Talk of strikes often centers on salaries for teachers, but strikes are not all about money. They are about preparation time, classroom size, and supplies. They are about creating schools where all students can learn, schools with adequate security and support services.

When planning periods keep disappearing as class sizes balloon, and teachers must buy their own supplies for even basic activities, classroom learning suffers. When aides are laid off or simply not rehired and one counselor is expected to help 1,000 students, classroom learning suffers. When no dean has time to track down the chronically absent, and kids skip class with no fear of being effectively disciplined, learning suffers — or does not occur at all.

Those kids getting high in friends’ basements while playing video games need interventions desperately, but understaffed districts can reach the point where teachers simply mark “A” for absent and get on with their day. Once a class reaches forty students, the teacher may even be relieved that “Jude” and his friends walked away from school to an empty house nearby to play Grand Theft Auto #19. This is the dark side of the Serenity Prayer line “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” 

But striking teachers can try to find the courage and fortitude required to get those kids back into the classroom. They can protest those missing deans and truant officers. If teachers don’t pick up the torch and publicly protest missing aides, engorged classes, and overworked support staff, then school districts have little or no incentive to fix the problems their choices have created.

The people who enter teaching? Almost all of them care more about the individual kids in their classroom than the size of their paycheck. If that were not true, those people would never have chosen to teach in the first place.

I am asking my nonteacher readers to support their local, striking teachers — and ask others to support striking teachers. Issues on the table often don’t make the news, such as shortages of classroom aides. One aide can make all the difference in an early elementary school classroom with 29 students. Without an aide, instruction grinds to a halt as the latest extreme bathroom emergency steals minutes away from kids who do not have extra educational minutes to spare. Without an aide, winter instruction in colder climates must regularly halt an extra 10 or more minutes early before recess and at the end of the day to sort outerwear, then get all those little gloves onto confused fingers before finding lost hats and scarves, putting those hats securely on heads and finally zipping up coats.

Eduhonesty: Please, nonteacher readers, trust the teachers. They are not walking the streets carrying signs because they are greedy. I have worked with multiple young colleagues who regularly headed to their restaurant or movie theater jobs after the school day ended. Anyone who has to carry trays of margaritas to pay the bills should be making a higher wage for his or her classroom work. Most importantly, those contracts the unions negotiate cover many aspects of daily teaching life, all of them relevant to learning for students.

P.S. Regarding anti-union bias: When did we reach the stage where the idea of safe working conditions, sick leave, insurance, a retirement pension, and the right to bargain for higher wages somehow became resented luxuries, rather than rights? As Americans across this country work 29 hours per week, sometimes at two jobs for a total of 58 hours, with their hours carefully held below the line where they might receive benefits, we should be supporting workers. State minimums vary and mostly exceed the federal minimum wage but it’s worth pausing to reflect upon the fact that the federal minimum for 2019 remains $7.25 per hour and only $2.13 for tipped employees. TWO DOLLARS AND THIRTEEN CENTS? The government is going to tax tipped employees on the assumption that they received at least 12% in tips, too. I have taught many children whose parents had two and even three jobs, all while receiving no benefits at all. That’s part of working in a poor district in the United States and it carries its own challenges; it’s tough to convince Johnny to do his homework when both parents work odd hours during evenings and weekends, while leaving thirteen-year-old Johnny in charge of his younger siblings, who may not be doing their own homework either.

The United States of America can do better. The United States of America should do better. But honestly, unions may be the last and only resort for the working poor. The anti-unionism that has infected this country? That anti-unionism benefits corporations and school boards, not teachers and other workers. It most emphatically does not benefit U.S. students.