Glen Stubbe via Creative Commons
St. Paul teachers on strike in 2020. Another strike looms as Minnesota teachers demand fair pay.
Minneapolis teachers are asking for a 20 percent pay raise in their contract negotiations with the Minneapolis Public Schools. Sounds greedy, doesn’t it?
That’s what Minneapolis Superintendent Ed Graff would like district parents to think.
In January, the executive board of the local teachers union, Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, authorized a strike vote, which took place this week among the union’s thousands of teachers and support staff members—a category that includes classroom assistants, bus drivers, cafeteria staff, and others.
Teachers and support staff are often expected to shove their own concerns to the side in order to maintain a system many say is broken.
Meanwhile, teachers union members in St. Paul also voted on February 17 regarding whether or not to authorize a strike, meaning both districts could be facing walkouts in the next two weeks.
As of February 18, both the St. Paul and Minneapolis teachers unions are reporting that their members have authorized them to strike, should contract negotiations with district administrators not progress satisfactorily. If a strike is announced, there will be a ten-day cooling off period before teachers and support staff walk off the job.
In response to the Minneapolis vote, which began on February 14, Superintendent Graff sent an email to district staff and parents. It begins on a neutral note, outlining possible timelines and next steps in the strike vote process, but then quickly devolves into a grab bag of scare tactics designed to pit students and families against teachers.
If a strike should happen, Graff’s email warns, graduation dates and summer programming could be disrupted, while academic progress for students whose first language is not English would certainly be negatively impacted.
And, he notes, all classes would have to be canceled during the strike. This would likely be a hardship for families at any time, but would be an especially bitter pill to swallow now, after two years of disrupted learning caused by the pandemic.
While it is true that a strike could result in any or all of these outcomes, teachers and support staff are often expected to shove their own concerns to the side in order to maintain a system many say is broken.
Here’s a clear example of what makes the Minneapolis Public Schools a troubled system in the eyes of many observers. In his February 14 email, Graff only shared the most headline-grabbing demands from the teachers union, such as their request for a 20 percent pay raise this year.
Who wouldn’t want a sudden, 20 percent bump in salary? It sounds egregious and inflated when shared without context. But the 20 percent figure is likely to be little more than a starting point in the union’s ongoing contract negotiations with district administrators, designed to highlight the way teachers’ salaries in Minneapolis have stagnated over the last twenty years.
When inflation and rising health care costs are factored in, teachers have lost ground, averaging just a one-percent salary increase in the same time period, according to a chart compiled by a union member who wishes to remain anonymous. (Public education funding in Minnesota, like most other states, has been on the decline over at least the last two decades.)
Teachers have taken to social media to call this wage theft, and to point out that Superintendent Graff makes well over $200,000 per year as he objects to their demands for a reasonable wage.
What is happening in the Twin Cities is part of a much larger dynamic. “Long-trending erosion of teacher wages and compensation relative to other college graduates,”according to the Economic Policy Institute, has made it difficult to attract recent college graduates to the profession.
In the last several years, teachers around the country have engaged in wildcat strikes and authorized walkouts regarding their extremely low pay, even when they have years of experience and advanced degrees under their belts.
The low pay, of course, is symptomatic of the way teachers have been castigated in the past twenty years in particular, as market-based education reform methods have taken root in school districts on a national and local level.
These methods have tended to scapegoat teachers and minimize the very professional nature of their jobs, by siphoning taxpayer dollars to outfits such as Teach for America that put temporary teachers in high-needs classrooms.
But there is another, more egregious omission in Graff’s February 14 email. In his message to parents and district staff, he does not mention the fact that it isn’t just Minneapolis teachers who may be on the brink of striking. Members of the union’s Education Support Professionals (ESP) chapter are also participating in the strike vote.
It’s easy to understand why Graff left ESPs out of his email message. Simply put, it’s harder to make enemies out of this group of employees. They are far more likely to be people of color from low-income communities than their teacher counterparts, which matters a lot in terms of the district’s stated commitment to racial and social justice.
Additionally, ESPs in the Minneapolis schools are working for near-poverty wages and lose their jobs over the summer, keeping them in a vulnerable financial position. Not one ESP, including those who work as special education classroom assistants with some of the district’s most vulnerable students, reportedly makes more than around $32,000 per year.
ESPs are also hourly employees, which excludes them from the more budget-friendly health care premium options teachers currently have. According to union documents, this means ESPs pay the same health insurance premium costs as district administrators making six-figure salaries.
Regardless of whether or not a strike actually takes place, teachers and support staff seem fed up with the austerity narrative that’s frequently used to shut down contract negotiations. Minnesota lawmakers are currently deciding how to spend a $7 billion surplus. It might be just the right time, as the saying goes, to strike while the iron is hot and the coffers are overflowing.