ShawshankExemption t1_j8klwgr wrote
I’ll get downloaded to all hell for this, but teachers striking during the school year causes incredible educational disruption and harm to students, not to mention their families. It can directly create unsafe environments for children and our communities.
If government is going to change the law to permit teachers to strike, it should only be during the summer or other, ‘non-teaching’ working days (e.g. professional development).
Most importantly, the government should change the laws to force school districts and local governments to come to the table during negotiations in good faith. The legislature should outline what ‘good faith’ negotiations entail, and put in place direct penalties for district that do not follow those guidelines. These regs must be highly responsive given the cost of even one day of bad negations out of contract.
Public schools have understandably had their reliability questioned given many districts response to the pandemic, remote/digital school adaptation. A lot of families are questioning if they can be relied upon to be there for the kids and their families. I’m not saying it’s the teachers fault, but allowing strikes could further weaken people’s faith in their reliability. The legislature should reform the other side of the negotiation table (districts) to fix this issue. Law makers can do it in conjunction with their constituents and unions to come up with a law that would satisfy them (without the right to strike).
niknight_ml t1_j8kq314 wrote
The entire point of a labor demonstration IS to cause an inconvenience. If there is no inconvenience, there is no possibility for change to occur in those situations.
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>If government is going to change the law to permit teachers to strike, it should only be during the summer
Are you really suggesting that they strike during a period in which they aren't under contract? That's like striking from a bagel shop that you haven't worked at in years...
guesswhatihate t1_j8mr6pk wrote
Kramer?
ShawshankExemption t1_j8krhmm wrote
You realize in mass teacher contracts go for multiple years and automatically extend if no new contract is ratified, so there isn’t a period when teachers aren’t cover by a contract right? Districts meet various federal and state requirement for grants, PD, and other items during the summer. A summer strike still causes pain for the district, admittedly not as much as during the school year.
Yes- I fully see how strikes are intend to get districts to the table to negotiate, specifically by inconveniencing them. I’m saying that the entity that inflicts that inconvenience and the nature of that convenience should not be a closure of schools, but rather other mechanisms as caused by the state law/reg I’m advocating be out in place.
One example could be an arbitration process. No new contract by x date? Forced arbitration run by the state. To extend the example, look how baseball handles their arbitration, each party (player and team) puts in what they think the pay should be for the next season. The arbitrator, using formulae decided by CBA (in this case it would be state law), determines what the number should be, and picks which ever is closer the player or the teams number. No splitting the difference so no incentive for one side to cook their number, and it frequently incentivizes teams/players to come to agreement before arbitration.
niknight_ml t1_j8kwgnm wrote
>You realize in mass teacher contracts go for multiple years and automatically extend if no new contract is ratified, so there isn’t a period when teachers aren’t cover by a contract right?
It's a little more nuanced than that. While the contract between the union and the district lasts for multiple years, individual teacher's contracts are year to year. One of the guarantees of professional status (aka tenure) is that the district has to offer you a contract for the next school year. This is why non professional status teachers (who haven't finished 3 years employment) can be non-renewed at the end of each year without reason.
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>One example could be an arbitration process. No new contract by x date? Forced arbitration run by the state.
And you've just struck on the reason for pushing the bill allowing for strikes. Ask for the ability to strike, settle for forced arbitration. No district would willingly add it to their existing contracts (since it cedes power that they currently "have"), so you backdoor the state into requiring it as a compromise.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8kygl9 wrote
Sure- but teachers aren’t trying to negotiate their individual contracts, but their CBAs. That, combined with that this labor action is across the union, not just those teachers without professionals status, means those YoY contracts aren’t really material to that.
