Q&A: When teachers go on strike

The Newton strike was the latest in a series of job actions by Massachusetts teachers over the past few years, and in fact, by teachers in other states such as West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona. But the media coverage of what occurred in Newton, especially by The Boston Globe, seemed particularly intensive and multifaceted. What made the Newton strike so compelling?

Proctor: I live in Newton, I'm a parent of a child who has graduated from the school district and one who is currently enrolled. I had a different kind of perspective on this that dovetails with my own professional interests around training and working with teachers. I didn't find the Globe's coverage particularly multifaceted so much as I felt like it was more commentary about the union approach, and settling on this idea of breaking the law versus not breaking the law. The Globe editorial board was notably anti-strike.

That said, I think the strike was compelling because, in part, of the eye-popping dollar values that we were seeing with the fines being levied on the union, the union not breaking to those fines, and Newton emerges as an outlier relative to the other five strikes that have happened in Massachusetts since 2022 for its duration and I think also for its vitriol. It was a very tense set of negotiations which had been ongoing for 16 months prior to the strike, and it felt to the union, as I understand it, that good-faith bargaining was essentially abandoned in part because the school committee was buoyed by the legal preclusion to striking.

Hartney: I think three things really stood out that brought so much attention to this particular strike: the geography, the timing, and the politics. Newton is atypical of the sort of place that we see teacher strikes. This isn't Los Angeles, it's not Chicago, where strikes are more commonplace, where the unions tend to be routinely engaged, or at least threatening to engage in this sort of labor action.

The timing, though, really looms large here. As we heard, this was a much longer strike than what we typically see in the United States. Students were out of school as a result of the strike for about half the month, and more importantly, the strike came on the heels of COVID.

I think that matters for a few reasons. Educators and school administrators everywhere are dealing with the fact that on average students are still really far behind academically compared to where they were before the pandemic. Chronic absenteeism in particular has surged since the pandemic. And Newton hasn't been spared from that. Chronic absenteeism was under 10 percent in Newton, and it's almost doubled up to 17 percent now. I just want to set that context to say, to their credit, the Biden administration has finally made this a priority, trying to speed recovery efforts.

But what makes the strike really compelling is that it's hard to do that, to turn the ship around when you're adding two more weeks of turmoil for students. A lot of people think the reason chronic absenteeism went up in the years subsequent is that students got out of the habit of going to school in person.

I would also say that part of what's going on are looming fiscal realities that aren't just confined to Newton: Enrollment in our public school system is down. Enrollment in Newton is down about eight percent. Less enrollment means fewer dollars, and about one out of every 30 school-age children living in Newton switched to a private school during the pandemic, largely due to the fact that Newton schools were closed, or using remote-only learning for much longer than other school districts around the country.

The politics make this really compelling because Newton is, like Brookline and other places in Massachusetts, a politically blue community. Whereas we saw strikes in 2018 across the United States and red states underfunding of schools—where in some places like Oklahoma school was only in person four days a week—this is a community where typically the public is pretty supportive of labor and of the Democratic Party. The politics here don't quite align with what we oftentimes see.

Massachusetts is one of 37 states that bans teacher strikes. As a result, the Newton Teachers Association owes up to $625,000 in court-issued fines. Yet the NTA also made some significant gains from the strike settlement, including a cost-of-living increase and extended parental leave—advances which might have been achieved earlier through more productive negotiations. Do Massachusetts and other states need to consider alternatives to the strike ban?  

Proctor: The short answer for me is yes. Six strikes in the span of less than two years says something about a law that's not functioning as intended. And when you read reports of the judge who was hearing the cases of the NTA and the school committee, he remarked as to being perplexed—“I don't quite understand why these fines being levied at such high levels are not having their intended effect”—and in response lowered the daily fines being levied on the union.

I think in part the union’s contention was that those fines were serving as a disincentive for bargaining in good faith with the school committee, that they were just waiting for the union to break, go back to school, and resume the same kind of negotiations that had been ongoing for the 16 months prior. When you have this many strikes, and this is all coming on the heels of the pandemic, that doesn't negate the fact that this law does not appear to be functioning as intended.

