Educators Strike Back: Why Teachers Walk Out
When Chicago teachers took to the picket lines on October 17, they garnered plenty of national press attention. After all, the public education system in Chicago serves nearly three hundred thousand students, so the impact of any disruption will send ripples throughout one of our country’s largest cities. This, of course, is just the latest large-scale strike of public school teachers in this country over the last few years, and so far the teachers involved in these actions have generally been viewed sympathetically by their fellow citizens. This fact, coupled with the positive outcomes of previous strikes, have given teachers a much-needed sense of political power. Sadly, the general conditions which lead to these strikes seem to be so pervasive that it may take decades of walkouts for teachers to impact the system as a whole. Teachers should never be forced to march in the streets with cleverly worded signs to force elected officials to provide them with the tools to educate students, and that is much of what Chicago’s teachers are demanding. Higher pay, after years of insulting salaries, is not the main reason students are cooling their heels at home. This strike, like so many others, is about teachers demanding the tools necessary to do our jobs.
There is a kind of sad logic to the way American’s consistently fail to understand how schools function. For many years, a large number of Americans were denied access to the public education services that we now take for granted. A hundred years ago, the poorest and most vulnerable children were simply not expected to attend school beyond elementary grades. In parts of the country, black children were not allowed to go to school at all. Considering that it took so long for Americans to accept that all students deserved a quality public education, it is no surprise that reality in schools so often lags behind our ambitions. When entire swaths of a country’s population are systematically disenfranchised for decades due to their skin color, it is not going to be a quick or easy task to erase the damage. Despite this fact, politicians and taxpayers are consistently shocked when standardized testing reveals major achievement gaps between black and white students in this country. State officials see these results, rub their disbelieving eyes, and then design a whole new round of tests to show the exact same thing a few years later. The political heavy-lifting needed to actually bring about positive changes is generally avoided. A few of the lowest performing districts are slapped around in the press and in state capitols, a few administrators are fired, and things generally return to the status quo.
It must be said that the foolishness of our elected officials simply reflects the foolishness of voters, particularly when it comes to education. Americans have no patience for long, expensive remediation measures that fail to produce dramatic results within months of implementation. Understanding how schools really work is tricky for non-educators, because every citizen spends a considerable amount of time as a student. This results in an assumption among taxpayers that they understand what education is all about, even though their perspective as a student was extremely limited. The passage of time after graduation also affects our recollections of the classroom as the inevitable effects of nostalgia kick in. Americans tend to think about schools through this hazy, distorted lens and it encourages damaging misconceptions. Adults always seem to remember their own generation as better behaved, higher achieving, and more deserving than the current generation of students. This creates the illusion that American schools have been on the decline for years and reinforces the idea that the only solution is to radically disrupt the way public education operates.
The facts do not support this narrative. Schools do not exist in a vacuum, but are extensions of the communities and society that surround them. American life has changed dramatically since the public education system was first put into place, and our expectations of schools have evolved at the same time. According to the US Census Bureau, over four million students dropped out of high school in 1972. By 2013, that number had declined to just over two million. This means that a schools are now serving high-need students who, during the so-called “good old days” would have been cut loose and forgotten. This is coupled with the fact that the job market has evolved into an extremely unforgiving place for those who enter the job market without a college degree or specialized training. Public schools are not only educating students who were once cast aside by the system, but they are also expected to prepare every student for college. This is a positive thing in my opinion, but the taxpaying public often seems to forget that the bar for our education system has been raised significantly over the years. Teachers in this country are fighting a heroic battle every day to meet these high expectations, but we often feel like the goal line keeps being moved just when we are making progress. We enter this profession pre-labeled as failures before we even start teaching children, and nothing we do seems to change this perception.
For many years, the gap between what the public believes about schools and the truth has been papered over by fact that school districts operate largely under local control. This allows Americans to deplore the system as a whole, while simultaneously believing that their own local schools are an exception to the rule. It has also allowed wealthier communities to pour funding into their districts which impoverished areas simply cannot match. For better or worse, this attitude towards education is rapidly coming face-to-face with reality.
The uneven, unfair, and inadequate support given to our public schools has reached a tipping point. Teachers, who have long accepted their role as underpaid martyrs are finally reaching the limit of their patience. Chicago’s strike, among others, shows that teachers are now choosing to exert their status as highly skilled, paid professionals who require a minimum amount of support and respect to do their jobs properly. The public is also waking up to the fact that teachers are not so easily replaced these days. This country’s attitude towards public education has caused teaching to become a profession that eats its young and burns out its veterans at an alarming rate. It is getting harder to convince young people that teaching is a valued profession when teachers have to walk picket lines just to get enough textbooks for their students and, in some cases, work second jobs to pay their bills. Even well-funded schools place so much pressure on teachers to do more with less that the strain can become too much to bear. If America does not change its attitude towards public education and the teachers that work on the front lines every day, the occasional high-profile strike will be the least of our problems.
