The Los Angeles Unified School District and Service Employees International Union Local 99 reached a tentative agreement around 2 a.m. Tuesday Pacific Time. 

United Teachers Los Angeles and Associated Administrators of Los Angeles agreed to tentative contracts Sunday night. If SEIU had not reached an agreement, all three unions would have for the first time in the nation’s second-largest district.

“We are pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement in principle with SEIU Local 99 that will allow schools to be open,” the district said in a . “Los Angeles Unified and SEIU Local 99 teams will continue to work together to finalize the details of a tentative agreement.”

The union, which represents more than 30,000 bus drivers, teachers’ assistants, custodians and cafeteria workers, had of bad-faith bargaining and retaliation. The teachers union and its 37,000 members had planned to walk out with the SEIU local in solidarity, as it did when the union an unfair labor charge strike in 2023. This time, the administrators union, which represents more than 3,000 principals and assistant principals, had planned to strike in support as well.

“Because of our members’ unity and readiness to take action, we secured major wins — including significant improvements to wages and hours; stronger protections against subcontracting; increased staffing; and we successfully stopped layoffs for (information technology) workers,” Local 99 said in a Tuesday . “This is what collective power looks like.”

The union and the district have been bargaining for two years, said Blanca Gallegos, the union’s communications director.

“Currently, the average wage in (our union) is about $35,000, which is below poverty for a family of four,” she said before the agreement was reached. “We’re also looking to increase hours — because the district relies on a lot of part-time work — so about 80% of Local 99 members are working less than eight hours a day.”

The district previously a 13% raise, but the union it wasn’t enough to provide a livable salary for its members. The union also wanted staff to be able to work more hours. Gallegos said many employees were restricted to a number of hours that’s just under the threshold needed to qualify for health benefits — a reason why picketing would have been classified as an . The district didn’t respond to a request for comment about the unfair labor charge.

“During these two years of negotiations, the district has taken a lot of actions that are retaliatory. One of them is they reduce the hours of thousands of members so that they’re not eligible for health care benefits — I mean, like 15 minutes short of being eligible,” Gallegos said. “We see that as undermining the contract.”

�ճܱ���岹��’s includes a 24% pay increase over three years and minimum work hour schedules for specific positions. 

The district had told all three unions it can’t afford huge raises, but bargaining leaders pointed to a $5 billion reserve fund. Los Angeles Unified has the account is dwindling amid a projected . 

United Teachers Los Angeles Sunday that it agreed to a tentative two-year contract that increases the average salary by 13.86%, with a minimum raise of 8%. The union had rejected an April 1 that included a 10% raise over three years with a one-time 3% bonus for this school year.

The new contract, which will expire in 2027, also includes four weeks of paid parental leave; more psychologists, psychiatric social workers and counselors; lower class sizes; and stipends for teachers if class sizes exceed the limit.

“The flexing of our collective power forced LAUSD to direct significant funding into critical priorities identified by UTLA members in the Win Our Future contract demands,” the union said in a .

United Teachers Los Angeles has been a key player in a statewide effort to improve pay and working conditions during contract negotiations this year. The , coordinated by the California Teachers Association, asked union locals in 32 districts to focus demands around wages, staffing, fewer layoffs and school closures. It also aims to pressure the state to increase school funding.

Associated Administrators of Los Angeles was 12% raises over two years, with a chance to renegotiate in the third year of its next contract. The district to an 11.65% salary increase. Union members stipends if they work in a high-needs school or are a school’s single administrator, and 40 hours a year of professional training.

“This moment did not happen by accident. It happened because 90% of you voted yes to authorize a strike,” union President Maria Nichols said to her members in a . “It happened because you trusted our union. It happened because you stood firm, you stood together and you refused to be overlooked. Your courage at that vote changed the tone at the bargaining table. Your unity shifted the balance of power. Your perseverance made this moment possible.”

The unions haven’t announced a timetable for ratifying the contracts. 

In case of a strike, the district had planned to at community food sites and offer classroom lesson packets. But some parents said loss of learning and other resources would have lasting negative impacts on their children.

Maria Palma, founder of the parent advocacy group , said the pandemic combined with other local school interruptions, such as immigration enforcement raids, have caused students to miss multiple days of school.

“Many parents are very concerned about the learning loss that has happened,” she said. “Most recently, we had a protest where teachers were telling students that they should walk out of schools and protest against ICE. The loss of so many school days for some kids that are now, for example, in high school, over all these years, has been considerable.”

A strike would have been especially devastating for Indigenous and immigrant families, said Evelyn Aleman, founder of , a local parent advocacy nonprofit. The district serves roughly 30,000 immigrant students, and 25% of them are undocumented, according to the .

Aleman said language barriers had made it difficult for immigrant parents to keep up with district updates about the strike. 

Undocumented parents don’t feel safe enough to pick up materials or food distributed by the district because of fears of deportation, she said. Many parents involved with Our Voice also work as street vendors and are the single guardians of multiple children, making it impossible to find child care.

“When LAUSD says there’s going to be food centers, some parents don’t have vehicles. It’s very frustrating,” Aleman said. “Some children will remain unwatched, because some of the parents will leave the children in the home and sometimes leave cameras. That’s how they monitor the children — that’s what is happening when these situations arise.”

That might sound like the premise of an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. But something very similar is happening right now in California’s public schools. Worse still, there’s no celebrity chef coming to clean up the mess. 

Even though public school enrollment has fallen sharply since the pandemic, most California districts have continued adding staff. Now teachers unions are pressing districts to commit to more expensive labor contracts, even as the funding they receive remains tied to the number of students they serve.

Earlier this month, teachers in two Sacramento-area school districts the job after contract negotiations stalled, bringing the number of teacher strikes in California to six this school year. And more may be on the way. Unions in Los Angeles and Berkeley have already authorized strikes if negotiations fail.

These strikes are not isolated incidents. They are part of a coordinated statewide pressure by the California Teachers Association (CTA) called “We Can’t Wait,” involving 32 districts that educate about 1 million of the state’s students. As the San Francisco Chronicle recently , the campaign has emboldened local unions to dig their heels in and make contract demands that go beyond what independent state panels have recommended.

How did we get here? 

From the perspective of union leaders, the answer is simple: California’s schools are understaffed and educators are underpaid. “We have a staffing crisis, and it’s worst in areas where teachers are needed the most,” Kyle Weinberg of the San Diego Education Association . “If we want to fully staff our schools, we need a living wage.” Striking a similar tone, Kampala Taiz-Rancifer of the Oakland Education Association : “Our students deserve smaller class sizes that allow them to thrive and feel safe at school.”

These local leaders are echoed by their counterparts in state headquarters. “There is no district anywhere in the state that is getting what they deserve from the state’s funding system,” CTA President David Goldberg the Sacramento Bee. “It is a system that has gone on for decades and basically balanced budgets on the backs of our students and educators.”

But research produced by a union-friendly organization complicates that claim. A recent school finance from the Albert Shanker Institute finds that California devotes 3.4 percent of its economic capacity to K–12 schools, compared with a national average of 3.1 percent. In other words, California already commits 10% more of its economic capacity to public education than the typical U.S. state.

Many union leaders say that California districts have prioritized administrative spending over investing in teachers and classroom support staff. Yet in Twin Rivers Unified School District, where teachers are currently on strike, the data point in the opposite direction. Combining figures by district officials with on teacher contracts shows that starting teacher pay in the Sacramento-area district has increased about 35% since 2019, rising from $48,168 to $65,228—roughly equal to the household income there. 

Meanwhile, NCES data by Marguerite Roza’s Edunomics Lab shows that administrative and central office staffing in Twin Rivers has been slashed while the number of teachers and paraprofessionals has grown, even as enrollment has fallen.

The slogan “We Can’t Wait” also carries an unintended irony for parents and students. Research has consistently that districts that relied more heavily on remote instruction during the pandemic experienced larger post-pandemic enrollment declines as parents sought alternatives when schools failed to reopen.

According to my own analysis of AEI’s Return 2 Learn , the 32 districts participating in the CTA campaign spent nearly 80% of the 2020–21 school year in fully virtual learning, while the rest of California’s districts were remote for closer to half that school year. Twenty-one of the 32 districts never reopened for a continuous week of fully in-person learning that year.

Many families apparently voted with their feet. Since the pandemic, NCES data shows that the 32 districts participating in CTA’s campaign experienced average enrollment declines of about 8%. Comparing these districts to their neighbors within the same counties — a fairer apples-to-apples comparison — enrollment in “We Can’t Wait” districts fell about 3 percentage points more than in nearby districts that are not part of the campaign.

In other words, the union locals striking — or threatening to strike — are concentrated in districts that have lost a larger share of their students since the pandemic and are therefore more vulnerable to structural deficits.

State policymakers haven’t helped. California expanded “” that allowed districts to be funded based on prior-year attendance rather than the number of students actually showing up. Because those protections were strengthened during the pandemic, the fiscal impact of enrollment losses did not fully hit district budgets until around 2024,especially after federal ESSER funding expired. In effect, districts were being paid based on yesterday’s students rather than today’s. It was like a restaurant paying this year’s servers with last year’s reservations.

Which brings me back to the slogan “We Can’t Wait.” During the pandemic, students and families were the ones told to wait: for classrooms to reopen, for normal schooling to resume, for the adults in charge to figure things out. Families were told to be patient, even as many quietly began leaving the system.

Now many of the same union locals that kept students waiting the longest are warning of a five-alarm fire. But emergencies caused by earlier choices have a different name.

They’re what happens when the customers leave and the bill finally comes due.

As Marguerite Roza recently predicted, “To balance [their] budget, districts will issue pink slips, cut some electives, Advanced Placement classes and sports, eliminate supports for high-needs children, freeze hiring and close schools.” Unfortunately, that prediction is already coming true. Across California, districts have issued thousands of preliminary layoff notices as they scramble to close widening budget deficits.

We can’t wait any longer. That’s just the math.

The union fully-funded health care and an 8.5% raise over two years for classified staff including paraprofessionals. Teachers will get a 5% raise over two years. It’s a compromise between the district’s original offer of 2% and the union’s demand of an increase between 9% and 14%.

Improving special education working conditions was also a key demand for the union. The includes caseload reductions, increased pay for added duties and requirements to ensure students receive special education services in a timely manner.

United Educators of San Francisco began its first strike in nearly 50 years on Monday after 11 months of failed negotiations with the district. Schools were shuttered for roughly 50,000 students as thousands of educators flocked to picket lines. More than 250 principals, office clerks and custodians in two other unions went on a in solidarity. 

“None of this would have been possible without the thousands of you who have shown up to our board actions, signed petitions to commit to our campaign, written letters to our Board of Education, and — in the last four days — shown up in the rain to support your big bargaining team in the streets,” the union said in a . “This strike has made it clear what is possible when we join together and fight for the stability in our schools that many have said was out of our reach.”

While staff reported to work on Friday, students will return on Feb. 18 after two previously scheduled holidays. Superintendent Maria Su said in a that the agreement marked “a new beginning.”

“I recognize that this past week has been challenging,” she said. “Thank you to the (district) staff, community-based partners, and faith and city leaders who partnered with us to continue centering our students in our work every day. I am so proud of the resilience and strength of our community. ”

Other contract wins include limits on the district’s use of artificial intelligence, according to the . The district and union also agreed on a proposal to classify schools as for immigrant students, staff and families. The policy bars federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering school grounds or obtaining records without a criminal judicial warrant. Staff will also receive three hours of training to enforce these policies.

The union said information about the contract ratification process will be announced in the near future and leaders are planning to host town halls. The agreement still needs to be approved by both the union and school board. 

“We know our work is not done,” the union . “While we didn’t win everything we know we deserve, this strike allowed us to imagine our schools and classrooms as they should be with staffing levels high enough that our students can learn and thrive.  This is a foundation for a stable district.”

The 6,500-member union has been negotiating for nearly a year with San Francisco Unified School District, which has roughly 50,000 students. The district closed more than 100 schools on Monday as the union solidified a strike roughly a week after members approved a walkout in two rounds of voting. More than 250 principals, office clerks and custodians in two other unions also went on a in solidarity. 

Negotiations stalled because of disagreements over pay raises, health care coverage and working conditions for special education teachers. 

“What this contract represents is stability for San Francisco Unified for years to come, and its commitment to us and coming to an agreement immediately will secure the schools that San Franciscans deserve,” said union President Cossandra Curiel at a outside Mission High School. “You can expect to see strong picket lines until that agreement is achieved.”

The union is sticking to its for a 9% and 14% pay raise for teachers and paraprofessionals, respectively, over the two-year contract. The current starting for a teacher with a bachelor’s degree is $73,689. The paraprofessional hourly is $31.52. 

Union officials are also asking for 100% health care coverage, along with caseload limits and more time for administrative tasks for special education staff. 

After multiple hours-long bargaining sessions this weekend, the district with a 6% raise over two years. It proposed implementing the union’s demand for a new special education workload model as a pilot program at five schools through June 2028. Curiel said Monday that district officials offered 75% health coverage.

San Francisco Unified officials have a $102 million budget deficit makes it impossible to meet the union’s demands. The union said the district can cover the increased costs with its budget reserve. 

“We understand that they are under a form of strain from the state, or that’s what their excuse has been up to now,” Curiel said. “We see that they have a reserve of almost $400 million. We believe that today’s dollars are for today’s students.”

The district the $400 million is not in reserves, but is already budgeted to prevent layoffs and address the deficit. 

“Using a one-time fund balance for permanent raises creates a funding cliff,” the district said in a . “Once the one-time money runs out, the district would be forced to make even deeper cuts to classrooms and lay off more staff to cover the ongoing cost.”

San Francisco Unified does have $111 million in its reserve fund, but the district said that money is for emergencies.

Superintendent Maria Su said in a that the district’s proposal “provides fiscal certainty by matching spending to available resources” and “keeps the district on a clear runway to exit state oversight.” The state started in 2024 because of projected budget deficits.

“Let me be clear, I do not want a prolonged strike,” Su said in a Sunday night. “I do not want a strike at all.”

Curiel said the district and union did agree on a proposal to classify schools as for immigrant students, staff and families. The policy bars federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from entering school grounds or obtaining records without a criminal judicial warrant. Staff will also receive three hours of training to enforce these policies.

Teachers protested in front of several schools Monday morning and hosted a rally in the afternoon that featured Randi Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest union for educators. On the in front of Mission High School, social studies teacher Cindy Castillo said she’s striking to improve school stability.

“Stability means that we can retain our educators of color and our students and families of color. It means we can fully staff security, who can build relationships with our students and prevent violence and harm,” she said. “It means our students and families feel safe and supported.”

Matt Alexander, president of the San Francisco Unified school board, he supports the strike and believes it’s a necessary step.

“I am so proud of these educators for standing up for what is right,” he said. “A strike for the first time in half a century takes courage. It takes sacrifice. It was not what these educators wanted, but they’re willing to do what needs to be done to create the schools our students deserve.”

If San Francisco educators walk out, it will be the city’s first teacher strike in nearly 50 years. United Educators of San Francisco approved a walkout with the second of two nearly unanimous votes last week. Its bargaining team is to decide within 10 days whether it will strike. 

United Teachers of Los Angeles, which represents more than 35,000 educators in California’s largest school district, has been in negotiations since February 2025. Both parties clashed over pay raises and in December. A strike vote passed with a member approval on Monday. 

With 6,500 members, United Educators of San Francisco has been negotiating with the district since March. The union asked for a 14% pay increase for support staff and 9% for teachers over two years, along with improvements to health care coverage, special education teacher workloads and family housing. 

