Expect to see sign-holding crowds standing outside Saint Paul’s Public Schools (SPPS) starting March 11, 2024, for the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) has now officially filed its intent to strike on that day.
If past experience is any indicator, those sign-holding throngs will likely argue that their strike is “for the children.” In fact, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten basically advanced this same argument the other day when she commended SPFE for striking:
Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and harder to swallow the line that this is all for the children. In fact, I would contend that it’s really more about the teacher unions, and those same unions are willing to abandon kids to further their own interests.
Don’t believe me? Then let’s take a look at the hard cold facts of the district.
Only 33.9% of SPPS students were proficient in reading last year. Only 25.6% were proficient in math. Put another way, fully two-thirds of SPPS students are not meeting reading standards, while three-fourths of them aren’t meeting math standards.
Imagine what life will be like for those students when they get out of school and try to make it in the workforce … or perhaps we should imagine what life will be like for the poor employers who try to hire them to do a job, only to find that they can’t read properly!
Teachers in the classroom must recognize how poorly many of their students are doing, so how can they justify leaving their students and going on strike? Teachers always imply that they are essential to student learning, so it follows that if they leave the classroom to walk the picket line, their students’ academic scores will only get worse. Such a move makes it seem that unions are willing to abandon kids to further their own interests.
But perhaps us average folks don’t understand. Surely the public schools just need more money to solve their problems. Surely we just need to pay teachers more in order for them to produce better student results. So the more money teachers’ unions lobby for, the better the outcome for students, right?
The only problem with this line of thinking is that there’s quite a bit of money being thrown into the SPPS district already. For example, official reports show that SPPS spent $25,474 per student in FY 2022. And according to a recent Pioneer Press article, “St. Paul teachers are among the highest-paid in the state,” the average teacher salary reaching $87,250 last school year, “placing the district in the top 10 statewide.” How is striking for a higher salary going to help much when teachers in the district are already paid top dollar for minimal results?
The truth is, if teachers’ unions really cared about kids, money wouldn’t be what they always talk about. Instead, they would be talking about alternative ways to help kids learn and grow, even if that meant that students pursued alternative education options in charter schools, private schools, microschools, or home schools.
In that way, perhaps it’s good that the SPFE is headed toward the picket line. Such a move will give us all a chance to reflect on the true state of education in our state, as well as the entities standing in the way of its improvement.
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Image Credit: Flickr-Colin Keefe, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