So teachers unions are pushing for a law/policy (striking rights) that they don’t actually want? They’re negotiating in bad faith! (/s kinda)
I think you and I agree that state government should take specific action so that unions have more leverage in negotiation. You would be okay with permitting strikes, it’s what this specific law would permit. It’s fine to say you could compromise from that, but you can’t say you don’t what what the law would give you. I personally think striking would cause far more harm than good to public education in this state broadly and that law makers need to take that into account when giving teachers unions the greater leverage they should have.
pillbinge t1_j8lcfmw wrote
As a teacher, I have never once attended anything during the summer that was required. Not at all.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8mlait wrote
You’ve never had a minimum of 3 PD days before school started? Never heard of summer school? Never been expected to prep for your year over the summer?
pillbinge t1_j8nfsm3 wrote
2 days, but those are part of the 183-185 day contract. Summer school is optional already. Prep is optional, and the onus to prep is put on teachers without pay anyway. Keep trying these entry-level responses to an actual teacher.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8nkpin wrote
Keep trying to fuck over kids you don’t give a shit about. You just want to strike to be vindictive , which is fine the district administration can be a load of ass holes, but it’s entirely wrong to say it’s in the interests of the students and the legislature should disregard those students and allow teachers to strike legally.
pillbinge t1_j8ocyv0 wrote
I work to my contract. If you don't like the contract, get a new contract during negotiations - the same way any other company would have to deal with it.
I'm begging you to stop making a fool out of yourself, though. No teacher is so vindictive. You want quality educators? Pay them. Simple as that. Far better to strike for a lousy one week than watch a slow leak of qualified veterans turn to other fields. Even lower-paying fields that are just easier to process and handle healthily.
pillbinge t1_j8lcd75 wrote
You'll get down-voted (not loaded) because it's a dumb opinion. You haven't provided any way for teachers to advocate for their interests in ways that matter. If teachers were paid what they needed already, and supported in the classroom, and not given bullshit work, they wouldn't need to strike in the first place. Nearly all strikes can be avoided.
Trying to use children as human shields in a negotiation is gross.
>If government is going to change the law to permit teachers to strike, it should only be during the summer or other, ‘non-teaching’ working days (e.g. professional development).
Then it isn't a strike. Teachers are already free to gather and complain during the summer. There's no point.
>Most importantly, the government should change the laws to force school districts and local governments to come to the table during negotiations in good faith.
That is already legally required.
>I’m not saying it’s the teachers fault, but allowing strikes could further weaken people’s faith in their reliability.
Then your comment would be more popular.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8ml4wo wrote
A solid portion of teachers work in the summer in mass, be it summer school, PD, prepping for the upcoming year, that’s all labor they can withhold then that’s critical to the district. Idk where you’re from that teachers don’t work during the summer. I meant “non-teaching” as not with the whole student body in front of them.
Once teachers and districts let things get to a point where students don’t have class because of the dispute, the kids already involved. Idk how you can’t see that.
I quite literally proposed an alternative way to bring about contract agreement.
pillbinge t1_j8odcri wrote
Summer school isn't required. You can't get fired for not working summer school. A district could be unreasonable and not renew a teacher without tenure/professional status for not doing it, but right now, they're in no such position.
PD isn't required. Prepping isn't required. And when the first day of school hits, teachers are judged on their ability to teach. Protesting in the summer to an audience of no one and calling bad lessons later on the summer's protest makes no sense.
>I quite literally proposed an alternative way to bring about contract agreement.
So did I. Tell districts to be proactive. If not, teachers can be "retroactive" and protest after a long period without changes. Seems to work. Make it so this kind of protest can't work and you'll be in good shape. No one wants to have to protest, but we don't live in that kind of world.
BlaineTog t1_j8ldkew wrote
What's the point of striking when you wouldn't otherwise be working?
If teacher strikes are so bad for kids, then shouldn't the government have pulled out all the stops to reach an equitable deal before this became necessary?
What are teachers supposed to do if their pay and work conditions are so bad that they'd want to strike over it? Should they just lie back and starve to death for other people's kids? Should they just all quit en masse? Because that seems way more disruptive for the kids than striking for a week.
You gotta think these things through. Yes, it sucks for kids to lose out of a week of school, but honestly it's probably fine. Lots of kids get taken out of school to go on family trips for a week and they're fine. They can catch up. Yes, it sucks for parents to lose free daycare, but they can avoid that by voting for better teacher pay.