Hartney: On the one hand, strike bans often fail to stop strikes. I remember a few years ago, during the West Virginia strikes, a reporter from The New Republic asked a teacher, “You know this strike is illegal, why are you doing it?” The teacher's response was really telling to me, and I think this is true more broadly of the calculus that teachers often make in these situations: “Look, we know what the law is, but we've got the majority. What are you going to do? You've got 700 vacancies in West Virginia; to heck with the law, replace us if you can.”

I don't know that that position works with Newton quite as well, because teacher retention there is pretty high. It's a good job. Average salary in the district is $93,000 a year. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the structure of teacher compensation, how that might play a role in the frustrations of educators, because I think they have some fair frustrations here. But the situation isn't akin to Ronald Reagan firing the air traffic controllers. Newton can't just go out and find the sort of labor to replace all those teachers, even if they had a Ronald Reagan as mayor and they wanted to do it. So just from a practical standpoint, I have to agree that the bans don't necessarily work.

On the other hand, I'm skittish about the idea of legalizing strikes. A former chair of economics at Cornell University did a study looking at the long-run outcomes for kids when they become adults, if they were exposed to long strikes in their primary and secondary schooling years. Being out of school can have negative effects even into adult earnings. I think we all want to figure out a way to change the law. I'm not a labor lawyer, so I'm not sure what the right approach would be. But we want to limit these strikes. We want to make sure kids are in school as much as possible.

Proctor: I agree with that, and it is a good-paying job to be a teacher in the Newton Public Schools. What's not a good-paying job in the Newton Public Schools is to be in Unit C, which are the aides, behavior therapists, etc., who implement the individual education plans that many students with special needs are on. These people were making a base starting salary of $27,000 a year, well below the poverty line. From an ethical and moral perspective, it seemed untenable to keep funding such a crucial component of the education of the most vulnerable children in Newton at such low levels.

I'm not a labor lawyer, either, but something needs to change. There needs to be some kind of rethinking of how this works, because you can't really go on underpaying such a crucial demographic of teacher that's so essential for basic support of the most vulnerable students we have.

Strike critics claim teachers have misplaced their priorities by putting themselves ahead of the students. Teachers say strikes are driven by the need to provide better services and resources for their students. Are the critics correct, or are the gains won by teachers improving both their students’ learning environment and their economic teaching conditions?

Proctor: I think both sides put kids in the middle of this debate. I don't think it's one-sided that the Newton teachers saying they're fighting for the children and the school committee is saying that the teachers are keeping the children out and the big losers here are the children. So, it's kind of hard question to answer. I do think the children were affected, and like Dr. Hartney said, we don't want kids out of school for that amount of time, particularly on the heels of a pandemic that had interrupted schooling in a way that we've never seen before.

I just found it interesting as a parent to try and navigate this with my daughter, who found herself thinking, talking about this and trying to turn it into something of a learning experience. I don't know that she did, but I like to think that she did.

Hartney: I think it depends: Are we talking about counties in Oklahoma that cut instructions such that kids were only going to school four days a week because politicians wanted to keep cutting taxes and underfund education? In cases like that, educators taking to the picket lines as a last resort may be an important thing. I'm not so sure that's the case when we look at districts where spending has increased even after inflation, especially when enrollment is down. There's a major problem because districts are going to have to figure out how to right-size their teaching force relative to students, especially in the aftermath of the pandemic.

Unions can play an important role in holding spendthrift politicians’ feet to the fire. But we also need to recognize that unions will tend to advocate for their members’ occupational interests, irrespective of whether those interests always and perfectly align with what's best for kids. It's in having the best instruction possible, the most highly effective educators, year in and year out.

Public education has a lot it could do to reinvent itself around teacher compensation that would be better than it is now. One example: Most of public school teachers’ pay is based on the number of years that they're employed by the school system and whether they have a master's degree. Research suggests that having a master's degree can be helpful in making a teacher more effective if the degree is pertinent to the subject—a math teacher getting a master's degree in math. But there's a lot less evidence that just a general master's degree makes one a better teacher. I think that, for very good reasons, teachers unions tend to be very protective of giving up that pay bump for a master's degree because their members have made life plans are based on getting the degree and then being compensated for it.