“We remain prepared to hear any real solutions the district may formally bring to the table that will stabilize our district for our students, educators and families,” the union said in a Tuesday. 

The San Francisco Unified School District has a 2% yearly increase, totaling 6% over three years. It on Saturday that a $102 budget deficit makes it impossible to meet the union’s demands.

“Any raises above the current proposals from the district will force further cuts at school sites that will impact the district’s ability to serve all of its students long-term,” the district .

The union that San Francisco Unified recently allocated $111 million to its rainy-day fund, “money members say needs to be directed back to classrooms and school sites.”

In Los Angeles, the union is an 18% immediate pay raise with a 3% bump the second year of the contract. Los Angeles Unified two consecutive raises of 2.5% and 2% and a one-time payment of 1% of an employee’s salary. A strike deadline has not yet been set.

Cheryl Coney, the union’s executive director, wrote in a to the district that drastic raises are needed because more than 20% of members qualify for low-income housing and roughly one-third leave Los Angeles Unified by their fifth year on the job. 

The union the district can afford pay increases with a $5 billion reserve, but officials budget constraints recently worsened because of enrollment declines, the expiration of pandemic aid and increased operating costs. The district’s projects a $1.6 billion deficit by the 2027-28 school year.

“We recognize the real financial strain on educators and staff but must make difficult decisions to preserve classrooms, student services and long-term stability within finite resources,” the district said in a Jan. 31 . “This moment calls for collaboration between all parties to reach a sustainable resolution.”

The Los Angeles and San Francisco superintendents joined representatives of five other school districts in a Monday that asked advocates, nonprofits and lawmakers to help campaign for more funding from the state. 

“Educators and staff deserve to feel valued and supported, and districts recognize and respect those realities,” the letter says. “At the same time, school systems cannot spend resources they do not receive, nor can local negotiations resolve statewide enrollment trends or the loss of temporary federal funding.”

The strike votes in Los Angeles and San Francisco come amid a by the California Teachers Association, focusing negotiations in 32 districts statewide around : wages, staffing and student stability — meaning fewer layoffs and school closures. The also aims to pressure the state to improve school funding.

A from the statewide union found that 88% of educators identified insufficient school funding and low pay as serious issues for 2026.

Several California teachers unions already walked out of the classroom this school year or are close to striking. United Teachers of Richmond, located north of San Francisco, staged a in December. Five unions — Natomas, Twin Rivers, Rocklin, Woodland Joint and Washington — are at an impasse, along with Madera Unified Teachers Association in central California and Berkeley Federation of Teachers.

More than 90% of San Diego Education Association members recently a one-day unfair labor practice strike for Feb. 26. The union said it’s protesting as San Diego Unified’s repeated contract violations regarding special education staffing caseloads.

So far, common-good advocacy has been concentrated in big, Democratic cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon. In a of 772 teacher strikes between 2007 and 2023, researchers found that most job actions centered on pay and classroom issues, with just 1 in 10 featuring common-good demands on issues such as housing, immigration or social safety nets.

What would it take for suburban and rural locals to take these issues on in contract talks? Part of the answer may lie in whether unions believe that doing so will help them win over the public.

To better understand public opinion, I embedded a survey experiment in the , a large, nationally representative survey of U.S. adults. In the experiment, respondents were randomly assigned to read about one of two hypothetical teacher strikes in their community — one common good, the other focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In the bread-and-butter version, respondents were told that teachers unions “went on strike to fight for higher salaries and more generous benefits for their members.” In the common-good scenario, teachers walked off the job to “fight for more affordable housing and better mental health services for the local community.” Although almost all unions make salary demands during real-world strikes, the experiment deliberately highlighted a single set of issues to see how these two different kinds of appeals resonated with different segments of the public.

The results showed a striking partisan split. Respondents who identified as Democrats were overwhelmingly supportive of both types of strike campaigns, with more than 7 in 10 backing teachers. Those who described themselves as Republicans, however, drew a sharp distinction: Nearly 4 in 10 said they would support a strike in their community for higher teacher pay, but when the union’s rationale for striking shifted to broader progressive policies, GOP support collapsed — fewer than 1 in 5 respondents approved of the hypothetical strike in their community.

What’s more, the framing experiment carried over to people’s broader opinions about teachers unions when they were asked a different question later in the survey. Specifically, Republicans who had been primed to think about common-good strikes were 11 percentage points more likely to say teachers unions have a “generally negative effect on schools” than were Republicans whose hypothetical strike vignette was focused on pay and benefits alone. Democrats, by contrast, grew even more enthusiastic when they were primed to think about the union’s broader progressive advocacy: 1 in 3 strongly agreed that teachers unions “have a positive effect” on schools after reading the common-good vignette, compared with just 1 in 5 when unions were described as striking for pay and benefits.

Two implications stand out.

First, unions in progressive cities face little risk in embracing common-good bargaining. Their members and voters are aligned, and the strategy can energize their base. For instance, United Teachers Los Angeles in August for protections for immigrant families — building on its 2019 that placed common-good demands front and center.

At the same time, these efforts are unlikely to work in politically mixed communities. With Republican voters repelled by common-good strike campaigns, unions would command less community support in negotiations with local school boards if they leaned into common-good rhetoric.

Second, these findings are consistent with one explanation for why, at the state and national levels, unions have doubled down on progressive political advocacy despite the Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus v. AFSCME decision. Janus made it harder for unions to raise revenue by requiring them to persuade non-members, who no longer paid fees, to join. In theory, that could have encouraged moderation, leading them to appeal to teachers who are moderate or conservative by focusing on bread-and-butter issues.

In practice, however, unions may see greater returns from mobilizing their most progressive members, since those are the ones most likely to contribute time, money and energy to unions that champion a broader political agenda like common-good bargaining.

The National Education Association’s 2025 Representative Assembly illustrates this shift. Delegates voted to sever ties with the Anti-Defamation League, citing its “weaponization” of antisemitism. The move reflected the growing clout of progressive caucuses such as Educators for Palestine and underscored how unions are staking their futures on being credible champions of progressive causes. Post-Janus, that may be a rational base-building strategy. But it also risks making teachers unions ever more isolated and partisan — stronger in blue enclaves, weaker outside them.

The American Federation of Teachers published the findings Sept. 10 after research company Grow Progress 705 members about classroom expenses and federal education policy changes. The union also collected personal insights about student hunger, an issue that have found is prominent at school and could be impacted by impending to food assistance programs.

“Every year, public school educators dig into their own pockets to help their students get the education they deserve,” union President Randi Weingarten said in a . “They pay for books, decorations, paper, pencils and, yes, even food.”

Families that deal with can’t afford enough groceries to meet their needs, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The most recent available shows that nearly 18% of households with children across the nation struggled with food insecurity in 2023.

Research the national nonprofit in March found that 92% of teachers have taken some type of action to address student hunger at school. Nearly half personally provide food in the classroom, while 29% have purchased food for students to eat outside of class.

“Families are struggling to put food on the table for their kids for a variety of reasons, whether that’s the rising cost of food or the worsening job market or limited resources,” said Sara Steely, a No Kid Hungry spokesperson. “The entire education system is stronger when kids are well-fed, and teachers are up against a lot — food shouldn’t be something they have to think about.”

In the AFT survey, a Florida union member said students need food at school because of a lack of it at home, while another teacher in Kentucky said many students “are starving because of lack of food availability.”

Ann Walkup, a Rhode Island physics teacher and AFT member, said she and many educators at her high school buy food like granola bars, crackers and water bottles.

“Most of us keep some sort of stash somewhere,” she told The 74. “There are definitely some teachers who have a situation like [food insecurity] with some of their students. We’re supposed to refer them to the office, and there’s a system the school has to support them, but admittedly, it is just easier to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got an extra granola bar.’ ”

Steely said child hunger is about to become even more complicated with the recent cuts to the , which helps about 42 million people afford groceries each month. In July, the Trump administration approved a tax bill that will from SNAP funding through 2034.

Once the SNAP cuts are fully implemented, roughly 2.4 million people are projected to lose food stamp benefits in an average month, according to estimates from the .

Students automatically qualify for free or reduced-price lunch if their families receive SNAP benefits, Steely said. Parents will have to return to filling out paperwork to get their children free meals at school — something that is an obstacle for people who have language barriers or are embarrassed about their income, she said.

“As we see these SNAP and Medicaid cuts play out and the impacts to free school meals access, I could see that burden falling to the teachers,” Steely said. 

Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, told The 74 that student hunger continues to be a critical issue for members of the nation’s largest teachers union. She said schools already felt the impact of cuts this spring, when the in funding for districts and child care facilities to purchase food from local farms for student meals.

“We’re seeing more kids coming to school hungry,” she said. “We spend money buying snacks, we send things home to families in book bags. We do that because, at least as educators, we can’t look away.”

Judge Paul Friedman issued a preliminary injunction in a lawsuit filed this spring by the Federal Education Association and Antilles Consolidated Education Association, which represent more than 5,500 teachers, librarians and counselors in the 161 schools under the . The agency educates 67,000 children on military bases worldwide.

The union sued the Trump administration over a March executive order that stripped collective bargaining rights from two-thirds of . The order impacted the Departments of Justice, Defense, Veteran Affairs, Treasury, and Health and Human Services, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency.

The Federal Education Association has been negotiating teachers contracts with the Department of Defense since 1970, while the Antilles Consolidated Education Association has bargained on behalf of Puerto Rico educators since 1976, according to the lawsuit. The current collective bargaining agreements for both unions were approved in 2023 and are set to expire in summer 2028.

But since the order was issued, the lawsuit says, the Department of Defense Education Activity has discontinued negotiations, stopped participation in grievance proceedings and prohibited union representation during educator disciplinary meetings. Members are also no longer allowed to conduct union work during the school day. Requests from educators to access a union sick leave bank with 13,000 donated hours have also been ignored, according to the suit.

“These actions, taken together, essentially terminate the respective collective bargaining agreements and thus cause irreparable harm,” Friedman said in his decision.

A 1978 federal statute allows collective bargaining in the civil service sector. The suit argued that while presidents have the authority to exclude an agency if its primary function involves intelligence, investigation or national security work, “Many, if not most, of the agencies and agency subdivisions swept up in the executive order’s dragnet do little to no national security work, much less do they have a primary function [of] intelligence, counterintelligence, investigative [work].”

The agency declined to comment on ongoing legal proceedings. In a reply to the unions’ lawsuit, Trump administration attorneys said the executive order was within the law and that reversing it would be costly.

“Rather than maintaining the status quo, it would force [the Department of Defense] to undo actions it has already taken to implement the executive order, causing significant disruption and resource expenditures,” the lawyers wrote.

In April, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized a few exemptions for agencies related to the Air Force and Army, but not the teachers unions — despite to exclude the school system.

“Ensuring that DoDEA educators and personnel retain collective bargaining protections will ensure that DoDEA can continue to recruit and retain the best staff in support of its mission,” the congressional members wrote in a letter. “Collective bargaining safeguards the public interest, and its history in DoDEA has demonstrated better outcomes for mission readiness, and stronger connections between military-connected families and those who serve them.”

An appeal from the Trump administration is pending. A similar lawsuit from six unions, including the American Federation of Government Employees, resulted in an injunction, but a in August.

One could be forgiven if, upon reading the above, one thought that Spiller finished a close second or third in the Democratic primary — that he ran a strong campaign, connected with voters in New Jersey, parried attacks from a hostile press, and fought valiantly against his opponents, only to lose by a handful of votes. 

But that isn’t remotely what happened. 

Spiller finished fifth, earning less than 11 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the winner, Rep. Mikie Sherrill, raked in 34 percent. And that was despite the union, through a combination of super PACs and independent expenditure organizations, spending to elect Spiller — about twice the amount spent by the second-highest-spending candidate in the race.

How did the largest teacher’s union in New Jersey take tens of millions of dollars of their members’ dues and essentially light them on fire in an abortive attempt to get its own president crowned as the Democratic candidate for governor? A number of explanations are possible, but one seems most compelling: simple incompetence. The more urgent question now is whether the union will learn from its mistakes — or whether it will continue to suffer in political obscurity.

It’s important to note the scale of NJEA’s failure. Politico that “no other special interest group has ever spent as much in state history to promote a single candidate” as the NJEA did with Spiller. The NJEA spent about $8 million more in one primary race in one state than the National Education Association, NJEA’s parent organization, spent at the national level between 2023 and 2024. (Spiller’s poor showing is a good reminder that it takes more than money to win an election — even in a post-Citizens United world.)

Another concerning stat: A lack of union turnout. The NJEA boasts around 200,000 members, yet Spiller received less than 90,000 votes total. Some back-of-the-envelope math suggests that, even if all of Spiller’s votes came from union members (a dubious assumption), he would have received fewer than half of their votes. John Napolitani, a local mayor and head of the teachers’ union in Asbury Park, : “I think it was a very poorly calculated and piss-poor decision by the NJEA to blow that kind of money.”

Indeed, Spiller seems to have been a uniquely bad candidate in this race. The proof is in Spiller’s fifth-place showing in his hometown of Montclair, where he was mayor from 2020-2024 (including during a of union-induced extended school closures). But this poor showing should not have necessarily been a surprise: In Montclair, Spiller was embroiled in a scandal involving potential health-insurance fraud, during which he suspiciously his Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination over 400 times. (Spiller announced his intention to not run for a second term as mayor the transcript of his deposition became public.) If voters in your hometown reject you so thoroughly, then you’re probably not a great candidate in a statewide race.

It could also be the case that Spiller, as the public face of the largest teacher’s union in New Jersey, was a painful reminder of extended COVID-19 school closures in 2020-21. Indeed, the NJEA (of which Spiller was then the vice president) against Gov. Phil Murphy’s November 2020 for schools across the state to return to in-person instruction. At the time, one found that less than half of New Jersey parents were satisfied with virtual instruction. Today, almost nobody seems willing to defend the extended school closures during the pandemic, especially considering the growing body of showing that the more time students spent outside of the classroom, the more they fell behind academically. 

Five years after the pandemic, the NJEA might hope that New Jersey voters would have forgotten the school closures, or at least forgiven the union for them. But parents may have a longer memory of being locked out of classrooms while nearly every other school in America was back in session. 

Still, even if unpopular with New Jersey parents, the NJEA could have spent its money more wisely by supporting a candidate other than Spiller. A competent organization seeking to have a tangible political impact considers a variety of candidates, weighs their strengths and weaknesses, and supports the one it deems most likely to win the race. If the union had conducted such a process, it would have surely rejected Spiller outright, especially considering its knowledge of Spiller’s rocky mayoral tenure in Montclair. But instead, the NJEA funneled $40 million of teacher dues toward a candidate who earned a fifth-place finish in a gubernatorial primary.

A competent organization also learns from its failures. Which raises the question: What will the NJEA learn from its failure here? Will its leaders look carefully at the decisions they made so they can avoid a similar fate in the future, or will they bury their heads in the sand as they face uncomfortable headlines and inquiries from their members? 

In the long term, it’s deeper questions about influence and efficacy that may haunt them, such as: Can the NJEA still connect with voters? Will its leadership continue to waste tens of millions of union dues on long-shot primary campaigns? Is the largest teachers union in a deep-blue state like New Jersey losing political clout? 

Judging by the semi-triumphant tone of the statement released after Spiller’s resounding defeat, it seems that current NJEA leadership sees little to be concerned about. But refusing to take ownership of such a colossal defeat will likely only make things worse for NJEA and its members. 

If the union has any hope of remaining politically relevant in New Jersey, then it must treat the Spiller campaign — and collapse — as a $40 million wake-up call.