What would be truly unconscionable would be a mandate for teachers to grind themselves into a paste to grease the wheels of their workplace. They are not our slaves and they do not deserve to be treated like garbage. They deserve fair wages and a workplace that allows them to thrive.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8mmihz wrote
Teachers work over the summer, obviously not as much as during the normal school year, but there is summer school, PD and other activities.
Yes! The government should’ve done way way more, I blame local districts way more than teachers unions. But at the same time it’s typically 10-20 morons in district/gov doing it. I’m saying the legislation needs to weaken their ability to be that moronic and set up more stringent rules for them to follow in negotiations to prevent work stoppages from that end.
The parents are only part of a voting populace! What about people without kids? Or whose kids are fully grown or two young? Never mind the fact the don’t directly vote for teacher pay but rather school committee members and even then that’s only ever 2 years. Yes- those elected officials may get voted out, but they are insulated until their next election.
This isn’t one kid out for a week. It’s an entire district. We just saw what happened when learned is disrupted, students academic performance and learned regressed massively over the pandemic. We saw how important it was to keep kids in school, and students are still clawing out of it. Any loss of learning is a significant loss and I’m saying state government needs to take action to prevent that from happening while protecting and strengthening teachers. Sure, the most recent strike in Woburn MA, was 1 week, but no one knew how long it would be day 1.
I’m not saying teachers need to be ground to the dirt. I’m saying the state legislature should take this nuclear option off the table and instead tie the hands of districts to negotiate in good faith.
BlaineTog t1_j8mqq8q wrote
> Teachers work over the summer, obviously not as much as during the normal school year, but there is summer school, PD and other activities.
Those activities are mostly not part of their usual teaching contract. Summer school in particular is a separate gig -- and how is it even better, according to you, for teachers to strike when they're supposed to be teaching summer school anyway?
More to the point, there's so much less going on then that a strike would be wholly ineffective.
> Yes! The government should’ve done way way more, I blame local districts way more than teachers unions. But at the same time it’s typically 10-20 morons in district/gov doing it. I’m saying the legislation needs to weaken their ability to be that moronic and set up more stringent rules for them to follow in negotiations to prevent work stoppages from that end.
That's a good start, but ultimately the teachers themselves still need leverage for negotiations to be equitable. No set of rules can adequately adapt to changing circumstances forever.
> The parents are only part of a voting populace! What about people without kids? Or whose kids are fully grown or two young? Never mind the fact the don’t directly vote for teacher pay but rather school committee members and even then that’s only ever 2 years. Yes- those elected officials may get voted out, but they are insulated until their next election.
That's just how Democracy works and ultimately we have to find a way to respect the will of the majority without crushing the minority. There's no magic wand we can wave to make everything neat and tidy. We'll need to convince those without kids that voting for more teacher pay -- in whatever form that takes -- is in their best interests. If we can't, well, I guess we just don't get to have public schools then and society will slide into a collapse until everyone else gets the picture that schools are important for everyone. Strikes bring those apocalyptical possibilities to our attention long before they become actualities.
> This isn’t one kid out for a week. It’s an entire district. We just saw what happened when learned is disrupted, students academic performance and learned regressed massively over the pandemic. We saw how important it was to keep kids in school, and students are still clawing out of it. Any loss of learning is a significant loss and I’m saying state government needs to take action to prevent that from happening while protecting and strengthening teachers. Sure, the most recent strike in Woburn MA, was 1 week, but no one knew how long it would be day 1.
One kid or a thousand, a week out still isn't going to cause serious learning loss. The school year simply isn't calibrated that tightly. A few months? Sure, that might cause problems. Sounds like we better give those essential workers what they need to do their essential work rather than prey on their empathy.
> I’m not saying teachers need to be ground to the dirt.
That's absolutely what you're saying by denying them the right to strike, though. That's the inevitable effect of denying them sufficient leverage to advocate for themselves during contract negotiations. Our economic and political systems only function properly if the network of checks and balances is intact, and the ability to strike is a potent check on the power of the employer. Remove that and the only remaining options teachers have are, a) beg, b) quit, or c) die, and we as a society should not be happy about any of those outcomes. What's next, making it illegal for teachers to quit? How Kafkaesque do we want this situation to get?
