Creative Commons
Minneapolis public school teachers on strike in March 2022.
According to Ma-Riah Roberson Moody, a big part of the reason that Minneapolis and St. Paul teachers and educational support professionals (ESPs) voted to strike in March was that they were “feeling disrespected in our jobs.”
Moody is a special education assistant at Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School and the first vice president of the ESP chapter of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers. She spends her days assisting students with assignments, advocating for them to teachers and school officials, and generally making it possible for them to attend school. When school buildings were closed, she notes, the people staffing emergency child care sites were ESPs. And workers like her make an average starting salary of $24,000 a year.
Like many other workers deemed “essential,” teachers have learned over the past couple of years that they are expendable.
Since the pandemic, the pressure on teachers and education workers to return to school buildings has been more about reopening the economy than about children’s needs. Education workers around the country were already “doing more with less” before COVID-19 put their health at risk every time they stepped into a classroom. Only the organizing and strikes of teachers in places including Chicago, West Virginia, Los Angeles, and St. Paul had been able to push back some of the worst attacks on public schools.
Corporate education reformers and their allies in public office often blame poor student outcomes on teachers’ lack of effort and care. But the pandemic-era demand that schools be physically open no matter who is standing in front of the classroom, no matter how many students or teachers get ill, has exposed this argument as fraudulent. It’s now clear that many pundits and policymakers see public schools simply as places to supervise the children of the working class during the day so their parents can return to productivity. And around the country, those teachers are rebelling.
“For a long time, the employer has benefited from dividing us all and siloing us,” Moody says. This time, though, across two cities, the workers who make public schooling possible, from the teachers to food service staff, have coordinated their contracts and their bargaining issues, and most importantly, their strike votes.
“We have these shared issues, especially across districts,” Moody says. “St. Paul has some things that they’ve bargained for, they went on strike, and we have admired some of the things that they’ve been able to secure through that process.”
The demands that teachers are making—and have been making—in active, militant unions are the ones that would make learning possible and make schools safer even during a pandemic.
The number-one demand from teachers around the United States for a decade or more has been smaller class sizes and more staff. Smaller classes improve learning outcomes and decrease the likelihood of viral spread. In Minneapolis today, as in many places around the country, teachers are demanding more counselors and mental health experts.
“The pandemic has been very hard on all of us and it’s been hardest on our students,” Moody says. “And not only just the pandemic, but our society around them crumbling.” In Minneapolis, she notes, more than 60 percent of public school students are children of color, and the killings of George Floyd and Philando Castile—himself a public school worker—loom large.
Despite all the pious concerns from administrators, mayors, and the White House about “learning loss” and the mental health needs of students, the reality is that students, like all of us, have suffered a major trauma. There’s no amount of false cheer and “back to normal” pretense that will heal that overnight.
As teacher Eric Fishman wrote for The Progressive last year, so-called learning loss is “a problematic understanding of teaching, one rooted in a capitalist paradigm of schools as factories that build future workers. From this perspective, the pandemic is an issue for schools primarily because of the inefficiencies it creates for the machinery of production.”
The learning process is necessarily nonlinear, complex, emotional, and social, and is not easily shoehorned into the kind of process that standardized tests can measure. As Fishman noted, “My students have certainly experienced losses during the pandemic. But the losses they’ve felt most acutely have little to do with academic standards.”
But Fishman also reminds us that the real reason the “learning loss” crowd wants school buildings open is that closing those buildings holds up the most important part of the production and distribution process, the thing capitalism cannot function without: human labor. Teachers are lambasted in the press for being justifiably leery of crowding back into buildings in which they’ve had to fight for every tiny safety precaution. As Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, tells me, “I’m still dumbstruck that we had to negotiate ventilation, dumbstruck that we had to negotiate masking, dumbstruck that we had to negotiate any component of mitigations.”
In some places, as staffing shortages due to COVID-19 (as well as the longer-term attrition of teachers) continued, police were called in to supervise classes. Elsewhere, parent and community volunteers—maybe background checked, maybe not—were called to step in. In still other places, the National Guard, fresh from staffing vaccination stations, were marshaled to teach. One National Guard member told National Public Radio that he was given “a few hours of training and a background check” before being sent in to teach band class. He had no prior teaching experience.
It’s insulting to longtime teachers, many of whom have reevaluated their relationship to the classroom as their work continues to be devalued. “You hear them being like, ‘Well, if you’re eighteen years old and you can pass a background check, you can be a substitute teacher,’ ” says Nicole McCormick, a teacher and union leader in West Virginia who recently left the classroom. “You don’t just pull some rando off the street and say, ‘Go ahead, buddy. We don’t have enough people today.’ Why are we accepting that for education?”
It’s been a head-turning (and bipartisan) process of devaluing teachers’ labor—by breaking their unions, tossing under-trained Teach For America recruits into classrooms, and filling more and more of the school year with standardized tests and test preparation—while simultaneously proclaiming from the hilltops the importance of schools and education. It’s driven many educators, like McCormick, from the work that they loved.
The teachers who’ve stayed through the past couple of decades of so-called education reform were often the most dedicated. Yet, in the pandemic, the devaluation only sped up, leaving teachers painfully aware that their very lives did not matter to their employers. Like many other workers deemed “essential,” teachers have learned over the past couple of years that they are expendable.
Students themselves, around the country, have picked up on what’s happening. In several places, they have organized walkouts demanding remote options and noting that “learning” is the last thing they’re doing in person.
“The first day I came back to school, on January 3, all of my teachers were absent except for one,” one student told the news website Gothamist. “Some of us read, some of us just sat around. We weren’t learning anything.”
In January, the Chicago Tribune reported, local public school students walked out holding signs declaring “Masks are disposable. CPS students are not.” One of the walkout leaders addressed the crowd, saying, “We know what keeps us safe. Only the community knows what they need to keep the community safe. They increase the police budget, but we don’t have a mental health department at our schools. [The Chicago Teachers Union] has been fighting for nurses, social workers, and psychologists in every single Chicago public school and even within a pandemic. That isn’t happening. That ain’t right.”
On March 8, Moody and her colleagues went on the picket lines in the first big teacher strike of the COVID-19 era, and around the country, educators were watching, hoping for a shift once again in the narrative that teachers don’t care about their work.
As many teachers and students have repeatedly said, if the United States actually valued education, it would value the safety, health, and lives of the participants in the educational process—those teachers, students, school workers, and even their extended families. Rather than a zero-sum game pitting educators against parents, we’d see expanded services: more mental health counselors and nurses, accessible COVID-19 testing, and updated buildings with good ventilation and outdoor green space.
Teachers’ contradictory position, and the clarity with which we are able to see it now, teaches us a lot about work at this moment in time. It reminds us that we are all only as necessary as the profits we produce. In that sense, the school workers in Minneapolis and St. Paul are fighting for all of us, and for a world where our needs for safety and care are met.