But if we're only looking at how to reform human resource policies in education with the mind of what's best for kids, we might want to look at that and say, “Hey, we'd rather reallocate that money to massively boost starting teacher salaries or to pay paraprofessionals more.” My general point is that on the union side, there needs to be some willingness to acknowledge that at a time in which enrollment has declined, you're going to have to make some trade-offs, and I think the biggest is on hiring because in 1970, for example, there were 27 kids for every adult in the building in a school in the United States; today, that number is 16. The simple fact is when you hire more school employees, you're going to spread school budgets more thinly over those employees.

Teachers have a real fair point and their unions are making it: Teacher pay is pretty flat after accounting for inflation. But part of the explanation for that is we've just gone on a teacher hiring spree over the last 30 years.

Teacher strikes are often characterized as a mismatch between what communities claim they want and what they're willing to fund. Inflation is rising faster than teacher salaries, but many cities and towns are hamstrung by state laws, such as Proposition 2 1/2 in Massachusetts, that limit their ability to increase taxes to meet teachers’ demands. Newton voters rejected a nearly $9.2 million increase in property taxes to fund the public schools. Does this disparity foreshadow more strikes and districts where contract negotiations have stalled?

Hartney: This is not just a revenue issue. School funding in the United States has increased after accounting for inflation. In Newton, per-pupil funding rose about eight percent after inflation over the last five years and just under 20 percent over the last decade at a time of shrinking enrollment. On the other hand, we need to acknowledge that we're asking schools to do more than we've ever asked them to do before. Part of that is because of special education, because of mental health challenges in classrooms where a single teacher isn't going to cut it.

We need to be very open with people that if you're going to take revenue and spend it on hiring more people, it means you're going to have less money available for salary increases for everyone. And so, if blue communities want to put their money where their mouth is, it means you're going have to say, “We want more paraprofessionals. We don't want to actually lower the number of hires.” And if they want to make that decision, then they have to go to the voters and they have to get them to pay for it.

I just think it's about being honest about your values. It's not necessarily a case that the taxpayers have been cheapskates. But if taxpayers want their schools to look a certain way, if they want both low class sizes and a $93,000 average educator salary, they're probably going to have to spend more.

Proctor: I voted for that override as a Newton resident. I think that if you want these things, you should put your money where your mouth is. In talking with a lot of people in the community, one of the reasons that folks voted against it wasn't because they didn't like public schools, but rather they thought Newton actually did have the funds available, and they felt like the mayor was simply mismanaging the budget to the point where they weren't going to bail her out.

To my mind, that was not a particularly compelling reason, because you could see on the horizon what was coming if this didn't happen. The city was saying they had no money to do what the union wanted, and the union was saying you have to do what we wanted, and it set up exactly what we got.

The other thing is that we keep invoking the pandemic as this sort of life-altering, education-disrupting event. We can't keep funding and doing things the way we were before the pandemic. I feel like there's this tension between analyses that look at prior funding levels and where things should be at, and then we invoke the pandemic. But we have to reorient ourselves to how we think about public education, how we implement it, what we do with it. If we're talking about the pandemic's impact on student wellbeing and feelings of belongingness, smaller class sizes are merited for trying to get at some of these needs that kids are now bringing that are unique, that weren't there before.  

Teachers strikes often pit the old versus the young. Older residents without children, no longer in the school systems, frequently oppose property tax hikes to fund education, while younger teachers can't afford to live near the schools where they teach. Data show younger educators are more supportive of unions than their older colleagues and more willing to take the risk of a strike, potentially alienating more experienced faculty in their own schools. Are there ways to bridge these age gaps in communities and schools?

Proctor: It might be considered an overly optimistic or hopeful response to that, but—getting back to the Globe's slant against the strike—I think we need to stop vilifying public education, which I think is a pretty common thing we see. I see this in terms of a dedication to the value of standardized testing—that has been shown to be biased against students of color and students who don't speak English or who are developing English—as emblems of an effective public school system, which to some extent they are, but to other extents they're not.

