unions

On August 26, the Seattle Education Association, which represents over 5900 education professionals throughout the city of Seattle, voted with 91% of members in favor to authorize a strike. The authorization vote followed hundreds of hours of negotiations spread over more than 20 bargaining sessions between Seattle Public Schools and SEA, after which SPS agreed to only around 12% of SEA’s demands. Workers will go on strike on September 2, the intended first day of the upcoming school year, if an agreement is not reached by then.

At the heart of SEA’s proposals is the understanding that education professionals’ working conditions are inextricably linked to students’ learning environments and outcomes. SEA’s core demands are:

Protect Special Education. SEA is fighting the district’s proposal to combine programs and cut support staffing, which would push even more onto educators already carrying too much.

Fair pay, especially for paraprofessionals and office professionals. Many SPS paraprofessionals earn below what HUD calls “very low income” for Seattle. One job should be enough!

Curb pressurization. Smaller class sizes, smaller case loads, and an end to the constant addition of duties beyond teaching.

These demands, if met, will mean students receive the effective instruction they need, while enabling staff to focus on education rather than making ends meet or doing paperwork.

Beyond these core demands, SEA is fighting for stronger protections for immigrants and LGBTQ+ members, professional autonomy, commitments around AI, and more.

Funding issues being used to push austerity agenda on Seattle schools

The district, headed up by brand-new Sup. Ben Shuldiner, is using the budget deficit as a pretext to drastically cut professional autonomy in the workplace and make sweeping austerity-based changes to the structure of schools. The budget deficit is real: Washington’s state funding for public education has declined from 52% to 43.2%, while structural obstacles like an insufficient funding formula and a state cap on how much local levies can collect have contributed to a budget deficit of about $75-87 million.

Inadequate state funding alone did not cause the deficit, though. The district’s management of its $1.3 billion annual budget has also contributed to the problem, as evidenced by administrative bloat and opaque “other” category in the budget, amont other questionable financial practices. The new superintendent himself is paid more than $400,000 annually.

A few years ago, the Seattle School Board tried to close 20 schools in response to the budget deficit and faced significant backlash. This is why they hired Shuldiner: he did the same cost-cutting in the Lansing, Michigan school district. His proposals are bad, but he was brought in by the board specifically to implement an austerity agenda. Austerity imposed for the sake of reducing the deficit will not address the issues of living wages for paraprofessionals and office workers, hard caps on class sizes/case loads, more support for multi-language learners and special education students, and respect for professional autonomy.

No matter which party is in office, federal ed policies hurt students and educators

The chasm between student needs and government policies and funding is emblematic of larger trends occurring across the nation. In the 2000s, the Bush administration used the punitive No Child Left Behind policy to defund already under-resourced schools. The 2009 Race to the Top grant program under Obama offered a carrot to promote slightly different neoliberal education reforms; in 2015, the Obama administration replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which dramatically reduced the role of the federal government in public education, further exacerbating inequities between states. The second Trump administration’s Educational Choice for Children Act, passed last July, financially incentivizes parents to donate and send their children to private schools, siphoning billions away from public schools, while moving to dismantle the Dept. of Education.

These decades of austerity and neoliberal education reform under the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations have pushed our public education system to the brink and forced education unions to respond. In February 2018, roughly 20,000 members of American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association chapters across all 55 school districts in West Virginia staged a historic strike that lasted nearly two weeks and secured significant wins for workers and students. The strike in West Virginia sparked a wave of similar struggles in states throughout the nation over the following year. More recently, SEA staged a strike in 2022, and this past February, educators in San Francisco went on strike for the first time in fifty years. In authorizing this most recent strike, SEA joins the continuing resurgence of educators using the power of their labor to fight for the welfare of their students.

We applaud and stand in solidarity with the members of SEA as they campaign for their students. That being said, that education professionals in this country are forced to go on strike at all, while the government endlessly funds ICE and the military, is an indictment of the profit-driven capitalist system we live under. A worker-run socialist government would necessarily recognize the importance of, and accordingly provide for, a robust public education system. Under socialism, education professionals would have the resources they need to dedicate all their time and energy to giving their students the education they deserve.