I know what you're thinking. Rather what you will think after reading this story. We are lucky to have the Teachers Union running the City of Chicago.
Oakland Teachers Strike for Climate Justice
The union’s demands go far beyond pay and work conditions.
By The Editorial BoardFollow
Updated May 9, 2023 6:46 pm ET
Teachers unions once focused on the details of compensation and tenure, but these days they’re a vanguard of broader progressive politics. This week’s illustration is the teachers union strike that is holding children hostage in the name of climate and housing for the homeless.
The strike by the 3,000-member Oakland Education Association in California is heading into its fifth day, and the impasse isn’t over pay. The district has offered a record raise that would immediately increase salaries by 22% plus a $5,000 bonus. Most workers would love that increase, especially if performance doesn’t matter.
The Oakland Unified School District has lost students for five consecutive years as families have fled to suburbs with higher-performing and safer schools. This has resulted in a financial squeeze, which was only partly mitigated by federal pandemic aid. The district has had to close schools to reduce costs.
Yet the union’s demands go far beyond teacher pay or working conditions. For instance, the union wants the district to repurpose vacant school buildings for homeless housing and to landscape school yards with drought-resistant trees.
The union also wants reparations for black students to remedy alleged historic injustices. How about instead remedying the enormous learning deficits the union has caused by protecting bad teachers and closing schools during the pandemic? Perhaps the district could extend the school year, or, better yet, provide families with private school vouchers?
Instead, the union wants the first week of school each year to focus on creating a “positive school culture,” whatever that means, rather than instruction. It is also demanding a “Climate Justice Day for standards-based teach-ins, workshops, action, and field trips.” Maybe kids can’t read, but they can be unemployed climate warriors.
The Oakland union is taking cues from the National Education Association. “When we expand the continuum of bargaining, we build power, and go on the offense in order to fight for social and racial justice, for our kids, for our schools, for our communities, and for the future,” the NEA states on its website.
Tired of being criticized for prioritizing their own interests over those of children, unions are now pretending to promote what they call the “common good.” Yet in doing so they are substantiating the Supreme Court’s landmark Janus decision (2018), which held that government collective-bargaining implicates workers’ First Amendment rights.
The district is rightly refusing to bargain over issues unrelated to wages and working conditions. Even Oakland’s NAACP branch is prodding teachers to get back to work. “Education is critical to ending intergenerational poverty,” it said in a statement on Monday, adding “all students, including the most vulnerable, should be learning and thriving in school.”
The union apparently believes drought-resistant plants are more important.
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