a board who literally refused to look teachers, students, and community members in the eye as they begged them for more than a year to come to an agreement that honors the work of teachers.
Honestly, this strike is a referendum on her failure as a leader, but she’s pulling people aside to say she believes teachers will fold quickly because they have bills to pay while she uses district funds to foot the heavy costs being charged by legal representation and crisis communication consultation the district only needs because of its leadership’s intractable desire to get everything about this situation wrong.
Collect teachers’ keys at the end of school every day weeks before a strike was officially called? Check.
Add locks to school gates those keys wouldn’t work in anyway, just to make a statement? Check.
Imply they’ll charge teachers with theft if they don’t turn in their computers before they go in strike? Check.
Threaten to cancel sports for students and then walk that threat back? Check.
Offer THREE TIMES the typical amount of daily sub pay to induce scabs to cross the picket line while claiming there’s no money to address the issues teachers have raised? Check.
Pen press releases about how much the district truly “respects” teachers while ignoring the independent review of their proposed contract that concluded teachers deserve more than they’d even asked for? Check.
Blowing off parent inquiries in support of teachers? Check.
Promising to meet student needs like special education accommodations and instruction appropriate to their long-term professionally despite the fact they functionally can’t be without permanent faculty in the classroom? Check.
It’s abundantly clear the district administration is much more concerned with getting their way than with serving their students.
Otherwise, they’d be breaking their backs to avoid another serious educational disruption for students already reeling from the impact of the pandemic-driven shut down.
Otherwise, they’d be determined to honor the work of the teachers who carried the heaviest burden of that shut down.
Otherwise, they’d have the moral fortitude to own their mistakes, humble themselves, and return to the table with a fair offer for a group that is already underpaid and simply asking not to have their benefits cut to cover expenses they didn’t incur.
My wife is a phenomenal teacher. Being that requires sacrifices every single day, sacrifices that carry no pay, garner little attention outside of the people she makes them for, and sometimes cost her dearly because she cares so much.
Her absence and that of her colleagues will be felt. I just hope it will be effective, because I’m not convinced the people in control of the district purse strings care.
I am convinced that regardless of the outcome, the entire administrative cabinet in Covina Valley should step down or lose their jobs, if for no other reason than they made this mess whether or not they want to cop to that.
Their lack of empathy and creativity has done harm to the teachers they supposedly respect and represent, and that should cost them.