Of course this phenomenon isn’t unique to education. But its problematic effects have played an outsized role in the K-12 arena in recent years.

First, there were the COVID-era school closures. The effort to reopen schools was initially by partisanship. But when President Donald Trump championed in-person learning in the summer of 2020, reopening became coded in red and blue. and swiftly rebuked Trump on the issue. Ordinary voters in turn. Reopening then became a partisan quagmire that put kids last.

But as has been , the decline in student achievement wasn’t just a pandemic phenomenon. The decline began much earlier, exacerbated during the retreat from consequential accountability, and steepened even more post pandemic.

As student outcomes remain moribund today, leaders in both parties are doing far too little to reverse these trends. This time around the obstacle isn’t COVID reopening battles or culture wars. It’s mainly about the of the political class to signal, in a bipartisan manner, that holding schools accountable for student learning must be the cornerstone of American education. 

As Harvard Education professor Martin West put it while digesting the results of another disappointing NAEP assessment, “There is good evidence… that really does suggest a lot of [the academic] progress in the 1990s and 2000s was driven by test-based accountability.”  

Unfortunately, according to newly released survey data, accountability advocates have lost the public, and Democratic voters in particular. 

As part of the 2024 Cooperative Election Study (CES) , I asked a national sample of voters two questions about their support for the two key pillars of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) reform agenda: testing and accountability. Crucially, these questions were asked using the same language that pollsters at PDK/Gallup used back in 2001. Specifically, voters in both surveys were asked: Would you favor or oppose each of the following measures that have been proposed as part of a national education program in the US:

• Increased use of standardized tests for measuring student achievement 
• Holding the public schools accountable for how much students learn 

The chart below displays the percentage of Americans, separately by political party, who said that they favor increased use of testing to measure student achievement.

While it’s true that support for standardized testing has declined among all Americans – no doubt due in part to during the height of NCLB – the drop has been far more concentrated among Democrats. Whereas six in 10 Democrats favored more testing to measure student achievement back in 2001, today just one in three do (Figure 1). 

But the Democratic backlash to the bipartisan reform agenda goes beyond an aversion to more testing. Democrats have also lost faith in accountability. Back when the Bush administration was lobbying to enact NCLB, Democratic voters favored holding schools accountable for student achievement slightly more than did Republicans. In the intervening decades, however, Democratic support for accountability has nosedived.

Why have Democrats soured so much on testing and accountability? 

The answer surely has something to do with “follow the leader” politics. Democrats’ attitudes followed a in the way prominent Democrats spoke about school reform. Leaders, including President Joe Biden, spurned President Barack Obama’s reform agenda and instead the teachers unions’ anti-testing and accountability posture.

Since then, ordinary Democratic voters have taken notice.

In the aftermath of the pandemic, teachers unions pushed for a permanent end to high-stakes testing in Massachusetts. In 2024 they succeeded: The state’s overwhelmingly Democratic electorate voted against keeping passing MCAS as a graduation requirement. 

While it’s unlikely that voters soured on reform solely because their party and union leadership did first, there is some evidence consistent with this follow-the-leader dynamic. 

Since Barack Obama left office, rank-and-file Democrats have become far more supportive of teachers unions. For example, in 2014, Harvard’s EdNext poll found that one in four Democrats believed teachers unions had a negative effect on schools. A decade later, my CES survey, asking an identical question, found that just one in 20 Democrats view the unions negatively. Instead, six in 10 said teachers unions have a positive effect on schools.  

Notably, it is the larger base of pro-union Democrats who are more likely to oppose test-based accountability than their fellow Democrats who are union skeptics. The bottom line: Testing and accountability became less popular among Democratic voters after the party’s elected officials and their powerful labor partners firmly united publicly against these positions.

Although we can’t disentangle cause and effect with precision here, this timing is consistent with political science research that shows voters often take cues from political leaders, rather than independently forming opinions first and influencing politicians.

As Democrats gear up to try and win back the White House in 2028, the party’s choice in a standard bearer will have important implications for the future tone and direction of education politics. 

Three union members filed suit in March, just days after the union announced a data breach had occurred on July 6, 2024.

A union investigation into the incident, completed Feb. 18, found that an “unauthorized actor” gained access to records like Social Security numbers, bank account numbers, birthdates and taxpayer identification information.

The Rhysida ransomware gang claimed on its dark web site in September that it had carried out the cyberattack.

The union refused to comment on how widespread the attack was, but a data breach tracker maintained by the said 517,487 people were affected.

The suits allege the union failed “to properly secure and safeguard private information that was entrusted to them” and that those affected — including the relatives of members — will suffer financial losses and lost time detecting and preventing identity theft. 

Educators must provide personal information to the union to receive its benefits, according to the lawsuits. 

The plaintiffs also allege that the union waited too long to announce the data breach. were sent out on March 17, a month after the union’s investigation was finished.

“We took steps, to the best of our ability and knowledge, to ensure that the data taken by the unauthorized actor was deleted,” the union said in the notification letter.

The attack occurred on computer systems that needed security upgrades, the lawsuits allege. Two of the plaintiffs have reportedly experienced increased numbers of spam calls and emails.

“[The union] failed to properly monitor the computer network and systems that housed the private information,” one lawsuit says. “Had [the union] properly monitored its computer network and systems, it would have discovered the massive intrusion sooner rather than allowing cybercriminals almost a month of unimpeded access.”

The union, which represents 178,000 members, said in a previous statement that it isn’t aware of identity theft connected to the breach. It did not respond to a request for comment from The 74 about the lawsuits.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensatory damages and want the court to order the union to pay for at least 10 years of credit monitoring services for those affected. Motions were filed in a Pennsylvania district court Tuesday to consolidate the lawsuits into one class-action case.

For several weeks in February 2011, she was one of tens of thousands of demonstrators who packed the Wisconsin state capitol to protest against legislation that aimed to shut down collective bargaining for public employees. One night, caught amid a swell of activists belting the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome,” she suddenly noticed that she was standing a few feet from Jesse Jackson, who had traveled to Madison to spur resistance to the Republican-led bill.

To Bazan, a social studies teacher in the nearby town of Deerfield, it seemed that she was living through one of the historic scenes she often described to her high school students. Though the GOP had won in the previous fall’s elections, capturing both chambers of the state legislature and electing the ambitious conservative Scott Walker as governor, the fight wasn’t over. Marching in solidarity with progressive heavyweights like Jackson, and with the eyes of the labor movement on Wisconsin, she and her colleagues could still prevail in the struggle to keep their hard-won rights. 

“You could see the Democratic legislators waving to us from the windows of their offices,” she recalled. “We really believed that we weren’t alone anymore, that these people were in it with us, and that it might force the legislature to back down.”

But Walker and his allies didn’t fold. 

Instead, after another month of political theatrics, they enacted , better known to history as Act 10. Its passage was a staggering setback for labor, stripping public-sector unions— with notable exceptions, such as police officers and firefighters — of virtually all bargaining powers. 

Before the crowds dispersed, the bill had already started to reshape the K–12 landscape in Wisconsin, both by shoring up district finances and straitjacketing unions’ political sway. While Walker ultimately lost the governorship in 2018, his signature accomplishment stands as a model for conservative governance in a purple state.

After a major judicial ruling last year, however, it is unclear whether Act 10 will stand at all for much longer. In December, a state circuit judge the law’s constraints on collective bargaining, declaring the exemptions for first responders a violation of Wisconsin’s equal protection doctrine. Even with pending an eventual appeal to the state Supreme Court, some political observers are weighing the potential of a massive shift in state policy.

Fourteen years under the Act 10 regime have cast ripples across much of Wisconsin. Overall teacher compensation has fallen substantially, to cash-strapped districts. Academic research has found that the weakening of workplace rights freed up school systems to change the way they structure pay, rewarding the best instructors while simultaneously lifting student achievement higher.

But as top performers found new opportunities, new divisions opened up among districts and even genders, with male employees often receiving higher salaries than their female coworkers. Solidarity continued to dissolve as formerly mighty unions lost members and prestige. And a lingering hurt still hangs over many Wisconsin teachers, who feel that the Republican triumph was built on their misery. 

Disheartened by what she described as an increasingly hardline stance from her school board, Bazan soon moved to another district. “They have a union on paper, but it has no power,” she said.

The restoration of their power would be a cause for immense celebration, even as most experts agree that some of the changes to education spending and teacher influence likely cannot be altered. Alan Borsuk, a senior fellow in public policy at Marquette University Law School, said that while teachers had largely “learned to live with” the changes to their bottom line, the blow to their esteem remained.

“In some ways, the biggest impact of Act 10 was what it did, intangibly, to the teaching field,” he said. “So much hostility to teachers came out during that time, and the damage to teacher morale continues to this day. It just hasn’t been a cheerful profession for a lot of people.”

***

The shock delivered to teachers resulted primarily from a rollback of union strength that could only be called historic. As the first state to allow public employees to organize, bargain, and strike, a revolution in workers’ rights a half-century before Act 10; in its wake, that mass movement suffered its worst defeat in a half-century.

After the expiration of the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that were in effect when the law was signed, unions were forbidden to negotiate over fringe benefits or working conditions. Though they retained the right to negotiate salaries, they could not secure raises that outpaced inflation in a given year. Further, teachers would be required to make to their own pensions and benefits, overturning generous perks that had been won at the bargaining table years earlier. Finally, organizing itself was made harder by for unions to hold recertification votes each year to remain active. 

Kim Kohlhaas was then in her 15th year as an elementary educator in Superior,, a lakefront city near the border with Minnesota. She described the time she spent there before the adoption of Act 10 as a “dream job,” but the impact of the change made itself felt within months.

“Our contract was 28 pages long,” said Kohlhaas, who now serves as the head of the American Federation of Teachers’ Wisconsin affiliate. “It became one page, and that was just recognizing that we existed.”

No longer obliged to deal with unions like the AFT over regular salary increases, school districts were responding to their newfound freedom exactly as Walker had intended. Some kept their existing salary schedules more or less intact, with merit pay schemes that who attained additional professional credentials or earned high grades in the state’s teacher rating metric. 

The effects, detailed in a series of studies conducted by Yale economist Barbara Biasi, have largely been promising. 

In , Biasi compared Wisconsin districts that moved toward a flexible pay model with those that continued setting compensation on the basis of seniority, as had largely been the practice before Act 10. Collecting both statewide salary records and data on teacher value added (a measure of effectiveness that reflects students’ improvement in standardized test scores), she found that highly successful teachers in “seniority-pay” districts tended to find new positions in communities offering some form of merit pay, meaningfully increasing both average teacher quality and student scores in those places. 

According to Biasi’s estimates, the value-added of those job-movers was 60% higher than their counterparts who chose to leave their districts after the adoption of flexible pay structures. In addition, some proportion of relatively lower-performing teachers simply stopped teaching in public schools, whether to leave the profession entirely or to work in private institutions.

In circulated this spring, Biasi extended her findings up to 2016, five years after Republicans pushed the reform through. In the years prior to 2011, she found, seniority was practically the only factor determining teacher pay: A professional over 57 years old earned, on average, 88% more than one who was 24 years old. But after the pre-Act 10 contracts expired, those career veterans earned slightly less than they previously had, only making 73% more than their most junior colleagues.

As the gap between older and younger educators flattened, student achievement — especially for children from low-income families — saw a significant bump throughout the state, with standardized test scores climbing higher statewide each additional year after Act 10 was passed. 

Biasi observed that no district has switched to a fully pay-for-performance system, in part because superintendents and principals do not typically have access to value-added statistics themselves. Instead, they were taking advantage of the autonomy around pay to favor employees whom they saw as working harder and more capably to boost learning. 

“They’re just using this flexibility to retain teachers that they consider to be better, or at a higher risk of departing for a nearby district, or who are in positions that are particularly difficult to staff,” she said.

***

Academic improvements like those revealed in Biasi’s research would be welcome anywhere. But even among its Republican supporters, Act 10 was not principally sold as a policy to improve schools.

Instead, it was seen as a way of heading off fiscal calamity. Like many states during the Great Recession, Wisconsin faced a large revenue shortfall in early 2011. When he took office, Walker vowed to close the structural deficit, that local governments “don’t have anything to offer.” Either Act 10 would be approved by lawmakers, or thousands of state employees had to be laid off. 

Nearly a decade and a half later, the budgetary picture is much brighter, with the state . After a dip during the financial crisis, Wisconsin has finished in the black every year since, with its total debt recently falling to its lowest level since the Clinton presidency.

In particular, conservatives tout an employee pension fund that was fortified over the long term by the contribution requirements included in Act 10. According to from the nonprofit Equable Institute, the funding ratio for Wisconsin’s retirement programs exceeds 100%, ranking the sixth-best of any system in the country. The Pew Charitable Trusts has that the state effectively balances while also insulating retirees from inflation. 

Borsuk, a frequent critic of state Republicans who is married to a retired teacher, said the financial case for the law was “clear and compelling,” especially when contrasted with of neighboring Illinois, where state employee pension funds are ranked among the most over-extended in the nation. 

“It saves school districts a huge amount of money, and some of them were facing fairly dire circumstances in 2009 and 2010,” he argued. “Teachers had to pay more to support their benefits, but to be honest, they got used to that, and life went on.”

Yet many schools and districts aren’t as sanguine. Wisconsin’s annual spending per K–12 student, which was 11% higher than the national average when Act 10 was being debated, just a decade later. Between 2002 and 2020, the state’s K–12 spending grew at the third-slowest rate anywhere in the country. After adjusting for inflation, the median teacher’s take-home pay fell from $68,949 in 2011 to $59,250 in 2023, according to .

That trend resulted partially from an exodus of older teachers in the first few years after the law went into effect — that the exit rate rose from 5% to 9% in its immediate aftermath — and their replacement with lower-paid novices. Headcounts , but Kohlhaas described a period of heightened churn that saw schools’ relationships with families frayed as familiar and well-liked staffers left for other districts.

“The first couple of years after Act 10, the retirement parties were not celebrations,” she said. “The teachers, the secretaries, the nurses, the bus drivers, the paraprofessionals — usually the first faces that students see in the morning — were changing every year, or sometimes mid-year.”

***

In a job market that was quickly becoming much more fluid, union membership also began to lose its appeal. School staff were increasingly on the move between districts, and the benefits of belonging to an organization with a severely narrowed scope of action were not always clear.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the proportion of union members in Wisconsin’s workforce , from 14.2% to 7.4%, between 2010 and 2023 (since that figure includes workers from all sectors, the drop for government employees is likely much steeper). A from the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a right-leaning think tank, showed that the total number of unions holding annual recertification votes across the state declined from 540 in 2014 to 369 in 2018. 

The largest teachers’ union in the state, the Wisconsin Education Association Council, experienced of manpower and organizing heft. A conducted by a pair of researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that WEAC was forced to restructure and cut its staffing by about two-thirds. The retrenchment was made necessary by a freefall in the collection of dues, the payment of which was made voluntary by Act 10.

The loss of paid organizers could be offset, in part, by the efforts of teacher volunteers. But the union had no ready replacement for the millions of dollars in government relations funds that had suddenly evaporated; WEAC went from being one of the biggest lobbying forces in Madison to a second-tier player virtually overnight. 

Spillovers into elections were inevitable. In , Yale’s Biasi studied the effect of Act 10 on political donations during gubernatorial races in 2012 and 2014. Across all Wisconsin school districts, she calculated that the reform depressed contributions to the Democratic Party by 33.1 per 1,000 people, and by over 50 per 1,000 teachers. Scott Walker’s vote share increased by about 2 percentage points as a result. 

