To strike or not to strike...

I just had a really helpful conversation with my colleagues in the math department here at Mission High School. We talked about why we became teachers, and why we teach at Mission. I'll share my story, and suffice it to say that there was significant overlap in key areas among the department.

I knew I wanted to teach at MHS before I even knew what MHS was. When I moved to San Francisco, I wanted to teach at the high school where the Latino immigrants went. If you teach in LA, that description fits a lot of schools, but in SF, Mission High School is the place to be.

I grew up in a family of teachers: my mom and her three sisters were all elementary school teachers working with Latino immigrant kids in the LA area. My uncle is an actor and writer, but his biggest gig up to that point ("that point" being the year I graduated from college) had been as part of the ensemble cast of "Square One Television," a PBS show that did sketch comedy about math... so we can count him as a teacher, too. My mom's family had immigrated to the US from Mexico when she was 7 years old, and I knew from my own family's history that immigrant children face a monstrous barrier to education in the fact that they don't speak or understand English. A child immersed in English can become conversant in a year or two, and functionally literate in five to seven years if they are just thrown into the same classes as the other students that speak English as a native language. The price they pay, however, is all of the content in their other classes while they're learning English. Around the time I was finishing college, it was clear that the general population of California was trying very hard to believe that immigrant students did not need (or perhaps, did not deserve) additional support while they learned English. There were propositions trying to do away with bilingual education as well as trying to make sure that undocumented immigrants (whose work is vital to the functioning of our economy... but that's for another blog entry) were denied access to services like emergency medical services that are paid for by public money.

I knew that there were kids who needed more help than society was willing to provide, more help than their families had the resources to find, and I knew that those were the kids that I wanted to teach.

So now I do teach those kids. I teach math to students who have been in the US for less than 2 years (4 semesters). I get new students almost weekly from all over the world, and they all come into my room with one thing in common: they don't understand English.

Now back to the title of this entry: to strike or not to strike? Our union has been deliberating with our district for three years over our contract. We've been working without a contract for over two years. The most immediate bone of contention as we lead up to the possibility of a strike is over COLA (Cost Of Living Allowance) money from the state. The way it is now, we've gone five years without a cost of living increase, although the cost of living (especially in San Francisco) has certainly gone up in that time. For years, we've been hearing that its because there just isn't money; not from the state, not from the feds, not in increased tax revenue, nowhere. We learned recently, however, that money had been released by the state to our district to cover a COLA of 15%! Great news, right? Well, in negotiations, the district offered our union a COLA of 2%, and not retroactive. If the state had just given us some long overdue money into the general budget and it had gone to cover other vital expenses, that would be one thing. The problem is, the state released this money specifically to cover a COLA. So where did it go? Nobody knows.

For the diehard unionists, this is the rallying call to a strike. It serves as proof-positive of the district's corruption, incompetence, intractability, mean-spiritedness or some combination of all of these. On the one hand, I agree. On the other hand, I don't necessarily follow the logic that leads inexorably to a strike. First of all, I see a strike as the labor-relations equivalent to war: you don't go to war until all diplomatic options have been thoroughly exhausted. A strike is the ultimate action... there is no next step after a strike.

Second of all, I am aware of the ways that the position of teacher is different than say, a hotel worker or airline mechanic or factory worker. Those people produce a product or provide a service that directly lead to their employers turning a profit. The pressure on their employers is economic: without workers productivity goes down which drives down profit. The public-relations hit is a secondary pressure, but it's not the primary pressure. For teachers, we don't contribute to a profit-bearing product. Our employers only spend money, they don't make any, and they spend the same amount on education regardless of how effective we are as educators. The only pressure on our employer is public relations, and since our employers are politicians, that PR pressure only affects them at the level of possibly costing them votes in the future.

The problem is that shifting more money to education would get them votes in the future, if the public were accurately informed about it. The political machine, however, is funded and powered by interests outside of education with enormous bankrolls who spend countless dollars to bombard the public with messages of dubious authenticity and almost no relevance to the issues at hand. These messages serve to accomplish one goal: get the guy elected whose gonna make sure I pay as little as possible and get back as much as I can. Not too many of these power brokers are educators. We're busy with, well, with education.

So we have unions to do that work for us. But the reason we need unions to do it is because it's work that runs antithetical to the ethos of the teaching profession. It's a Catch-22 situation: it's work that teachers don't want to do (and for some, the work they got into teaching to avoid). If it's not done, however, the powers that be will continue to whittle away at the teaching profession to the point that even those who care nothing for money will have to leave their students to find jobs that pay them enough to provide food, clothing and shelter for their families.

So I ask again: To strike or not to strike? Is a strike morally permissible? Is it politically expedient? Does it have a chance of accomplishing what it's meant to? Does it matter? Is it standing with the marginalized professionals against the government machine, or is it standing with calculating careerists against helpless students? Or are we spending our time and energy fighting the wrong enemy? Who has the money... the district? Is the district spending billions on unwinnable wars instead of on education? Is the district finding new ways every day to give tax breaks to millionaires while decreasing tax-breaks for the middle classes? Is the district shifting money away from local governments by requiring them to spend millions on "special elections" to get around the elected legislature and try to snow the public with slickly packaged initiatives that blame and punish teachers for the failures in education and give excuses to try and fix the problem by making it harder to become and remain a teacher?

I think that every teacher in California should strike together. Our struggle is not with the SFUSD, it's with Sacramento. All of the teachers in America should strike together. We should be addressing these problems to those who have created them. These are strikes that I would gladly join in.

But should the teachers of the SFUSD strike? And if they do, should I join them? Should I cross picket lines with my students and teach them?

What do you think? I'd be interested to hear from you.

"Anyone? Something -D -O -O economics? Voodoo economics."