Stay in school
A city teachers strike would do untold damage
As the Pittsburgh Public Schools struggled academically and financially over the years, there has been at least one constant: Day in and day out, the schools have been open and teachers have been in their classrooms. Teachers have not struck the district since the 1970s, a remarkable 40-year run that should help propel the parties past current roadblocks to a new contract.
A two-year contract extension lapsed June 30, and teachers last week authorized a walkout. With so much academic progress to make, however, the district cannot afford a disruption in the school year. With so much riding on the district’s improvement, the city cannot afford a break in instruction or a breach of labor peace.
A strike would be a black mark against Pittsburgh as it vies with 19 other cities for Amazon’s second headquarters. Amazon, like any innovative company, has workforce needs that can be met only if local public schools are high functioning.
In recent years, the union and district have maintained labor peace despite multiple rounds of school closings and consolidations, financial problems, leadership turnover at the district and union, changes in the teacher evaluation process, various reports criticizing the district’s academic performance and various turnaround initiatives. Both sides deserve credit for staying the course. Their record of resilience is a reason to believe they can come to terms once again.
One of the main stumbling blocks now is how to address teacher churn. The district wants the right to hold teachers in positions for three years, while the union wants to keep the current practice allowing many of its members the opportunity to transfer annually. The district says the change is necessary to provide stability to high-need schools.
Teacher churn is an issue confronting many urban districts, and it’s been been a cause of concern here for years. In 2010, the education group A+ Schools released a study showing that the most-vulnerable schools retained 54 percent of their teachers during a 2½year period, while schools classified as least vulnerable kept 66 percent of their teachers during the same period. Aware of the problem, the union and district undertook a collaborative approach to addressing it.
In the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers contract for the five-year period ending June 30, 2015, then extended for two years, union members had an opportunity to earn stipends for taking on especially challenging roles. Those roles included learning environment specialists, who agreed to work in highneed schools for three years; instructional teacher leaders for secondary schools, who agreed to a three-year role helping other teachers be the best they can be; and Promise Readiness Corps teachers, who agreed to work with the same group of students for at least two years. The contract also called for turnaround teachers to work in low-performing classrooms for three years, but the district said this position has not been utilized.
If these sorts of efforts failed to pan out or did not yield enough progress, the union and district should be able to find more common ground. They’re well into the conversation about churn by this point, not taking up a contentious issue from scratch.
The parties also have disagreements about compensation for earlychildhood teachers and athletic coaches and about teacher scheduling. If they had a history of work stoppages, the city might resign itself to another one now. But the district and union have a much different history — one of working things out.