Unions “essentially stopped donating money to Democratic political campaigns after the reform because there was a huge drop in revenues coming in.” Biasi said. “Membership went down, and so they just became increasingly less influential actors post-Act 10.”

Gender politics were inflamed as well. Once collective bargaining was invalidated, individual teachers were left to negotiate their salaries by themselves — typically at the start of their work in a new school. But while these interactions occurred at the individual level, a significant pattern made itself felt over the course of several years: Male teachers were making more than female colleagues of similar age, effectiveness, and experience.

that, two years after the expiration of CBAs that had been in effect when Act 10 was signed, salaries for male staff were .4% higher than those for comparable female staff, a gap that grew to 1% after another three years. That estimate would be the equivalent of $540 per year, mostly attributable to women being over pay . While hardly lavish, the disparity could be seen as adding insult to the injury already sustained by .

***

Whether those wounds will be mended anytime soon is difficult to say. 

After the ruling issued in December, the fate of Act 10 will not be decided until an appeal is heard by the state Supreme Court. In all likelihood, much of 2025 will pass before a final ruling is delivered — most likely not until in April. The court’s liberal faction holds a 4-3 majority after Democrats to flip a Republican-held seat in 2023. This spring’s contest is also drawing national attention, with White House advisor Elon Musk contributing $1 million to support the Republican candidate.

Foes of the law were hopeful even before conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn announced in January that from hearing the case (Hagedorn had previously defended Act 10 in his capacity as Gov. Walker’s counsel). But some believe that even the wholesale rejection of the law wouldn’t restore to labor the primacy it formerly enjoyed.

Borsuk remarked that, with the expiration of federal pandemic aid last fall, local districts would be hard-pressed to grant generous new contracts to reinvigorated unions. Cities and towns have already had to dig deep to finance increases in school spending, of property tax hikes last fall to keep up with expenses. 

“School districts in Wisconsin are under an enormous amount of financial pressure in every part of the state,” he said. “There’ll be some change, but it’s not like the golden era can return; there isn’t much gold.”

But to Bazan, the prospect of an overturned Act 10 is too promising to dismiss. More than simple financial rewards, she said, she looked forward to regaining “a voice outside the classroom.” 

“A world without Act 10 is one where teachers get back the respect that we lost 14 years ago,” she said. “When we lost that seat at the table, we lost a lot of that respect as well.”

The nation’s second-largest teachers union was joined by its Maryland affiliate in the suit, filed in a Baltimore district court. It targets guidance from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights in a Feb. 14 “Dear Colleague” letter sent to school officials across the country.

threatens to deny federal funding to any school that considers race in admissions, hirings, financial aid, scholarships, discipline policy and “all other aspects of student, academic and campus life.” 

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that

has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” the letter says. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice or equity is illegal.”

The lawsuit argues that the order’s vague language implies that all schools should get rid of all programming related to race and is actually an attempt at rewriting civil rights law.

The letter says all educational institutions must “cease all efforts to circumvent prohibitions on the use of race” and stop reliance on third-party agencies that are being used to “circumvent prohibited uses of race.” Schools have until Feb. 28 to comply.

“The activities and programs that are described as unlawful include: classroom instruction

that confronts difficult and uncomfortable subjects and imparts critical thinking skills,” the lawsuit says. “Orientations and training that equip students with the communication skills and tools to navigate complex social dynamics … and support services and extracurricular activities.”

In the suit, the AFT argues that the Trump administration and the department misrepresented the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race in federally funded programs. The letter also leans on the 2023 Supreme Court decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard — which outlawed race in college admissions — and argues that the ruling applies more broadly.

“This Letter is an unlawful attempt by the Department to impose this administration’s particular views of how schools should operate as if it were the law,” the suit says.

Earlier this week, a different division of the Maryland district court granted a temporary restraining order in a separate lawsuit filed by the union. That one alleges that the department illegally gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency access to millions of private and sensitive records.

Utah teachers unions are reeling after a bill that would bar them from bargaining collectively and conducting operations on school property was forwarded to the governor’s desk Feb. 6.

Lawmakers who favor the measure, , say it was introduced to ensure transparency in public-sector unions and protect taxpayer resources, but educators say it will only make a job that’s already full of challenges more difficult.

While it doesn’t prevent employees from joining a union, the bill prohibits public agencies — which employ teachers, firefighters, police officers and county workers, among others — from “recognizing a labor organization as a bargaining agent” and “entering into collective bargaining contracts.” 

The bill’s state Senate co-sponsor, Republican Kirk Cullimore, argued during a that “unions are negotiating against what could be seen as the taxpayer sometimes.” At that same meeting, Republican state Sen. John Johnson said collective bargaining can undermine the public interest.

“Public-sector unions, unlike their private counterparts, negotiate with government officials over taxpayer-funded resources,” he said. “This dynamic can lead to decisions that prioritize union interest over the needs and welfare of the general populace.”

Other lawmakers who support HB267 said it ensures that unions operate with transparency and fairness.

But some opponents of the bill, including educators and legislators, charge it was created to retaliate against the Utah Education Association, which is The association is the state’s largest teachers union, with 18,000 members.

In a Jan. 25 , Republican state Sen. Todd Weiler called the measure a “knee-jerk reaction” to the legislature’s frustration with the union. 

“Because we can’t constitutionally pass a bill that just punishes the UEA, we’re including firefighters and other unions that didn’t necessarily draw the ire of the legislature,” Weiler said. “I don’t think our best policy directives are achieved if we’re trying to be vindictive or reactive to something.”

Like most of Utah’s teachers unions, Canyons Education Association in Salt Lake County doesn’t engage in collective bargaining. But President Krista Pippin said the chapter regularly negotiates with the district for improved policies and working conditions. 

“The school board administration didn’t support [the bill]. The superintendents association did not support it, because they all know the importance of advocacy work that is so essential to the profession,” Pippin said.

Lawmakers who support HB267 unions could still advocate for their interests under the bill, but opposing senators and Utah’s largest teachers union disagree.

State Senate Minority Leader Luz Escamilla said the measure will have a lot of unintended consequences.

“Our first responders, our teachers, are doing probably the most difficult jobs that we have right now,” Escamilla said. “Their ability to feel protected and have representation in conversations … they are not going to be able to do it individually with their management. That is just impossible.”

The Utah Education Association said that HB267 will weaken advocacy because it cuts off access to schools, making it harder for unions to do their work. 

The bill would bar unions from using public property for free. Members would have to pay to use their school space or rent another public location for union activity.

Jenny Graviet, president of Weber Education Association, said she would no longer be able to visit schools during lunch to collect teacher opinions or meet with district administrators to discuss union priorities.

“I do a lot in the evening, but when I talk to members, then I have to catch them during their lunchtime. But I’m still using the building,” Graviet said. “Which means I’m not going to be listening to voices.”

Under the bill, collective bargaining contracts that are in place by May would remain in force until they expire. The union in Weber, located north of Salt Lake City, is one of the few in Utah that does engage in collective bargaining to secure teacher contracts.

Now, the chapter will have to act quickly to finalize a multi-year contract with the district and get it ratified by the school board by the May deadline.

“We’re going to have to just cut off the ideas that we were hoping to do,” Graviet said. “For example, special education teachers had reached out to me, begging for more time because they’ve got to get caught up on their caseloads.”

Graviet said she’s already losing members because educators are getting misinformation about the bill, thinking it will outlaw teachers unions.

“If we have reduced membership, we cannot pay for things … in the end, you get a very weakened union,” she said. “When you have weakened locals, you have a weakened state who can’t work on legislation, who can’t advocate on our behalf. It kind of makes me sad.”

Indiana’s largest teachers union listed educator pay boosts, increased public school funding and consolidated training requirements among its top asks for the 2025 legislative session.

The Indiana State Teachers Association, which represents roughly 40,000 Hoosier educators, released a priority agenda on Tuesday — just weeks before state lawmakers are set to return to the Statehouse.

Jennifer Smith-Margraf, ISTA’s vice president, emphasized that “equitable funding for Indiana’s public schools” is of highest concern to the union.

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The 2025 session will see state legislators craft the state’s next biennial budget, about half of which has historically been earmarked for education.

In recent years, however, Indiana’s Republican-dominated legislature has opted to grow the state’s private school voucher system at a faster rate — a shift ISTA has long opposed.

“We’re here to speak for educators and every student whose future depends on a fair, safe and supportive learning environment,” Smith-Margraf said during a Tuesday news conference. “Hoosiers value strong public schools that provide equal opportunities for all students. Whether Black or white, Latino, Asian, Native (American) or newcomer, every Hoosier child deserves a quality education, and that starts with well-funded schools.”

Top priorities focus on funding increases

A two-page agenda released by ISTA officials breaks the union’s priorities down into five categories.

A section on funding emphasizes increased funding to “efficiently support” Indiana’s public schools. That includes greater funding for early childhood education, as well as additional dollars to ensure that schools can adequately afford students’ textbook costs.

In 2023, the General Assembly mandated K-12 schools to cover the cost of textbooks and a range of other curricular materials, but district officials have since expressed concerns that the state dollars they’ve received .

“What we’re asking (lawmakers) to do is to not just cover the textbook portion of it, but the fee portion of it, because we don’t believe that parents should be responsible for that, especially if they’re out working two, three and four jobs,” Smith-Margraf said.

The union is also advocating for Indiana’s compulsory school attendance age to drop to six, meaning kindergarten would become a requirement for Hoosier kids. Currently, Indiana students are not required to attend school until age seven, when first grade begins.

“Every child deserves a solid start,” Smith-Margraf said in reference to mandated kindergarten. “This funding will help make that possible.”

Another bundle of ISTA requests center around “fair compensation and benefits for educators.” The union wants to see teacher salaries aligned with “inflation-adjusted” benchmarks — which Smith-Margraf said would close the 22.8% pay gap with other professions. ISTA is also asking for all public school employees to receive 12 weeks of parental leave.

The showed the average teacher salary in Indiana during the last school year — up from $58,531 the year prior.

ISTA is not recommending a specific minimum salary, however. Baseline educator pay in the state currently sits at $40,000.

“We’re looking at how inflation has affected all of our different locals across the state, and we are looking for an increase in funding that will help make sure that we are paid competitively,” Smith-Margraf said. “We also know when we look at our surrounding states that we are not keeping up with salary increases with them, and we continue to lose folks across the border to Michigan, to Ohio, to Illinois and to Kentucky. And so we know we have work to do in looking at those metrics to make sure that our pay is competitive.”

“We have a critical educator shortage,” she continued. “We just have so many good people who are either retiring early or who are leaving the profession because they’re burnt out from many different things … we can all see from the numbers that there are too many of them leaving, and there are too many openings statewide. And that’s affecting those things that the legislature has talked about being really important: making sure that every kid can read by third grade, making sure that we have numeracy skills in fifth grade, making sure that we have folks around who are qualified to implement these new high school diplomas.”

‘Hopeful’ about new administration

Reduced training requirements via the creation of a five-year cycle for state-mandated professional development is among the union’s other priorities, too. That would “reduce redundancy and improve efficiency,” and affect trainings around suicide awareness and child abuse prevention, according to ISTA officials.

Smith-Margraf also noted teachers’ request to exclude veteran teachers from the state’s new — and controversial — literacy licensure requirement, allowing for the completion of an 80-hour science of reading course, instead.

After the requirement was approved by the General Assembly earlier this year, the “unfair” and “overwhelming” 80-hour training. Many pleaded for to be made available for teachers to complete the professional development course — or that it be removed as a requirement altogether.

The state’s education department has since adjusted and added training options. Some educators have already been exempted from the licensure requirements, as long as they aren’t teaching literacy to students past fifth grade.

Additionally included among ISTA’s priorities is:

The addition of 500 school counselors statewide to lower Indiana’s counselor-to-student ratio from 694:1 to 500:1, and to reduce non-counselor duties.

Establishing “clear reporting mechanisms” for violence against school staff, as well as penalties for non-compliant districts, especially in light of a in which thousands of Hoosier teachers and other school workers said they were hurt by students on the job during the last academic year.

Promotion of restorative justice programs over suspensions for non-violent offenses among students.
Giving teachers mandatory collective bargaining rights in “decisions impacting their safety and working conditions.”

Increasing funding for diversity scholarships and programs to recruit and retain minority educators.
Allowing the bargaining of schools’ reserve funds that exceed 25% of a district’s budget.

Smith-Margraf said many of the union’s priorities are aligned with those in Gov.-elect Mike Braun’s agenda. She noted that ISTA is actively meeting with the new Republican governor’s administration and other state officials ahead of the legislative session.

“Gov.-elect Braun and various members of leadership from both parties have talked about all of these things as being priorities, and so they’re priorities for them, and they’re priorities for us,” Smith-Margraf said. “We’re looking forward to working together with them as we go through the legislative session to figure out how we’re going to fund these and implement these different priorities. But since these are priorities for all of us and for our state, we believe that’s how it stays top of mind for everyone.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com.

“It was literally the best I’ve ever done,” he said, remembering how such moments fueled big ambitions for life after high school. “Half the fun was … getting to perform at some college that I even thought about going to — like Stanford or Berkeley.”

But less than two years later, the smile had faded — and so had the dreams. Just weeks into remote learning in the spring of 2020, Jason stopped attending class at American High School in Fremont. By the middle of the following year, he had descended into academic failure and depression. After months in which he had trouble getting out of bed, plagued by thoughts of suicide, he spent 10 days in a residential mental health facility.

“I felt so worthless,” he said. “I had no clue when things were going to go back to normal.”

As scholars debate the pandemic’s effect on lost learning and student well-being, Jason’s story is a reminder of the suffering millions of young people experienced when they were no longer tethered to school. Cut off from friends, teachers and extracurricular activities, students reeled from the effects of school closures. And the aftershocks continue: Into early 2022, were still seeing spikes in students admitted for eating disorders, depression and suicidal behavior. 

“Connection to one another is a core need for all of us. Having that stripped away is traumatizing,” said Karen Larsen, CEO of the Steinberg Institute, a Sacramento-based think tank focusing on mental health. She added that while some teens quickly bounced back, others “may never fully recover from what they have lived through these past few years.”  

The shutdown 

Another snapshot, also pre-pandemic: A laughing Jason is carried by a friend in student council. They’re wearing pajamas, part of a promotion for a school movie night.

Typical Jason, thought his mother, Carol Finuliar. She posted on Facebook: “My son does not have a self-conscious gene.”

He was popular — and gifted. In sixth grade, he got 1,150 on an SAT practice test, a competitive score even for students much older.

By sophomore year, he was active in student council and president of the speech and debate club at his school in the 33,000-student Fremont Unified district. When the pandemic shuttered classrooms in March 2020, he was a kid whose “identity was tied to school,” Carol said. 

Like most students in the Bay Area district, Jason faced lockdown with a mixture of shock and relief: He looked forward to an extended spring break. At first, he participated in Zoom classes and tried to have a “cool background” on his screen to stand out. 

But, as a teacher noted in comments later used to evaluate him for special education, and shared by his parents with The 74, Jason quickly disconnected from school. 

“He was always a happy student ready to help others in the class,” wrote Purvi Mehta, Jason’s 10th-grade life sciences instructor. “After March 13, when we started distance learning, he stopped responding to my emails and submitting work.”

Over time, Jason started thinking no one cared whether he made the effort. Rolling out of bed right before class, he grew self-conscious. 

“My hair is sticking up, and I’m wearing the same shirt for days on end,” he said. “I didn’t really feel like I was even in school. It felt like I was watching this movie on repeat, and I wasn’t necessarily enjoying this movie.”

Like schoolwork, Jason’s favorite outlet —  — went virtual. That, too, felt dispiriting. In junior high, he rehearsed speeches every day, starting a few weeks before a tournament, and practiced in front of friends and family.