We need strikes like the Woburn teacher's strike to remind us that these people are not our slaves and that they are doing us a great service that deserves commensurate compensation. They cannot be treated like 14-year-old babysitters, paid $5 an hour plus snacks and no boyfriends/girlfriends over until the kiddos are asleep!
ShawshankExemption t1_j8mwt65 wrote
It would the strike in the summer would still be partially effective, it would still escalate the still, still withhold labor as you are calling for, and it’s better than during the school year because feelers kids would have their schooling disrupted.
Sure- rules may need to be changed and updated, like every other single rule and law ever created by humanity. That’s not a good counter argument for why we shouldn’t create them in the first place.
Strikes aren’t just a foreshadowing of the collapse of public education, I’m saying they are the first stage of the collapse of public education. If strikes are legalized, they will become common and public schools will become wholly unreliable for parents and they will look towards other options. It’s already happening with enrollment numbers dropping and interest in private education jumping.
I don’t see how you can take students missing school so flippantly, hand waive it way with them being fine. It’s tens of thousands of hours of school a year, kids not only are behind but they actually regressed because of the pandemic. If you can see that a terrible thing in and of itself, idk what there is for you.
I’m saying the legislature needs to be the entity to place the check on the school districts. I’m not saying teachers should have no leverage, I’m saying the harm caused to kids and public education at large is to great to make it permitted. Has the illegality of strikes prevented them? Nope! We’ve had 3 in the past 2 years. They’ll be a hell of a lot more than that if they become legalized.
There are more options for teachers than your a)b)c), and the legislature can create a hell of a lot more as well as other bats to bear districts with that don’t fuck over students and families like a district/teachers union caused work stoppage does.
BlaineTog t1_j8n5pdh wrote
> Sure- rules may need to be changed and updated, like every other single rule and law ever created by humanity. That’s not a good counter argument for why we shouldn’t create them in the first place.
I'm not arguing against legislating rules to force school districts to play fair. I'm arguing against solely relying on those rules. This situation cannot be solved unless teachers have the ability to advocate for themselves directly.
> Strikes aren’t just a foreshadowing of the collapse of public education, I’m saying they are the first stage of the collapse of public education. If strikes are legalized, they will become common and public schools will become wholly unreliable for parents and they will look towards other options. It’s already happening with enrollment numbers dropping and interest in private education jumping.
Because teachers don't have the legal right to strike, administrators know they effectively have them over a barrel. As such, they have minimal incentive to treat with them fairly at the negotiating table. As such, teaching conditions at public schools are terrible, thus driving teachers out of the profession or at least into private jobs. Meanwhile, you don't tend to see these kinds of strikes at private schools partially because their teachers do have the right to strike, so the schools have to play ball and treat them fairly.
If public schools are about to collapse, it's not because teachers are striking but because things have gotten so bad that teachers feel the need to strike. You're mistaking the signal for the cause. When the canary in a coal mine drops to the bottom of the cage, you should get out of the mine, not reprimand the canary for putting miners in danger.
> I don’t see how you can take students missing school so flippantly, hand waive it way with them being fine.
It's a week. School year lengths vary more than that from state to state. Dropping 5 days isn't going to make a big difference.
Now if this became a regular occurrence, or if it dragged on for months? Yeah, obviously that would be bad. Sounds like the school would have a pretty big incentive to play ball with the teachers if that were the kind of consequence that would be carried by ignoring their demands and demanding they grind themselves to dust.
Let's be honest here: the Woburn strike hurt because it pinched parents to find alternate childcare, not because these kids are actually going to see long term damage from spending a week out of school. I realize using children as a political football is a storied tradition in policy debates but they're really not the specific concern in this situation. It's because parents treat schools as just a place to dump their kids during the day for free.
> There are more options for teachers than your a)b)c), and the legislature can create a hell of a lot more as well as other bats to bear districts with that don’t fuck over students and families like a district/teachers union caused work stoppage does.
