The 2023 teachers’ strike in Oakland, California, surprised and divided parents as it focused on demands related to racial reparations and environmental justice, rather than just pay. Matt Feeney in UnHerd explains how the strike highlighted the teaching union’s shift towards progressive activism, and raised concerns among fellow parents about the future direction of the school system.
In 2019, my children’s teachers went on strike for higher pay, and I supported it, which was a bit of a surprise. I’d always thought public-sector unions a mockery of the idea of organised labour — not workers bargaining for a larger share of the value they create, but bureaucrats extracting rents from taxpayers, via politicians. On top of this, I’d trained to be an English teacher. I saw up close the pathetic scholarship and inane doctrines that inform teacher education in American universities. To me, unionised teachers were a convergence of these two unhealthy forces.
But then my wife and I had kids in the expensive California city of Oakland, and we sent them to our local government school (‘public’ school, in the US). I saw that, rather than applying dubious theories from their training — ‘child-centred’ teaching inspired by John Dewey, Paulo Freire’s ‘pedagogy of the oppressed’ — teachers were mainly using age-old methods to convey mandated curriculum to restless children. And I learned that many of them, especially younger teachers without spouses, or divorced teachers raising children of their own, were sharing bedrooms in group houses to cut down on living expenses, commuting huge distances from more affordable cities, or even working second jobs.