A favorite selection was a one-man show in which he acted out a scene of a boy and girl running for class president, altering his voice to play each character.

But as competitions went remote, Jason found it too easy for students to cheat because they could read a “script” on screen and record their entries.

All of this ran counter to what he loved about speech: the thrill of delivering a well-prepared address before a live audience.

“That was the point of competition,” he said.

‘I thought he was being lazy’

Jason also lost motivation in other aspects of his life. By the summer of 2020, he had stopped taking care of Cookie, the family’s 3-year-old shih tzu, and doing other chores. Increasingly frustrated, Carol sent him to stay for a month with her brother in Sacramento. 

“I just thought he was being lazy,” she said. She and her husband felt “blindsided” by their son’s struggle. “I didn’t know that you don’t choose to be depressed. I didn’t understand that at all.”

In fact, she initially worried more about Jason’s younger sisters, Julia and Cherie, who are more reserved than their outgoing brother. Julia, now a senior at American, said she actually found school easier online and “way more relaxed.”

Jason, for his part, doesn’t remember a single argument that led to his ejection from the house — just that his mother “yelled at [him] for random stuff.” 

When he returned home in the fall and again refused to participate in remote classes, Carol made him get a job. 

That turned out to be a blessing.

Taking orders and making chalupas at Taco Bell funded his love of Nintendo Switch games like Minecraft and Mario Kart. Streaming games to Twitch, an interactive online platform, linked him to other players. In those moments, he felt less alone. 

And working fulfilled his need to interact with people in person. His mother remembers: The days he worked were the only times he got out of bed.

He also looked forward to sessions with Yvette Helmers, a school psychologist for the district and the only staff member to see him in person. At school, they talked about his anxiety. In psychology-speak, she said Jason experienced an “embedded level of maladaptive perfectionism.” Avoiding stressful situations, for fear he couldn’t control the outcome, only made them harder to face. 

“He felt like, ‘What’s wrong with me? Why can’t I manage this? I’m just supposed to go to school,’ ” she said. His response to closures, she added, was not atypical.

Jason’s decline from A and B sophomore to clinically depressed teen is a reminder that even students who had sailed through school and lived relatively comfortable, middle-class lives didn’t escape COVID’s gauntlet. But they also enjoy privileges many students do not. They typically have access to quality medical care and parents with the time and financial security to care for them. Scholars studying how prolonged continue to affect students say the damage to learning was far worse in high-poverty communities and for those who were already struggling.

By contrast, the median household income in Fremont is $142,000, roughly twice the statewide average. The district serves a majority Asian population, where many parents work in the tech sector for familiar brands like Apple and Tesla. In 2018, Meta’s Facebook expanded into a research and development hub not far from Jason’s high school. His father, Jesse, works as a computer programmer and networking engineer.

Growing up in a Filipino-American family, Jason lived with high expectations. Carol, a self-described “tiger mom,” enrolled him in SAT prep classes in elementary school and, the summer after his freshman year, placed him in a community college astronomy class taught by a former NASA engineer.

A doctor later suggested that maybe Carol was pushing him too hard. At the time, she was offended.

Such behavior is by no means unique. “Fremont is a very high-performing district,” Helmers said. “Students already have a high level of depression. People say, ‘They have everything — access to tutors, technology. Why would they not do well?’ ”

But beneath the high GPAs and extracurricular activities, she said, is often an unhealthy pattern of behavior — staying up past midnight and going to school sleep-deprived. By the time the pandemic began, she said, “they were already taxed.”

Thoughts of suicide

Midway through the school year, Jason’s mental state worsened. On his 17th birthday, Jan. 21, 2021, Carol made pancakes with whipped cream and berries — his favorite. But he didn’t get out of bed. 

Jason began to think — and dream — about suicide. In one recurring nightmare, he stepped off the end of a pier. By day, he thought of jumping off the Dumbarton Bridge, which connects Fremont to Palo Alto over San Francisco Bay. 

He told a doctor he had placed a metal coat hanger in the closet around his neck to see if it would support his weight. It didn’t.

The situation was serious enough that a psychiatrist referred him to Sunol Hills — a single-story house in a residential area of Fremont converted into a treatment facility for youth with behavioral health problems. In a recurring theme, his stay there wasn’t a dark period he’d like to forget, he said; rather, it filled a deep need for human contact. 

“It felt nice to be around people my age,” Jason said. “I felt understood.”

He had his own room and went to sleep to the sound of a passing train. During the day, patients took supervised walks through the neighborhood and played card games like .

As nourishing as the experience felt, Jason said he never forgot where he was. After the games, staff locked up the cards because some teens had a history of cutting themselves. 

There were no hangers in the closet.

‘Fighting against everything’

Meanwhile, Carol put aside hopes for college scholarships and honed her advocacy skills. A workers’ compensation attorney for the state, she took off as many as four days a week to “deal with the school and get him treatment.” 

By March 2021, roughly 43% of schools nationwide or offered a hybrid split between remote and in-person learning, according to the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a think tank that tracked school closures. Brown University economist Emily Oster’s of test data in several states confirms those with less access to in-person learning saw drops in proficiency as high as 20 percent. 

California were among the last to reopen, and Jason’s district finished out the 2020-21 school year online.

Carol attended regular school board meetings, fired off lengthy emails to administrators with links to about learning loss and pushed officials to evaluate Jason for special education services to alleviate his depression. She hoped to ease Jason back into school by getting him more time on tests and the ability to skip missed assignments.

In doing so, she got a glimpse of the bureaucratic morass so many parents with children in special education face. A “student study team” first met in January 2021 to take up the family’s request. But it wasn’t until May, just weeks before the end of the school year, that the team determined Jason was eligible for an individualized education program, or IEP — a plan that outlined the additional services and accommodations he would receive.

The report determined that “the situational factors of the pandemic cannot be ruled out as contributors to his mental health and academic performance.” 

Despite her activism, Carol felt helpless as neighboring districts gradually implemented hybrid schedules. 

She saw other families flee the district for private schools.

Some left the state.

Fremont parent Nely Rojas-Matteo helped organize to force an in-person option that spring, but soon moved with her family to Florida, where schools were open. 

“We were fighting against everything and everyone,” she said. 

But the situation in Fremont complicates a pandemic narrative that typically pits angry parents against reluctant educators. Rojas-Matteo said it was hard to get the district’s “risk-averse” families on board with reopening, even after said it was safe for students to return and warned of “grave mental health problems” if they didn’t. 

Nationally, Asian families were the most hesitant to resume in-person learning, a fact researchers attribute to of COVID caution and fears of linked to the virus’s origin in China. Even in Fremont, an Asian woman and her 10-year-old daughter were of “Go back to China” by a neighbor in October 2020. 

In an email to The 74, Fremont Superintendent C.J. Cammack insisted the district “centered the well-being of our students and staff at every turn in the decision-making process.”
 
For example, Fremont opened some classrooms for on-site learning in March 2021 and added “wellness centers” at high schools that fall.
 
But the in-person hubs turned out to be classrooms where students sat together while teachers remained virtual. Jason found the scene “chaotic” and asked not to return.
 
Helmers, the school psychologist, described the wellness centers as places where students can read, paint, drink tea or “sit and do nothing.” However, neither Jason nor his sister Julia said they knew anything about the center at their high school.

In the push to reopen, several California districts took advantage of from the state and reached agreements with unions for teachers to return. Not Fremont. By the end of that March, Cammack — appointed just before the 2020-21 school year — that talks with the union had broken down. 

The union the district for the failure to find “middle ground” and said teachers “carried the weight” of knowing that most parents weren’t even interested in returning to in-person learning before the end of the year.

Brannin Dorsey, current president of the 1,700-member Fremont Teachers Association, wasn’t in charge then.

And she’d rather not play “armchair quarterback and critique how it could have been done differently,” she told The 74. 

“I think the entire nation is thinking about that.”

‘Genuinely wanted … my diploma’

As the school year drew to a close, Jason grew so desperate to escape the daily pressure of signing on to Zoom that he was prepared to leave high school for good. In his IEP evaluation, he told educators he “saw no value” in remote learning. He took the high school equivalency exam — an option far more typical of students who have already dropped out. 

For Carol, the test offered a final “ticket out” of regular calls about Jason’s truancy. 

He passed the exam — remotely — despite panicky feelings over a proctor watching him on camera. A picture Carol took of him holding his certificate offers almost a reverse image of the happy kid in the snapshot from two years earlier. Standing in the kitchen, hair almost covering his eyes, he looks defeated.

“It was heartbreaking,” she said. “It was such an accomplishment, but he couldn’t celebrate or find anything to be proud of.”

Something was missing. For a student who had once been so immersed in school, he still felt driven to stay on a traditional path toward graduation. When American reopened in person last fall, his friends persuaded him to return for senior year.

“I genuinely wanted to get my diploma from that school,” he said. 

But he remained emotionally fragile. One teacher refused to give him more time on tests, as his IEP stipulated. He came home in tears the Thursday before Halloween and didn’t join friends going out in costume. By Monday, Carol told the school he wouldn’t be coming back. 

Post-high school, he worked at a grocery store — hours that Carol believes contributed to his healing — and spent spare time playing Pokémon with friends he made at a comic book shop near his old junior high. 

Carol didn’t let up on making sure he enrolled in school somewhere. But the thought of entering college only reminded him why he had left American. Jason worried professors wouldn’t make accommodations for him. During the summer, he said, he still needed “time to work through the trauma.”

A student accessibility office at Ohlone, a community college in Fremont, gave him the time and space to do that. Over the course of several visits to the campus, counselors broke down the admissions process into small steps and assured him that instructors would consider his needs. In late July, he registered for the fall semester. Carol said she “nearly cried.”

On Aug. 29, his father made him a breakfast burrito and Jason reported to class. 

In looking back at her son’s two-year ordeal, Carol remains bewildered by how quickly school closures knocked Jason off course. Despite her disappointment that he’s not attending a traditional university this fall, she has learned to focus on his happiness.

“We are all a little bit more aware of mental wellness,” she said. “It is so hard to accomplish anything when you’re depressed. The healing process is so slow, it’s painful.” 

Carol believes that Jason no longer feels like a failure, but still worries “one little obstacle will set him off.”

His progress, while visible, is far from linear. Relearning study habits hasn’t been easy.  Sometimes, he procrastinates on assignments and skips class.

Carol tells him to break up homework into one-hour increments and often sits with him in his room to get it done. He especially enjoys his Japanese class, and a county rehabilitation agency is helping him look for a new job.

For Jason, there’s solace in knowing he’s not alone. A friend in his early morning English class recently opened up about feelings of anxiety. 

“It’s kind of comforting knowing that he’s sharing with me what he’s going through,” he said.

When his own dark thoughts return, Jason remembers he’s “been through so much worse.” And he’s in a counseling program at Ohlone that will give him a better shot at transferring into highly competitive Berkeley — a goal he’s rekindled.

“There’s much more that I want to accomplish.”

Jonathan Chait has been writing about the fraught politics of education reform for over a decade.

The veteran political columnist for New York Magazine is a vigorous advocate for the pillars of liberal education reform: high academic standards, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers who aren’t meeting expectations. It was an outlook that largely fit with Democratic Party orthodoxy in the late 2000s and early 2010s, when Barack Obama and his allies in Congress successfully pushed many states to expand charter schools and adopt the Common Core standards. 

But as the years passed and the Obama era ticked down, his essays on K-12 schools took on a somewhat anxious tone. Resurgent teachers’ unions began exerting more influence at all levels of Democratic politics, including the effort to replace the federal No Child Left Behind Law. Then Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos arrived in Washington, further polarizing a debate around charters that had already begun to split the party. By 2018, Chait was openly to save his “forgotten education legacy.”

That was all before the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of American students suffered severe academic losses over months of prolonged school closures. Now, less than seven months from November’s midterm elections, Chait warns that Democrats around the country may lose the support of voters alienated by a faction that “doesn’t see educational achievement as something important.” 

Those views have earned Chait the enmity of some educators and activists, who have accused him of teachers over COVID-related school closures and intermittently called for him to “disclose” his wife’s career as an education consultant. In response, he has brought to intra-Left disputes that makes him one of the most compelling writers in liberal journalism.

In an interview with Kevin Mahnken, Chait offered a K-12 agenda for Democrats and explained why he believes that “the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Education has always been an issue that Democrats have won on, and there’s some polling evidence that they still do. But you’ve expressed the view that it could be a liability for them this fall, in part because parents may not see the party as reflecting their values or priorities. What are the party’s vulnerabilities here?

There are a few potential causes, some of which they have more control over than others. One simple one was that the [American] Rescue Plan gave an enormous amount of money to states, more than they needed to fill their budget holes, and some of them used that money to increase teacher pay. That included [governors] in Florida and other Republican-controlled states, who were able to boost teacher pay and kind of seize the political center without having to pay for it with taxes. So that’s given them a leg up.

Number two would be the pandemic, during which Republicans have had a more aggressive pro-opening stance than Democrats. The Democrats have really caught up, and I can’t think of many places where schools are being closed anymore, so I’m not really sure that will be a big issue. But it’s possible that Democrats have lost some credibility on that issue because they were behind Republicans in calling for reopening in some states. And this is — there are some fears that this has given an opening to the Right to split Democratic constituencies from teachers’ unions and basically say, “Look, the unions had this irrational, harmful position. Maybe you should be questioning some of the other things they say.” Now, some people on the Left are framing this as a kind of diabolical plot on the Right and not as a mistake the unions made, which is how I think we should view it. Regardless, there is that danger that some people who didn’t really question the unions before are questioning them now.

But the biggest ongoing risk factor here is the potential for schools to become laboratories to introduce lefty ideas that don’t have majority support and, in many cases, don’t have strong empirical support. The reason for that is that education schools and unions have both become incubators for a lot of pretty radical ideas that don’t always hold up to evidence or to public opinion. This is a little hard to quantify, but you see it in some places that are scaling back the use of standardized tests, scaling back tracking. It’s exaggerated by the Right to a huge degree, but there are places where — they’re not really teaching “critical race theory,” but they’re teaching historical interpretations that are aligned with certain left-wing challenges to liberalism. That’s happening a lot in elite private schools, but probably a little in public schools too.

Because schools are an area where these policy changes can be implemented without democratic approval, it opens the door to people being exposed to ideology that springs from the far Left. You know, you have pretty left-wing people with ideas for all kinds of areas of American life. would say, “We should abolish the police! We should abolish private insurance!” But they can’t do that because you actually need to pass those proposals through a legislative body; to make changes to schools, you don’t need to do that. That’s the reason why schools are an area where the Left can operationalize policies that can’t really pass democratic muster, and it makes education a danger zone for Democrats.

While these are all areas of exposure for the party, education is one of those issues that really doesn’t have a history of turning national elections. Is 2022 going to be different, or are your warnings here just an example of the ?

Well, we don’t know how widespread these pedagogical changes are. I don’t really know how you’d go about measuring that, and I don’t think anyone has tried. And the second question is, even if they’ve spread widely, how much would that affect voting behaviors? We don’t know that either. That’s why I’d depict this as a risk factor, but how big a risk is really hard to say.

You’ve been writing for close to a decade about the decline in support among Democrats for what has loosely been described as “education reform.” What’s your theory for how the party began its transition?

What’s interesting historically is that the Democrats’ biggest education reform initiative [Race to the Top] happened under very unusual circumstances. It was thrown into the stimulus that was passed just a few weeks into the Obama presidency, in the middle of a massive catastrophe and at the absolute peak of the administration’s political capital. The president threw into this giant measure, as a very small percentage of the overall cost, a grant-based reform to the states to incentivize them to implement education reform measures.

