They’re already illegal in 37 states, and Portland’s teachers need to get back to work.
They’re already illegal in 37 states, and Portland’s teachers need to get back to work.
P ublic-school teachers in Portland, Ore., are striking. All schools have been closed since Wednesday for about 45,000 students in Oregon’s largest school district. “We are on strike not just for ourselves, but for our students,” said Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT).
Preventing students from going to school is not for the good of the students. Teacher strikes are intolerable and should be prohibited by law.
The PAT, affiliated with the National Education Association, says the strike is about low pay, large class sizes, and planning time, among other issues. Except that the average salary for a Portland public-school teacher is $87,000, well above the national average and $7,000 above the median income for an individual in the Portland area. The district is offering a pay raise of 4.5 percent this year, and 3 percent the next two years. The union wants more than double that.
“I don’t know how I’m going to survive on a teacher salary in Portland and I’m at the top of the pay scale,” said high-school teacher Shannon Kittrick. The top of the pay scale is currently $97,333, and the district’s proposal would raise it to $107,391 in three years. If Kittrick can’t figure out how to survive on a six-figure income, that’s a problem for her, not Oregon taxpayers, to solve.
Class size might seem like a student issue, but the union cares about it more for the reason that mandating smaller class sizes requires the hiring of more teachers. Class size is not part of the bargaining process under Oregon law, except for schools in areas of high poverty. That means the most needy students are already subject to class-size caps, and the larger classrooms the PAT is complaining about are mostly in wealthier areas. The union’s proposal would require the hiring of about 500 more teachers, which would increase the size of the 3,700-member union by as much as 14 percent.
Portland middle- and high-school teachers already get one class period of planning time per school day, and elementary-school teachers get five hours and 20 minutes per week. The union wants all teachers to get seven hours and 20 minutes per week. Striking over roughly two hours per week of time when teachers aren’t interacting with students is not in students’ best interest.
In total, the PAT wants $372 million in new spending for a district with a current education budget of $834 million. The district’s proposal would increase spending by $150 million. Portland public schools already spend $13,900 per student, which is 24 percent higher than the Oregon average.
Despite all that spending, according to the Oregon Department of Education, only 56 percent of Portland students meet state expectations for third-grade English, and only 41 percent meet expectations for eighth-grade math. Those numbers are 33 percent and 19 percent for Hispanic students, and 16 percent and 8 percent for black students. The PAT mentions “issues with racial equity” as a reason for the strike, but instead of focusing on these educational outcomes, it demands “a pay raise so that the district can attract and retain teachers of color.”
Strikes by public-school teachers should not be permitted. They’re already illegal in 37 states. Oregon already prohibits strikes by prosecutors, emergency-communications workers, juvenile-corrections workers, firefighters, prison guards, parole officers, police officers, and transit workers. It should add teachers to the list.
The district and the union began bargaining on January 10. State mediation began on August 31. It’s not as though the sides didn’t have plenty of time to come to a deal. If this same situation happened with Oregon public employees for whom striking is illegal, the two sides would enter binding arbitration under state law. Arbitrators would evaluate the final offer from the employer and the final offer from the union and hammer out a compromise while workers remained on the job. That’s how it works for firefighters and police officers, and it’s how it should work for teachers too.
The governor of Oregon should say that if teachers don’t return to work on Monday, their employment will be terminated and replacements will be hired. But of course, Oregon governor Tina Kotek is a Democrat, which means she was elected with massive support from teachers’ unions. “I respect the collective-bargaining situation that they are in at Portland Public Schools and I expect the adults in the room to come together and figure it out for kids and their families,” Kotek said the day before the strike. Kotek is an adult in the room with considerable power, should she choose to exercise it, but she won’t get in the way of her union supporters.
During the Boston police strike of 1919, Calvin Coolidge, as governor of Massachusetts, famously said, “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime.” The same ought to be true of public education, and 37 states already have laws recognizing that. Portland’s teachers should get back to work and stop pretending that their absence from the classroom is good for their students.