When you get right down to it, there really aren't other levers to pull here. If the district knows that you ultimately have to come in and do your job, then what reason do they have to give you what you need? Right now, we're only having this discussion because the teachers chose to strike illegally -- they made enough disruption that we've collectively realized that continuing to ignore them is not an option. Legislating school districts into paying better is nice and all, but when those laws become irrelevant and school districts go back to bending teachers into pretzels, we're going to ignore them again until they strike and make us pay attention.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8nawdc wrote
Private schools don’t face these same issues not because those teachers have a right to strike, but because they tend to be better off financially than public schools because they have more affluent families in their student community, and are able to provide higher/different comp. Not because they are unionized (the vast majority are not). Those teachers contracts actually are individual not collectively bargained.
Look, if you are good ignoring thousands of hours of learning loss, idk what to tell you. It’s a bad in if of itself, regardless of what causes it. It’s a significant price to pay by those who have the least control of the situation (the students).
You are specifically arguing for strikes to become a regular tool available to unions in negotiations. If you can’t see that strikes will become more prevalent regardless of circumstances if they are legalized you are just naive.
The canary in a coal mine is a shit metaphor. You cannot separate teachers and the union from thr situation, they are not some neutral signal like the canary is, they make up the system collectively, with the district/local govt. they are not some neutral signal.
BlaineTog t1_j8nfl6o wrote
Private school teachers not feeling the need to unionize is not the flex you think it is. You are absolutely correct that private schools generally have better funding, though. Sounds like we oughta fund our public schools better if we want to avoid frequent strikes, right?
> Look, if you are good ignoring thousands of hours of learning loss, idk what to tell you. It’s a bad in if of itself, regardless of what causes it. It’s a significant price to pay by those who have the least control of the situation (the students).
Learning loss doesn't happen over a single week. If it did, there would be calls to eliminate break weeks and anyone who took their kid out of school for any amount of time would be guilty of child abuse. Grandma passed away in another country and you want to take your child to the funeral? Too bad! CPS is going to show up at your door and drag your kid to school instead.
You can't just aggregate school time loss into a big number and call it harmful because it's big. Learning loss happens individually, so you needs to consider the time lost on an individual basis, and losing a week isn't going to be a serious problem for any individual kid. I'm just saying, let's be honest about why the Woburn strike had people up in a tizzy. It's not the kids who were harmed: it's the parents' pocketbooks and time.
Look, obviously it would be bad for kids if teachers were striking all the time. Giving them the ability to strike legally doesn't mean that will happen. Not giving it to them does mean that schools will continue to rot and die from the inside.
> You are specifically arguing for strikes to become a regular tool available to unions in negotiations. If you can’t see that strikes will become more prevalent regardless of circumstances if they are legalized you are just naive.
They absolutely could be come more common... if the school districts insist on continuing to treat teachers like slaves. The point is that they wouldn't, because their failures to negotiate would be much more public and painful. They'd have to play ball instead of having all the power to themselves.
> The canary in a coal mine is a shit metaphor. You cannot separate teachers and the union from thr situation, they are not some neutral signal like the canary is, they make up the system collectively, with the district/local govt. they are not some neutral signal.
It's a perfectly good metaphor regardless of the interconnectivity of the system. Strikes don't happen in healthy workplaces.
ShawshankExemption t1_j8nkavg wrote
I didn’t say non-unionized private schools were good/better because of their non-unionization. I’m saying your logic that because those teachers can strike, it is the root cause for why they don’t strike is a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy and provide what I believe is the alternative mechanism for why they don’t experience strikes.
There are absolutely folks questioning the utility of the winter and spring breaks in mass, as well as the summer gap, and if our agricultural society based education calendar is still appropriate today.
If you are dealing with district wide learning time loss, you absolutely do have to aggregate it together. Is each student going to ‘suffer’ the exact same? Not at all, some will have it hit them more than others. But you can’t just hand waive it all away. Those examples you present are individual kids and situation as determined by the parents. If school district decided to close a school for a month because of utility issues and just sent the kids home you’re sure as shit there would be an inquiry. If a parent took their kids out of school for a month? Sure as shit CPS and the school are going to have questions.
Strikes aren’t the only tool possible to protect teachers. They are just your preferred tool.
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