When I went back and looked at the coverage of it in the national press, there were just tiny little details. So there really wasn’t time for opponents to mobilize against it — even though, if this had been a standalone measure that was introduced even a few months later, they would have gone to the mat to defeat it and probably succeeded. I also think that it was much more successful than even its advocates thought at the time. Certainly its critics didn’t realize how effective this would be at leveraging reform at the state level; it drove a lot of changes, and it took a while for those critics to say, “Wait a second, what’s going on here?” 

The problem was that Obama was deeply committed to this agenda, and the [teachers’] unions really didn’t have the leverage to go to war with him. If the unions had gone to their members and said, “The president is killing us — we’re going to support a primary challenger in 2012,” they would have lost more members than they would have hurt him. That was too risky, so the way they played it was , as if Duncan was running around implementing this reform agenda without Obama knowing anything about it. And when Arne Duncan decided to leave and Obama appointed another reformer, they decided they were against him too. The whole time, they had to keep up this pretense that these guys were acting against Obama’s wishes because they recognized that openly opposing Obama would have hurt them with their own members.

But when Obama left the scene, it gave the unions another opportunity to reset the playing field. They were pretty active in the 2020 primaries, trying to nail down all the candidates on commitments to their agenda, and they had somewhat more success there. The candidates who most strongly opposed reform — Warren and Sanders, and to a lesser extent Bill de Blasio, who was sort of making that his lane — didn’t win, but Biden was still much closer to their position than Obama.

I notice that we skipped over the 2016 election there, as well as the Trump presidency. But it really felt like those five years were the major pivot point.

That’s right. As harmful as Obama was to union organizing efforts, Trump was extremely helpful. 

The main goal of reform critics is to bracket together liberal reform with conservative reform — charter schools and vouchers, for example. Even though these are really different policies, they want them to be called the same thing: privatization. They don’t want to distinguish between those two ideas, and it’s their most successful rhetorical gambit. The fact that Obama was for charters but against vouchers was very difficult for them, but Trump allowed them to frame the terms exactly the way they wanted. So they really made a lot of headway during the Trump era, though they’re now in a somewhat different position under Biden.

I was just starting to look at the Biden administration’s new regulations on the Charter Schools Program, but that looks like a win for opponents of reform. It seems like they’re attaching a ton of red tape to make sure it’s as difficult as possible to access those funds. 

We’ve been expanding choice and using standards-based accountability for a few decades now, and there isn’t a great deal of evidence that student learning has dramatically improved since the beginning of the Great Recession. Do you think, even before Trump, there was a sense among Democratic elites that the gains we’ve seen since the ’90s just haven’t been worth the investment made?

It depends on what’s being invested. Federal spending is still such a tiny amount compared with the overall amount spent on education. To the extent that Democratic elites are thinking about a costly investment, it might be the investment they feel they made in reforms that have caused them significant damage with their own allies. From the standpoint of someone in Democratic politics who’s not primarily interested in education, they’re saying, “We’ve put ourselves behind these reforms and taken enormous blowback from within our base, so we need to measure the benefits of this reform against the very high price we’ve paid to do it.” Even if you’re getting some pretty good results for kids, it might not necessarily cost out as a good bet from that perspective. 

I wrote last year, and I focused on charters because I think that’s the area where the research has been most impressive. Initially, education reform really covered a lot of ground, and you’re right that the results have been kind of tepid in some of those areas. It is really hard to steer public education when so much of it is controlled in this fragmented way, and to have a national reform change something at the local level is so difficult. I think charters have been the bright spot. 

Granted, their effects have been really concentrated in one cohort — basically, non-white kids in cities. But that’s the biggest crisis in American education! It’s not the affluent suburban schools, not the middle-class areas, though you want those to be better. The inability to give non-white kids in urban schools anything like a decent education is the real crisis, and that’s where charters have made a big impact. So having a lot of success in that narrow area actually means quite a bit.

I’d like to go into the time machine one more time. Eleven years ago, right after in Wisconsin, arguing against Scott Walker and the whole effort to limit the collective bargaining power of public sector unions.

I’ve completely forgotten this!

It’s basically a defense of the necessity of teachers’ unions, including some hopes that they can be partners for reform in the future. In the kicker, you write that they “can’t hold off reform forever. And, after all the worst aspects of the tenure system disappear, education reformers will discover that teachers are their best allies.” Do you still hold that view? And do you still see teachers’ unions as necessary?

That’s a great question. I certainly expressed an optimistic view of where unions would go politically that has not borne out. They’re probably moving in the opposite direction. I guess you’d chalk it up to misplaced optimism.

Are teachers’ unions necessary? Let me put it this way: If I were designing my ideal world, they would exist. But given their political orientation, and the fact that so many of them are determined to put their efforts into defending the worst aspects of the system rather than pushing for more constructive changes, I would say no, I don’t think they are necessary. 

I’ve started to think of them more like police unions, which I consider the main problem in criminal justice. Police unions have just devoted so much of their efforts to protecting the worst, most abusive cops. You can imagine a world where police unions were on the side of reform, realized that it’s in the interest of police to be trusted by the communities they protect, and weeded out bad actors so that good cops don’t get the blowback that’s caused when abusive and racist officers mistreat people. But that’s not how they behave. 

So I think that busting up the police unions is probably the straightest line to getting to better criminal justice — and the straightest line to better education reform probably involves running over the teachers’ unions, at minimum. I would like to have a world where we can have teachers’ unions and better education reform, but the unions have made that really hard.

I actually wonder if the political influence of police unions can be compared to that of teachers’ unions. As both national and local actors, it seems like the latter are much more influential in election outcomes.

I’m not sure that’s true. I’ve seen plenty of examples where a mayor is trying to reform the police, and the police will just go all-out to sink that candidate. Police unions really put the fear of God into mayors and city council candidates who are trying to rein them in. I’m not sure they have the same power at the state and national level, but for the most part, that’s not where the criminal justice policy they’re most interested in gets decided. So they’ve got a lot of power.

That said, teachers’ unions have a power on the Left to define the way political activists think about the issue. That’s probably a case where there’s not an analogue on the Right. Conservative ideas about criminal justice and racism have their own sources, and you don’t really have police unions steering the Right toward those points of view. Whereas I feel like the role of teachers’ unions in setting the party line — by which I mean the progressive movement rather than the Democratic Party, but to some extent both — is very powerful.

In a on education, you take issue with what you call a “false binary”: the idea that Democrats can either focus on improving schools or on improving the living conditions of students and families. I think many left-leaning critics of education reform would argue that Democrats can do both, but also that mitigating social disadvantage is going to make a much bigger impact on how kids learn than expanding high-quality charter schools, for instance. How do you respond to that?

I think there’s actually a lot of room for school improvement. To characterize it broadly, you’ve got these urban areas whose schools have performed very badly — kids have basically no chance to learn as much as kids in suburban schools — and charters are able to substantially or completely close that gap. They haven’t necessarily found ways to make the suburban schools better, but within the realm of improving education, charters have a significant effect.

I don’t really see anything to this argument, other than that education can only do so much. And that’s true. Education can only do so much, health care can only do so much, anti-poverty can only do so much, lead remediation can only do so much. Nothing is a panacea. But that’s just not a standard that we hold other policies to: Is this a panacea for all our problems? That’s a ridiculous standard. I know you’re trying to steel-man this and turn it into a serious idea, but I don’t think it is a serious idea. That’s not the way we do, or should, measure policy innovations.

Well, to carry the law enforcement comparison a step further, I don’t think advocates for criminal justice reform would argue that we just need to reduce poverty. There’s a definite sense that something affirmative has to change about the way our police operate.

That’s a very good analogy, and I wish I’d thought of that before. The disparities, whether it’s in education outcomes or incarceration, are going to be very hard to dent if you don’t get rid of poverty. But there are still disparities that we can address within the system itself. So we should do that! 

It’s just not a real excuse. No one makes that point about incarceration because they understand that it’s not relevant to the question of what kind of criminal justice system we want. It’s just not relevant.

Do you think there’s something about how the progressive movement views education — as a means of fighting social injustice and cultivating democratic values — that just doesn’t sync up with how most parents see it, and therefore creates a political problem?

I don’t actually think there is disagreement about those aspects of schools. There’s disagreement about the nature of civic values you want to teach: People on the Left want to teach liberal values, and people on the Right want to teach conservative values. People on the Right might have an image of the Pledge of Allegiance and teaching about the greatness of our country, and people on the Left might have ideas of teaching antiracism and creating a space where gay kids can come out if they don’t feel welcome at home.

But everyone really does see schools as a place to inculcate values. The real disagreement is about whether educational achievement is important. That’s where  you have a numerically tiny segment — much less than 10 percent, probably — of the country that doesn’t see educational achievement as something important. The absence of achievement as a priority is what makes them focus on the other stuff as representing the value of schools, because otherwise there’s no rationale for them to exist, and you’re just a straight-out libertarian who thinks we should get rid of public schools.

It certainly does seem like the public K-12 discourse now focuses way more on cultural politics than on academic performance. In particular, the state laws being passed about instruction on controversial subjects have just dominated the news for months. Do you think these bills are a valid response to politicized teaching, or is it more a political play by Republicans?

I genuinely don’t know. I’m almost certain that there’s more quote-unquote CRT in the classrooms now than there was five years ago. But I think it rose from a low level, and it’s really hard to say whether you’re talking about something that’s a serious concern. There are so many schools in this country that you could just cherry pick another new example every single day, and it still wouldn’t prove that there’s a real problem. 

You can see on Twitter that crazy teachers become national news stories now. My daughter had an absolute lunatic as a high school teacher who would use the class as a platform for all sorts of right-wing rants that were extremely racist and sexist. And this was not even a social studies class. This is a big country, and there’s a lot of crazy people out there.

But the legislative solutions just don’t work. I don’t think you can design a law that can effectively rule out bad teaching practices without also ruling out necessary teaching practices. So having state legislatures try to steer this ship is really not going to work.

When I spoke recently with the historian Daryl Scott, he essentially argued that the anti-CRT perspective in these debates wasn’t even especially right-wing — that it was more about explicitly teaching patriotic history in a way that would have been familiar to postwar liberals. I wonder if you’d agree with that.

There are definitely areas where the Left position has moved so far left that it’s opened up space for conservatives to advocate what used to be a center-left position. But I also think there are some aspects of the debate where that is not true. He’s capturing a piece of the reality, but not the whole of it.

What should the Democratic Party’s agenda on education be right now?

They should be encouraging more charter schools in urban areas, because they work. They’ve got an effective policy tool that can help people who need help very badly. They should be expanding that tool rather than scaling it back.

They should also be doing what Michelle Rhee did in D.C. They should say, “We are going to massively increase the base level of teacher pay in this country.” And they should go further than that, doubling or tripling aggregate teacher pay and treating teachers like professionals. Which means subjecting them to assessments that can include quantitative and non-quantitative judgments, and replacing them if they’re ineffective. I can’t really point to evidence that says that would work, but I don’t think it’s really been tried at scale. 

D.C.’s reforms worked, but all you can really do by increasing teacher pay is attract more and better teaching candidates from other cities. What a city can’t do is change the kind of person who goes into teaching in the first place. You can’t make it so that everyone in college knows that if you go into teaching, you’re going to make a really good living. College students know that if you go into teaching, compared with other things you could do, you’re making a financial sacrifice. If that were not the case, you’d have different people entering the profession and a bigger pool of talent. That’s not something I can improve with experimental evidence because it needs to be done at a societal level. But if I were in charge of the world, that’s what I’d do. 

But according to public opinion data released Monday, Democrats and Republicans are actually internally divided by significant generation gaps in their attitudes toward certain aspects of education. Younger Democrats are much more likely to favor school choice than their older counterparts, pollsters found, while Millennial and Generation Z Republicans look more favorably on teachers’ unions than Baby Boomers.

The polling was administered in March by the research group SocialSphere on behalf of Murmuration, a reform-oriented nonprofit. Roughly seven months ahead of a midterm election cycle that could shake up control of Congress and state governments, its findings strongly suggest that voters of all backgrounds see public education as a crucial issue after two years of COVID-related tumult. 

SocialSphere founder John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics and a former advisor to the Biden presidential campaign, said that he and his colleagues had detected significant, generational cleavages within the parties across a host of focus groups conducted with respondents from around the country.

“The new generations of voters, who have already played a significant role in the 2018 and 2020 elections, leave their partisanship at home when they go to vote and engage with schools,” Della Volpe said. “The old framework that has governed education politics really is not relevant in 2022.”

With a sample of nearly 7,000 registered voters, the research combines and weights a single national poll with additional surveys in nine states and Washington, D.C. Several — California, Texas, Tennessee, Colorado, and Georgia — are holding gubernatorial elections this fall, while the nation’s capital will choose its mayor. 

shows President Biden’s party facing tough odds in November, with discontentment around the economy and foreign affairs driving voters toward a typical midterm flip; those trends were crystallized in last year’s surprising breakthrough by Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race after focusing intensely on pandemic school closures and the backlash against equity politics in schools. 

But when asked which party’s education values aligned most closely with their own, just 34 percent of SocialSphere respondents chose the GOP, compared with 44 percent who sided with Democrats. Another 22 percent said they were unsure. In state-level polls, Democrats were favored on education among voters in California (where they led on the issue by a 19-point margin), Colorado (17 points), Georgia (seven points), New Jersey (26 points), Texas (10 points), and Washington, D.C. (66 points); Republicans held an advantage in Louisiana and Missouri (both by five-point margins), while responses were within the margin of error in both Indiana and Tennessee.

Perhaps more notable than the clash between the parties are the fissures within each. The controversy over critical race theory in K-12 classrooms has acted as the main dividing line between left and right during the Biden era, with outraged parents in multiple states launching dozens of recall efforts against school board members over the teaching of controversial topics like race, gender, and sexuality. Some political experts see the emergence of anti-CRT activist groups like Moms for Liberty as reflecting a populist wave that could both deliver Republican victories this fall and change curricula in classrooms going forward.

Surprisingly, the issue may split Republicans more on the basis of age than it unites them in ideology. Asked whether school districts should teach “all aspects of American history,” including the legacy of slavery and racism, 59 percent of Millennial and Gen Z Republicans said yes, while 28 percent favored banning such lessons. Among Republicans in the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, just 44 percent supported teaching about these subjects, while 46 percent said the practice should be banned if it made white students uncomfortable. The resulting gap between the party’s oldest and youngest voters stands at 33 percentage points. 

Those findings jibe with those of other national polls, which have generally shown widespread support for teaching about the persistence of racism throughout U.S. history. , however, that responses to the issue can vary greatly depending on how questions are phrased.

Teachers’ unions, typically viewed with suspicion on the right, engendered similarly disparate responses. Millennial and Gen Z Republicans gave local unions a favorability rating of plus-15 percent (44 percent favorable versus 29 percent unfavorable), while members of Generation X rated them minus-10 (32 percent favorable versus 42 percent unfavorable.) But those over the age of 57, falling into the Baby Boom and Silent Generations, were much more hostile (25 percent favorable versus 55 percent unfavorable.) While political perceptions can change as young people come to be more aligned with the positions of their favored political party, Della Volpe argued that “nothing in this data” suggests that the views of younger Republican voters will come to resemble those of their parents and grandparents.

