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Commentary By Ray Domanico

What Are the Teachers' Strikes About? Racing to the Left

Education Pre K-12

What’s behind the recent spate of teacher strikes from Los Angeles to Denver, West Virginia, and Oakland? Local issues like across-the-board raises and increased educational spending are certainly a big part of teachers’ demands, but they could have been fought without a strike. The larger issue at play, and the real reason for these strikes, is a shift in the landscape of the party the teachers’ unions have always called home.

The Democratic Party continues to drift away from centrist ideas and toward a more “progressive” approach to labor and education, and teachers’ unions are prepared to exploit this shift. In a very real way, the teacher strikes across the country serve as a signal to the progressive left within the Democratic Party that union support is contingent on falling in step with their demands. Gone are the days of Obama-era bipartisan support for charter schools, teacher accountability, and merit pay. In addition to increased school spending, that means ending the use of merit-based pay and hindering the growth of non-union charter schools, and the progressive left, for better or for worse, is prepared to acquiesce.

The call for across-the-board salary and spending increases may seem reasonable to some, but my Manhattan Institute colleagues have shown that they run smack into the financial limits imposed by growth in non-classroom spending and by existing pension and benefit liabilities.

On merit pay, the unions make fair points. These poorly thought-out policies were a key driver of discontent among parents and families from suburban and other middle-class communities during the era of Common Core and its Obama-era reforms. Reducing a teacher’s value to a single metric based on test scores just did not sit right with many parents, and their reaction fed the nationwide opt-out of testing movement.

The unions’ move against charter schools, however, is deeply misguided. This move puts them in direct opposition to the exact families who are traditionally a core constituency of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. These working class and low-income black and Hispanic families constitute the vast majority of those who choose to send their children to high-performing charter schools in urban areas.

Still, whatever their outcome, the teacher strikes are serving to re-establish the influence that teachers’ unions once held in the Democratic Party. Notably, the teachers’ union in Los Angeles won the support of six Democratic senators, all presidential hopefuls, responding to the rising tide of a youthful progressive wing of their party, a direct rebuke to the centrist educational policies of the Obama presidency.

Since they rose to power in the 1960s, teachers’ unions have been solid supporters of Democratic candidates and have been consistent contributors of both money and manpower. They found themselves in uncertain waters by the early 2000s as policy experts from across the political spectrum focused national attention on the real shortcomings of public education in low-income communities and communities of color.

Today, the new union activism may be less about reversing these trends than shoring up the support of the Democratic Party’s emerging progressive left-wing. By showing their strength through strikes across the country, teachers’ unions are ensuring left-wing buy-in to their traditional priorities: lockstep salary schedules and monopolistic control of public education as opposed to performance bonuses, school choice, and charter schools.

Democratic politicians aren’t the only target of these strikes. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in the Janus case, which found mandatory union fees to be unconstitutional, union leadership likely feels pressure to do whatever it takes to solidify membership and dues-based revenue. A strike is just the way to do that: It builds cohesion in the now voluntary association, ensuring members stick around now that they have a choice.

Politicians should take the time to see past union demands to what is best for teachers, as well as their students and communities. They should certainly work to see that dedicated public school teachers receive fair compensation in a system that can remain fiscally solvent for future generations. This doesn’t need to mean abandoning charter schools in the communities they help most, especially when those same communities represent these politicians’ base.

This piece originally appeared at Washington Examiner

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Ray Domanico is the director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute.

This piece originally appeared in Washington Examiner