We need to rethink how we cast public education in this country, to understand that public education is a cornerstone of a functional democracy. It is the only place where anyone can go and attend school and get an education. I don't want to overstate it, but other than public libraries it is the most accessible institution that we have in this country, and the degree to which it gets vilified, I think, pits older versus younger. If there was more of a consensus on the value of public education, we might be able to make some progress, but that's a societal effort.

Hartney: If you look at strikes that have taken place recently, you see a lot of language from union leaders about bargaining for the common good. On the one hand, union advocates see this positively. They say the teachers unions are not just bargaining for a higher cost-of-living adjustment, they're asking for things that their members and the community would be better off with in their estimation. I’m not focusing here specifically on the Newton Teachers Association, but I am a little worried because unions are not making compelling political arguments when they say to the district, “You need to figure out affordable housing. You need to have it so that our members can afford to live close to school.”

I don't think it's necessarily fair to school districts that don't have the political authority to change that dynamic compared to, say, state governments to hold their feet to the fire and say “Our willingness to work hinges on you.”

One thing that goes against conventional wisdom is, for a long time, people talked about the “gray peril” in education—that older voters were against funding schools. There's actually some really good research that showed things are more nuanced, that older residents tend to be very pro-education spending if they're residents with roots in the community. Think of Florida retirees: Yes, older residents are very skeptical about spending more, will vote “no” on levies and such, if they're more transient. But places that benefit from longer-term seniors, they're actually big allies of the public school.

On the younger educator piece, this is really the key issue and it's a conundrum in some ways. I understand that labor is all about solidarity and unions’ modus operandi is to say each educator is an equally valuable member. So their impulse oftentimes is to want policies, whether they're around pay or benefits, that treat all educators the same. This is tricky when it comes to younger educators—or just younger Americans in general—because their incentives and what they're looking for in their careers can oftentimes be different than older educators. The best example of this is teacher pensions: Today we know that a lot of younger people aren't necessarily going to spend their entire career in a single school district, let alone in a single occupation.

I think what younger people considering teaching want, for example, is just a higher starting salary—especially if they're graduating in a place where living expenses are high. But in some of the research I've done, I've found that teachers unions are pretty consistent in advocating to either defend benefits or policy structures that disproportionately benefit more senior teachers. That's not to rain on them or anything. It's just a reality of the fact that the people who are involved in the union typically are more veteran teachers.

When some members of the occupation have different needs at different points in their career, this can get challenging. That's something I'm going to be watching going forward as you see more younger teachers get active in their union.

Proctor: Seniority is an interesting issue. More veteran teachers get more privileges within their schools, in their school districts. They're able to choose if they want to change schools, things like that.

I work with pre-service teachers all the time and yes, they want a high starting salary. There's no question about that. The other thing they want are working conditions that they think are humane, where there's not a trade-off between that salary and the daily grind of teaching, which is a really challenging job.

Teachers are coming to schools with rising class sizes, no social workers, things are starting to spiral. It's an interesting point that interacts most definitely with sort of traditional union notions of building seniority and having privilege as a function of time on task.

Hartney: It's not just about pay. Working conditions are pretty paramount. You only have to look at private schools where teachers will take jobs because of the working conditions. We both work at a private university with very thoughtful students; we’re very fortunate to work where we do.

The issue that I'm going to watch going forward is student discipline policies. It's really interesting politically for a lot of reasons, but also from that working-conditions perspective, because teachers want to have classrooms that they feel like they can manage. Given a lot of the problems we've talked about after the pandemic, teachers don't always feel necessarily safe and they feel like managing the classroom is very difficult. That's an issue where I'd really like to see the unions advocating for them.

Proctor:  Locally, what I'm interested in watching is the mental health and wellbeing of the Newton teachers in the wake of this strike. That was a bruising fight. I know many teachers in the Newton schools who were receiving hate mail and emails from angry parents telling them that they were derelict in their duty and neglecting their children and how could they do these sorts of things. The psychic toll is challenging and I'm looking to see how this community recovers.