Age gaps were apparent on the left as well. The idea of school choice — defined for respondents by SocialSphere as “​​the freedom to choose the educational environment that serves [one’s] children best, regardless of financial ability or home address” — received support from 61 percent of the youngest Democratic voters, but just 38 percent of the oldest. Overall, Democrats above the age of 57 viewed school choice slightly unfavorably (38 percent support versus 44 percent opposition). By contrast, the national Democratic Party has spent much of the last decade distancing itself from alternatives to traditional public schools, which it largely embraced under Presidents Clinton and Obama. Democratic officials at the state and local levels have attempted to curb the growth of charter schools, while the party’s 2020 platform called for “measures to increase accountability” from the sector.

Della Volpe, who recently about the political emergence of Generation Z, said that his past surveys of people in their 20s revealed a cohort that prizes choice and agency above all.

“We see a group that is less supportive of school choice, and they’re aging out of the electorate,” he said. “They’re being replaced by others who value choice, specifically when it comes to their children.”

Pandemic fallout

More broadly, the SocialSphere data indicates that voters across partisan, racial, and gender demographics count public education among the most important political issues of the day. Fifty-two percent of all respondents rated K-12 schools as “very important,” with majorities in all but three state-level surveys saying likewise. That represents a larger share than those rating immigration, climate change, and the protection of traditional values very important, though somewhat lower than inflation (73 percent), the economy (73 percent), health care (67 percent), crime (61 percent), and foreign policy (56 percent). 

Somewhat larger shares of African Americans and Hispanics characterized education as very important (60 percent and 58 percent, respectively) than whites (49 percent). But when asked whether Americans “need to do more as a nation” to ensure that all children receive a high-quality education, the margins among members of different racial groups were virtually identical. Some 60 percent of Republicans agreed with that sentiment, along with 72 percent of Democrats.

The poll’s results also indicate significant, though possibly divergent, support for changes to the U.S. education system. Fifty-three percent of voters, and 55 percent of parents of school-aged children, agreed that the post-COVID recovery was “the time to begin working on the big ideas and changes necessary to improve education,” while 38 percent of voters said they’d prefer to “get back to normal.” But while Democrats agreed on the need for new reforms by a 60-31 split, only a slight plurality of Republicans did (49-43). 

Emma Bloomberg, the founder of Murmuration, said in an interview that the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic were likely behind the public’s willingness to embrace new approaches. Dissatisfaction with schools’ performance, especially with regard to lengthy closures, may have convinced parents that extensive new measures would need to be taken to help their children catch up from two years of lost learning.

“I can’t think what else it could have been, other than this pandemic offering a window into those classrooms — there’s nothing like actually seeing how your kids are or aren’t learning — and then the bungled reopening by so many districts…has just left families feeling like the school system didn’t prioritize their children,” said Bloomberg.

Bloomberg said she was heartened to see bipartisan willingness to expend greater national resources in pursuit of a better K-12 system, adding that she hoped younger partisans would vote their beliefs in the coming months. The eldest daughter of one of America’s most prominent advocates for school choice, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, she said that Millennials’ relative detachment from political orthodoxy could make them “more reasonable and attuned to the impacts of policies on communities” — if they actually made it to the ballot box.

“Young voters get a lot of hype, and it’s always ‘Will they or won’t they turn out?’ This moment really does feel like…an opportunity to engage younger generations. If they believe deeply in the importance of a high-functioning public education system, that gives me hope not only for this cycle, but certainly for the cycles ahead.”

Because the district’s nearly 28,000 students have been out of class for 15 days, the school day will be extended by 42 minutes starting April 11, right after spring break, and two weeks will be added to the school year to make up for missed instructional time mandated by state law. 

“This is a historic day,” union President Greta Callahan said Friday outside district headquarters. “We know that we have historic wins.”

Hours earlier, Superintendent Ed Graff and school board Chair Kim Ellison spoke at a news conference. “The days have run together into months and weekends,” Graff said. “I am just grateful we are able to get back together in the end.”

While the union’s teacher and educational support professionals are covered by separate contracts, the two chapters walked out together March 8. Chief among their joint demands was a pay increase for most paraprofessionals to a minimum of $35,000 a year, as well as a 20% hike in teacher pay in the contract’s first year and 5% in the second. 

But after district administrators balked at using finite stimulus funds to boost the permanent pay scale, union leaders asked for bonuses instead. Each teacher will receive $4,000 in April, a 2% raise in the contract’s first year and 3% in its second. 

Members of the union’s Educational Support Professionals chapter will receive raises, plus $6,000 in bonuses spread over two years, with an additional $1,000 for those with 10 or more years on the job. Because of temporary increases in hours available until the end of the two-year contract in 2023, a “significant number” will be able to reach $35,000 a year, union leaders say. 

Shaun Laden, president of the support professionals union, said the increased hours and bonuses would allow the district to tap the stimulus funds. District leaders have not yet said how much the settlement will cost or whether they will use recovery money to pay for it.      

District leaders project a $21.5 million shortfall for the 2022-23 fiscal year — a gap that would be much larger had they not earmarked half of the $260 million in federal pandemic recovery aid to avoid laying off teachers and closing school buildings after years of precipitous enrollment declines.

Researchers and school finance experts have warned that using one-time infusions of federal funds in this way will create a steep “fiscal cliff” in 2024, when the money runs out. In the days before the settlement, Ellison warned that increasing pay for paraprofessionals would necessitate $10 million in cuts elsewhere. 

In neighboring St. Paul Public Schools, which is facing similar tensions over enrollment losses, board members recently voted to close and consolidate a number of schools and have budgeted the lion’s share of their stimulus funds for addressing student learning. 

District leaders declined to answer questions before the union vote on the contract, which took place over the weekend, but posted to their website. They have not yet said whether the one-time spending outlined in the contract will come from the remaining stimulus funding and how much will now be diverted from other uses. 

According to the , in the 2020-21 school year, the district employed some 2,155 teachers and almost 1,000 instructional aides. Leaders of the union say they have 4,500 members. 

Tensions roiled the community during the strike. For months, the district and unions traded proposals to protect teachers of color from ongoing, disproportionate vulnerability to layoffs and changes in assignments. The two sides had differed on how broad to make any exception to “last in, first out” seniority rules. 

Because of a deadline in state law, the week before the strike began, the district announced that some 50 teachers of color were among those who had been excessed — lost their current postings — because of possible layoffs for the 2022-23 school year. The following day, Southwest Voices, the union withdrew its layoff-protection proposal. 

In the days leading up to the settlement announcement, a number of teachers of color and the local chapter of the NAACP , and the union’s offer regarding the protections was reintroduced. 

The provision approved along with the new contract protects teachers from “underrepresented populations” but does not apply to as many as 50 teachers just excessed for the 2022-23 academic year. Callahan called the new protections “nation-leading.”

While community support for the strikers ran high, many families expressed concern that students had very little in-person instruction between March 2020 and the start of the current academic year and again lost classroom time in January, when the Omicron variant surged. 

The Minneapolis teacher strike has extended into its third week, reportedly with some progress in negotiations. The district made what it described as its “” offer to settle the question of pay for education support employees. There was no new information on just how far apart the two sides are on teacher issues.

While bargaining continued, the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers took direct action to pressure the school board to accede to their demands. On March 13, union activists marched on the homes of all nine school board members. One in particular, Josh Pauly, got special attention.

Marchers trailed behind a truck with two large speakers. They chanted, “.”

Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum, look out Pauly here we come!

— Heather Paulson (@Heather37727075)

They posed for photos in front of his home …

… stapled flyers to telephone poles that read “Where is Josh Pauly?”

… and asked, “If you see him, share information online and tag @MNWorkersUnited.”

Pauly resigned from the school board two days later.

noted the resignation and remarked, “This comes after community marched on his house on Sunday!”

, “On Sunday I did a very loud and very annoying bit in front of Josh Pauly’s house and today he resigned from the school board. Draw your own conclusions.”

Pauly did not mention the protests in an , saying he resigned, in part, due to differences with district leaders. 

“I don’t feel like I am in a place where I can work towards rebuilding trust with the current MPS leadership,” he said.

Pauly did not respond to Union Report’s request for an interview.

Pauly had also caused some controversy by taking a job with a tutoring company that has a contract with the district. The district stated that Pauly’s new job did not represent a conflict of interest.

The Minneapolis Federation of Teachers endorsed Pauly for school board when he ran in 2018, citing his three years as a teacher and the fact that he was “.” In fact, the union endorsed seven of the nine Minneapolis school board members. Those endorsements and friendly attitudes toward the district’s unions, though, haven’t shielded the board members from protesters appearing on their doorsteps.

Rallies and protests are standard items in the union toolkit. Showing up in force at a school board member’s home is an attempt at intimidation, and it’s patently unfair. If protesters were to line up in front of the homes of the union president and her executive board, I doubt they would accept it with grace and understanding.

Minneapolis school board members are paid $20,000 a year. They don’t need such aggravation from people making more than three times as much.

To mark 24 months since schools shut down because of COVID-19, The 74 spoke with parents, educators, researchers and students across the U.S. We are running some of these interviews in their entirety to give complete accounts of where we’ve been and where some think we’re going. 

Michael Mulgrew is president of the United Federation of Teachers, which became aware of COVID-19 before many parents and educators had even heard of it. The union repeatedly clashed with former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio over safety precautions and reopening schedules, but union leaders also took charge of some mitigation measures, such as testing school ventilation systems. In January, he spoke with The 74 about how a lack of planning for remote learning led to a “mad scramble” to provide services, the union’s efforts to offer comfort during the darkest, earliest days of the pandemic, and what he’s learned since.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: Feb. 14 will be 700 days since most schools began closing. That number even took us by surprise. What’s your initial reaction to it?

Michael Mulgrew: It feels like 7,000 days.

What was the moment you realized everything changed? What were you doing before and after?

We had started tracking this during the Christmas holidays. We had some teachers who were in China then. We had them quarantine when they came back, and then we really started tracking it and talking to our own infectious disease doctors as it kept building. It then became like a fast track, like every day was like five days, and the pressure kept building. I didn’t realize I was so involved with so many fast decisions and changing information. I didn’t realize it until March 16th, the day after the New York City Public Schools closed. I was in my car driving around the city and I was shocked that the streets were empty. That’s when I realized it wasn’t science fiction. 

What decisions do you remember having to make in the first weeks after schools closed?

The hardest thing was, how do we set up? How do we get the equipment that teachers need? How do we get them trained? We hadn’t done anything. There was a small pilot of what you would call a virtual learning program involving, literally, like 15 teachers. That was it for the entire city.

It was a mad scramble to get everyone trained quickly on how to get their classrooms up, then going through how do we teach parents how to help their kids. It was non-stop. It was hundreds of decisions every day trying to figure things out, moving people from place to place. Even though everything was closed, we were still moving stuff like laptops and iPads, trying to get them to our members’ houses so they had something to work off. 

What has been the darkest part of the pandemic for you?

We were one of the last school systems to close, even though we’re in New York City, which at that point was ground zero. We had to fight to close the school system. It was a big, ugly fight, especially that last week. We set up a virtual executive board to meet every Monday night, so we could all keep our communications up, and I had to read the names of our members who passed away. I had to make the phone calls to those families. We lost a lot of members, and I always think that if we could have closed earlier, how many more would we not have lost.

What do you feel hopeful about now?

The people. I saw people who were absolutely afraid still figure out a way to get up and get moving. There was no book on how you do remote learning. There will be now.

I watched teachers start mailing supplies to each one of their children’s houses and figuring out different ways to get the children engaged. I did town halls with parents. I started in the middle of April [2020], and the parents were crying with me, telling me, “I always knew that my child’s teacher cared about my kids, but I never realized they really loved them.” The teachers were saying the same things: “I’ve gotten to know my students’ entire family and they’re beautiful people.”

That’s the stuff that gives me hope, because when people had to connect, they started connecting in those ways. They really helped each other get through what was probably the darkest time of this pandemic

What’s one thing you think no one has understood about you or about unions since the beginning of school closures? 

The whole time it was about protecting the school and that means us and the children. We had to fight to close our schools, and then we had to fight to open our schools. We never said no. We always said we wanted to open the schools, but at that point, we had learned that we’re not gonna listen to doctors unless they’re independent. Thankfully, we were able to get access to that, and our doctors designed a plan for us to open schools safely.

We all know pandemic information changes all the time. We should have opened on time last year, but the mayor didn’t understand that it was real for us. We were going to do it the right way, because we weren’t going to subject ourselves or our students and their families to any more danger for going to school. The last thing we wanted was people sick because they went to school or putting their lives or their families’ or their school communities’ lives in jeopardy. Basically, 35 percent of the parents felt comfortable with their child going to school. This is over a year ago. Thankfully it’s much much higher than that now.

Every school in New York City ended up with a group of four or five teachers who actually set their school up, put up the signs, did all the training of the other teachers on how to do certain things — how to wear their masks, how to fit them properly, how to direct the children, what to do when they’re eating and how you do your spacing, and getting kids in and out and on and off the bus. There were over 3,000 volunteers who did that and trained their schools to do it. Nobody talks about that stuff. There was no pay involved. It’s not in our contract. It was just: If we want to be safe and we want our schools open, we have to do this. And they went and did it.

Ventilation. Oh my God. We actually were able to fix ventilation. I’ll never forget last winter. The buildings were built after the last pandemic. They have these really big windows. They actually were built that way so you could open them to keep ventilation in case there was another pandemic. That literally became part of the code for schools after the pandemic of 1918. For a period of time, the teachers kept opening up the windows the whole way and it’s like 7 degrees out. So we had to produce this video for all the teachers about, “No, you don’t have to do that. You only have to open like half the windows about 3 inches each and you’ll be fine.” This year, one of the first cold days in January, I was in a school, and one of the teachers had the windows open a large way. And I’m looking at the windows and she touched my arm, and she goes, “I know I don’t have to open it that much, but my team teacher for 20 years died of COVID a year ago.” I said, “You keep that window open anyway you want.”

Describe a moment when you felt you were getting conflicting guidance or instructions. What did you end up doing and why?

The opening of this year was probably the most frustrating because once again everyone thinks we’re getting through the pandemic. We go from 6 feet to 3 feet [social distancing]. We opened the schools last year. We had no vaccines. We went back into work; we did what we needed to do. Now, the vaccines are available. Everybody wants schools back open. We agree. And then all of a sudden, the New York City Department of Health starts issuing new guidance. Three feet is no longer 3 feet. Three feet basically becomes . And then, you fight, you fight, you fight.

Even in the beginning, I’ll never forget having meetings where the city doctors are telling us, “It’s gonna be nothing but a cold …and the schools could remain open. The kids are gonna be fine. They’re not gonna get it and we’ll create herd immunity and we’ll be safer faster than everybody else.” Literally, that’s the conversation we were having with the mayor and his doctors. And our doctors are saying to us the absolute opposite. They said, “Listen, children might not be getting it at this point in time, but this is a serious virus, and people are gonna die.”

That was probably the big conflict, that first one.

Do we understand what works in virtual learning better than we did two years ago? Why or why not?

We never said it was going to be the be-all-and-end-all. It was always a way for us to keep in contact, to keep our students engaged. Through that March and the end of that school year, it really was more of a lifeline between teachers and students and their families. Remember, nobody was leaving their house or apartment. There was no such thing as a school day at that point. Teachers would be teaching at 6:00 in the morning. Teachers would be teaching at 8:00 at night. Teaching was all over the place. They did whatever they needed to do to reach the parents, especially the younger children when the parent could be there.

The following year is where you learn a little bit more about it. For 65 percent of those students, the parents said their child is going to work remotely. We never should have had each teacher [figuring out remote learning] on their own. We thought it should have been a more centralized process, deploying the best practices we know. But the department still felt — because I gotta be honest, they just didn’t want to manage it — it’s better off to just let every teacher in school do their own thing.

We’ve learned a lot. One of the things we found out is the majority of students really do regress in a remote setting, which we completely expected. There was a small percentage of students who actually thrived in remote. So to me as a teacher, that says there’s something there we have to look at, because if these students who were not doing well when they were going to school — and there’s all sorts of different reasons for that — all of a sudden did really well in a remote setting, we have to look at this going into the future.

But this is not an online college course. That’s what everyone always thought: “We’ll put the camera in the middle of the classroom.” It does not work in K-12 education.

How has this crisis changed your union? 

It’s made us stronger. We communicate better than we ever did before. We’re using technology in ways that it probably would have taken us a decade to get to. We started doing these virtual town hall things. There was no such thing in any union before. It was always, “You’re a union, you have to come in person.” There were 17,000 and 23,000 and 28,000, then over 30,000 people — there would just be massive town halls with the members. It really was comforting to all of us. That was comforting to me as their president.

We don’t have all the answers, and let’s just all be there for each other and we’re doing the best we can. That’s when we we decided — it was probably in the middle of May after we first shut down — we’re going to do three things: We want to open our schools again, we’ll never listen to any doctors on anyone’s payroll again, and we’ll fight like hell to make sure that we’re doing what the independent doctors tell us to do. 

Did you ever feel like quitting or think of quitting?

Of course I did, and I think most people in this profession thought of quitting throughout this thing. There were some really, really tough times. The only way out of this is to go through it, and I don’t think any of us expected it to go on this long.

In the beginning, we lost close to 100 members, and then over the next year, we did go over 100. That was really difficult, because everyone thinks, “What else could I have done?” Thankfully, we were able to really use the power of our union to try to get the families support. Remember, we also represent over 3,000 private sector nurses who work in hospitals. We set up a food delivery service for them because no one was doing anything for them at that point. At downtown NYU Langone [hospital] and Staten Island University Hospital South — you would go there and they would get their food and you would see what they were going through. They’re like, “We gotta be in [the hospital]. We gotta do what we have to do for these patients.” I saw the same thing happening with the teachers when I’m on Zooms with them and on town halls. [They would say], “This is tough. No one prepared us for this, but could you help me get [something for my students]? This will help. There’s a child I can’t reach because he lives with his grandmother.” That’s what fueled me.

What would you tell yourself 700 days ago, if you could go back in time, given what we know now? 

Trust the members at all times, the members and the parents. Just keep standing up and fight, fight, fight as hard as hell on everything you know once you get the information. You need to just keep your head down and keep swinging. Like in any crisis, there’ve been some really good people who have stepped up in all sorts of ways. Have faith in people who dedicate their lives to either health care or education. Anytime there’s a problem or I’m in a foxhole, I want to be with those people. 

The plaintiffs in the first two cases, Troesch v. Chicago Teachers Union and Fischer v. Murphy in New Jersey, said that so-called “escape periods” — short windows of time in which employees can opt out of paying union dues — are allowing states to avoid compliance with the court’s 2018 decision in . 

In Janus, the court ruled that the fees violate non-union members’ First Amendment rights because that money subsidizes political and policy positions.

The court on Monday also denied a request to hear a case from a Chicago teacher, , who argues he should receive a refund for the union fees he paid. Ocol has the picket line in the past two Chicago teacher strikes in 2016 and 2019.

A Supreme Court ruling on the post-Janus lawsuits would have impacted nearly 5 million members of public sector unions, according to the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has been fighting what it calls “schemes” to get around the 2018 ruling. For example, 17 states limit withdrawal from the union to official escape periods, which can range from 10 to 30 days. If educators miss that opt-out window, school districts continue withdrawing the union dues from their paychecks for another year. Some of the laws were passed shortly after the Janus decision. But the Foundation and its clients haven’t been successful, and the appellate courts for the 3rd, 7th, 9th and 10th circuits have upheld restrictions on when employees can opt out of paying fees.

“We are disappointed the Supreme Court did not take this opportunity to clarify this important issue,” Patrick Semmens, the Foundation’s vice president, said in a statement. “We believe the Janus ruling does not permit public sector employees’ constitutional rights to be limited to an arbitrary union-created ‘escape period,’ and that eventually the High Court will need to step in to prevent Janus from being undermined.”

The Foundation continues to press that point. In late October, the Foundation asked the court to hear several that don’t involve teachers. The anti-union attorneys argue some new employees are never informed about their right to refuse to pay dues under the Janus decision.

According to Colin Sharkey, executive director of the non-union Association of American Educators, thousands of teachers contact the organization each year for help on how to exit their union.

“Numerous states made it even harder to leave the union in the aftermath of the Janus decision, greatly limiting the will of many public employees,” he said.

But unions, which have seen declines in membership, maintain that they negotiate on behalf of all employees, whether or not they want to be part of a union. 

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the court’s denial “exposed these frivolous cases for what they are: a cynical attempt by well-funded, anti-union radicals to flood the zone with countless post-Janus lawsuits to drain unions of resources.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 96 percent of school districts are now offering full-time, in-person instruction. Stakeholders, including the two national teachers unions, are on board with vaccine mandates for school employees. So after more than a year of battling, everyone should be relieved that those major issues have been resolved.

Not a chance.

It turns out to be relatively easy to issue a vaccine mandate and an entirely different matter to implement and enforce it. In many places, the mandate is accompanied by bargaining, cajoling, exemptions, injunctions and jurisdictional complications — all of which make it virtually certain that your children are spending at least part of their school day indoors with an unvaccinated adult.

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You might find this alarming because the whole point of school closures was to eliminate exposure of children to COVID-19 in classrooms. Or you might not find it so alarming, because that “staff-to-staff transmission is more common than transmission from students to staff, staff to student or student to student.”

Even President Joe Biden might wonder why a vaccine mandate issued from the White House has had so little effect. The president directed that any employer with more than 100 employees would have to require vaccines or weekly testing. This would seem to affect most school districts in the United States. But as Nat Malkus points out in The Hill, the mandate because of the jurisdictional limits of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The option of weekly testing is also a poor substitute for vaccination, since an employee could have already spread the virus before receiving a positive test result.

In New York City, a federal judge issued a . An appeals court lifted the injunction, but lawyers representing teachers who brought the suit said they will petition the U.S. Supreme Court. The city’s Department of Education reports that about 29,000 school employees have yet to upload proof of vaccination.

Over at Chalkbeat, Matt Barnum reports, “Even in the strictest districts, the timeline allows teachers to before being fully vaccinated.”

With all the media attention on vaccine mandates, one reality has been largely overlooked.

“In fact, it doesn’t appear that any large school district started this year with a full vaccine mandate in place, though the vaccine was available beginning last spring and teachers often were provided with early access to it,” wrote Barnum.

Research by the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education shows that the majority of school districts do not require teachers to be vaccinated. Even so, they are now being given priority access to booster shots.

“That is a major unresolved problem,” said CRPE Director Robin Lake. “Why do we keep giving teachers priority access to the vaccine without requiring they all do their part to protect kids?”

No one thinks these policy choices are easy, but they should adhere to some sort of internal logic. If vaccinated employees are an absolute requirement for schools to operate in person, then there should be no exceptions. The unvaccinated should not be in contact with students or other staffers. What to do with them instead is a matter for each school district (and probably union) to decide.

If, on the other hand, we are going to allow unvaccinated staffers to interact with students and other employees, then why were schools closed for 18 months?

But despite their resignations, the Chicago Public Schools continued to withdraw dues from their paychecks on the union’s behalf. The union argues the deduction was legal because the educators signed a contract in 2017 agreeing to the dues.

Troesch and Nkemdi sued, and now are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take their case. Troesch v. Chicago Teachers Union asks whether signing a membership contract sufficiently authorizes unions to continue collecting the money. The plaintiffs argue that states are denying employees’ rights with so-called “escape periods” — windows of time, ranging from 10 to 30 days, in which employees can opt out.

If employees miss that window — which National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation attorney William Messenger described as a “mandatory subscription service” — unions continue to collect the dues.

“Employees subject to these restrictions are effectively prohibited from exercising their First Amendment right to stop paying for union speech for 335–55 days each year, if not longer,” the plaintiffs argue in their petition to the court.

The Supreme Court won’t decide until October whether to hear the Troesch case, but if it does, the outcome would have an impact on 4.7 million members of public-sector unions in 17 states that have escape periods, Messenger said.

The case is the latest to argue that states and unions are skirting the court’s 2018 decision in . In a major blow to unions, the court ruled in that case that collecting union, or “agency,” fees from “nonconsenting” public-sector employees is unconstitutional because the money subsidizes unions’ political and policy positions. The justices said unions can’t just presume that employees have waived those rights. Some predicted the Janus decision would seriously cripple the unions’ political power, but their over school reopenings shows that hasn’t been the case.

Making it ‘harder to resign’ 

Referring to the escape periods, the Troesch petition says, “The Court should not allow the fundamental speech rights it recognized in Janus to be hamstrung in this way.” But so far, the lower courts haven’t agreed. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit in Troesch, as well as the 3rd, 9th and 10th circuits, have upheld the restrictions. Messenger is also asking the court to hear , in which two teachers from New Jersey’s Ocean Township School District are challenging that state’s 10-day escape period. The 3rd Circuit ruled against those teachers in January.

An escape period is considered a “maintenance of membership” strategy, explained Michael Hartney, a political science professor at Boston College.

“The union has an incentive to try to make it harder to resign,” he said. “If people were dropping out like flies every year, they wouldn’t be able to budget.”

But he added that striking down these union security provisions is less important to right-to-work advocates than overturning a giving unions exclusive bargaining rights. In other words, even employees who don’t join unions in states with collective bargaining laws still can’t negotiate their own salary and benefits, Hartney said.

Unions argue that they negotiate on behalf of all teachers and other school staff, regardless of membership

Attorneys general weigh in

Republican attorneys general in 16 states filed with the court in late July, urging the justices to hear the Troesch case.

“Across the country, public-sector unions have resisted Janus’s instructions and devised new ways to compel state employees to subsidize union speech,” they wrote. “When constitutional rights are at stake, this Court requires ‘clear and compelling’ evidence of waiver precisely to protect individuals from unwittingly relinquishing their fundamental freedoms.”

Union leaders argue the precedent is in their favor.

“The union feels that this lawsuit was correctly dismissed by the federal trial and appellate courts, and believes those rulings will stand,” said Ronnie Reese, a spokesman for the Chicago Teachers Union. The union and the district have until Sept. 27 to argue why the court shouldn’t hear the case. Defendants in the New Jersey case have the same deadline.

The plaintiffs in both states argue that even though they signed union contracts before the Janus decision, the court’s ruling in that case made the dues deductions unconstitutional.

But in the 3rd Circuit ruling, Judge Patty Shwartz wrote, “That is the risk inherent in all contracts; they limit the parties’ ability to take advantage of what may happen over the period in which the contract is in effect.”

Hartney said Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the Janus opinion, might want to hear the case because he has “voiced skepticism that union security provisions outweigh First Amendment violations.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts is known for preferring incremental changes in constitutional law and might not want to take up the issue because the Janus decision was “such a shot across the bow.”

But unions, like most large bureaucratic organizations, are like oil tankers. They don’t turn on a dime, and it’s clear that many affiliates were unprepared for the shift in direction, or were unwilling to go along for the ride.

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According to a survey by the , as of Aug. 13, only 13 of the 100 largest school districts in the nation required teachers to be vaccinated, .

“The unions are in a difficult position,” . “The national unions’ hesitance to embrace vaccine mandates has hurt their reputation on a national scale and angered parents fearing for their children’s safety, yet they are reluctant to do anything that might hamper the local unions’ bargaining power.”

That’s it in a nutshell, and it has been obvious from the earliest days of the pandemic. Back in May 2020, the California Teachers Association was already issuing bargaining advisories to its local affiliates, recommending that they “.”

While parents and students were struggling mightily with online learning, the union was telling its locals, “Now is the time to secure language improvements that we have wanted for some time.”

If I understand the current positions of the national teachers unions correctly, they support universal mask mandates and strongly urge vaccination of both staff and eligible students, with mandatory testing for the unvaccinated. Who should be exempted from those requirements is a matter to be left to local collective bargaining.

These are perfectly defensible positions. The problem is the “collective” part. It doesn’t take much digging to discover that there is substantial, and organized, resistance among union members for every one of these measures.

I’ve previously reported on the opposition to vaccine mandates by the presidents of the Hawaii State Teachers Association and the Spokane Education Association in Washington. There are more.

Teamsters Local 174, which represents school bus drivers in the Seattle school district, says .

“When you actually talk to the people this is affecting, it’s not political. It’s fear-based. They just feel really strongly about this. So the way to get around that isn’t to threaten somebody’s job, that’s not going to help,” said Jamie Fleming, a spokesperson for Teamsters Local 174.

The Michigan Education Association announced its support for testing and masks but . “Our members are vaccinated over 90 percent right now, according to our records, and so we believe a mandate right now is not necessary because so many of our educators were so proactive,” said Vice President Chandra Madaferri.

On her first day in office, announced her plan to “pursue options to mandate vaccines for school employees or require weekly testing in the absence of vaccines.”

“We support universal mask wearing as part of a layered mitigation strategy that also includes robust COVID testing, contact tracing, proper ventilation and other strategies recommended by public health experts,” . “We also support the governor’s move to require regular COVID testing for school staff who are not yet vaccinated. It’s critical that educators continue to have a voice in the implementation of vaccine requirements and other COVID policies at the local level.”

The statement noticeably omitted support for a vaccine requirement.

New York City public schools will require all education employees to be vaccinated, but also fell well short of full-throated support.

“While the city is asserting its legal authority to establish this mandate, there are many implementation details, including provisions for medical exceptions, that by law must be negotiated with the UFT and other unions, and if necessary, resolved by arbitration,” he said.

Even if Mulgrew climbs aboard, he faces pushback from some of his own members, . Similar qualms .

There may be reluctance to vaccinate, but surely union member support for masking is universal? Not so.

In Billings, Montana, the school superintendent issued a memo , stating that failure to comply would be “unacceptable insubordination and the employee will be disciplined.”

The Billings Education Association called the memo “,” saying it had a memorandum of agreement with the district that encouraged masks but did not mandate them.

Over in Trenton, New Jersey, the “” Facebook group organized a rally to protest both mask and vaccine mandates.

So what happens when these issues reach collective bargaining? In many places, things will go smoothly. Unions and districts will reach agreements that reflect the needs and desires of all parties involved. In other places, it will be a long and costly battle.

Whenever you issue a blanket requirement for anything, you have to account for exceptions. COVID vaccinations are no different.

“We are calling for districts and employers to work directly with educators and their unions to address the complexities of vaccinations and accommodations that will need to be made for educators,” .

There is no reason to think that establishing those accommodations will be easy or that they will be consistently applied. The Washington Education Association said questions about exemptions are “.”

In Connecticut, the governor issued a vaccine mandate and requires all school employees to submit proof of vaccination. He allowed school administrators to evaluate exemptions on a case-by-case basis.

“Those are the kinds of words that, frankly, pay your lawyers’ mortgages,” , an attorney who works with school districts on vaccine policy.

The problem is that collective bargaining by school employees unions is ill-suited to determine the most effective public health policies. It is indisputable that some people cannot or should not receive the COVID vaccine. Should those people, along with any other employees who are exempted through negotiations, be allowed in close indoor contact with unvaccinated children and other employees?

No matter your answer to that question, there will be many places where unvaccinated employees will return to in-person work, even with a vaccine mandate. So it will come down to each individual’s level of risk tolerance, for both themselves and their children. No memorandum of agreement will override it.