Progressive California claims to love public school kids. Union influence proves that’s a lie
It’s a big story that barely got the attention it deserves.
The Natomas Unified School District is opening doors next week to families who want their pre-kindergarten to sixth grade kids back in classrooms.
Natomas Superintendent Chris Evans and his labor partners with the Natomas Teachers Association worked last weekend to get a deal done. It was the kind of deal that often eludes bigger districts with fraught labor relations, such as the Sacramento City Unified School District and similarly dysfunctional districts in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.
“There were plenty of tense moments,” Evans said. “But we worked in the best interests of everyone. We said, ‘Let’s figure this out.’
“It’s been the most positive collaboration with my teachers union in nine years.”
As the parent of students in the Sacramento City Unified School District, I am so jealous of what Natomas is doing.
The deal is an example of what can happen when people do the right thing under difficult circumstances. The shared objective in Natomas was connecting students with their classmates and teachers after 11 terrible months of COVID-19 lock downs. This deal – though it’s not perfect and will only mean short hours of live instruction two or three days a week to start – is still an antidote to the insidious inequities playing out in our public schools.
Private schools and parochial schools have largely stayed open throughout California while public schools shut down. This is because teachers at private and parochial schools are overwhelmingly non-union. The rights of students in private schools – like the children of Gov. Gavin Newsom – are not subject to negotiation. Private school kids have largely avoided the lost learning, isolation, depression and anxiety that my children – and thousands of other public school children – have faced week after crushing week.
What can we deduce from this unequal treatment of California children according to their wealth and means? It means that if there is one group of people in this pandemic who are without a powerful constituency to champion their interests, it’s public school children in California.
The rights of public school kids are subject to negotiation and Newsom’s requirement of labor unions to sign off on any deal to re-open schools. For those of us with kids at SCUSD, a district afflicted with toxic local labor relations, we know what that means: Good luck.
Teacher unions or kids?
The interests of our kids are secondary to the economic and political interests of the unions representing their teachers. When deals are cut involving public school kids, the end results are too often at the expense of kids. Remember the threatened Sacramento teacher strike of 2017? When teacher salary increases were supposed to come with benefits for kids? The salary increases happened, the benefits for kids didn’t. It was an omen of things to come. The fortunes of the teachers union have improved. The fortunes of the kids haven’t.
In California, almost 55% of public school kids are Latino. More than 10% are Asian and 5.3% percent are Black. Only 22% of public school kids in California are white.
These numbers are even more pronounced in the Sacramento City Unified School District, where nearly 40% of students are Latino, nearly 20% are Asian and nearly 14% are Black. White students make up less than 20% of the more than 40,000 SCUSD students.
Meanwhile, unions representing a constituency of public school teachers in California who are roughly 60% white have far more to say than parents or politicians about the educational experiences of mostly brown, Black and Asian kids.
Earlier this month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed tearfully told reporters that she was heartbroken to “see these (public school) kids and these families to know what they’ve been going through. Kids are struggling in our city and we all know it.”
Breed made her comments at a press conference where she was flanked by public school kids holding signs that read, “I miss my friends.” She pledged her support for a lawsuit filed by San Francisco’s city attorney against the San Francisco Board of Education and the San Francisco Unified School District. The suit alleges the school board and district’s reopening plan is “woefully inadequate and doesn’t meet the basic requirements set by the state,” including “to offer classroom-based instruction whenever possible.”
When I heard about the suit I thought, “Wow! Power to the people! I wish they would do that in Sacramento.” But then reality set in.
Last week, Breed threw in the towel on getting San Francisco public school kids into classes this academic year.
“Definitely not this school year,” Breed said during a live-stream press conference.
Why? As the San Jose Mercury News wrote: “(Breed) later added that to get the kids back onto campus before the school year ends is ‘not realistic,’ because teachers have expressed concern over their safety should they return before being vaccinated.”
Dennis Herrera, San Francisco’s city attorney, is suing the district on a lot of fronts, including not having a plan to bring kids back to school. But the lack of a plan is not what is keeping kids out of school in San Francisco.
As Steve Sugarman, a UC Berkeley law professor, told the San Francisco Chronicle: “(A plan) is still contingent on the union agreeing to send the teachers back in.”
Teacher vaccinations the key
San Francisco teachers unions insisted on an agreement that says all teachers need to be vaccinated if San Francisco County remains in the red tier of coronavirus risk, the second most restrictive in California’s rating system that regulates reopening segments of the state. Only when San Francisco reaches the orange tier, which is less restrictive, would teachers return to classes without vaccinations.
That is why Breed gave up on the current academic year, despite her tears and despite a high rate of suicides among San Francisco public school kids.
Politics and the teachers unions win, the kids lose and the private schools – pandemic or no pandemic – remain in business.
Money buys the rights of California students today and if that is what you call progressive, count me out.
The situation at SCUSD and other large districts such as Los Angeles Unified seems just as bleak because the unions are trying to set the standards on when school can resume while California politicians – such as Breed and Newsom – remain afraid of the California Teachers Association’s money.
This is why the Natomas deal for its 14 schools and a little more than 11,000 students is so remarkable.
After a few days of orientation next week, in-person learning would begin the first week of March with two different cohorts of pre-K to second grade kids on campus every other day and on Zooming/Googling into their same classrooms on the other days.
Children between the third and sixth grades would return the week of March 8 and follow similar guidelines. The secondary kids, between sixth and 12th grades, can’t return to campus until Sacramento County’s COVID-19 numbers improve.
Like most of California, COVID-19 is still considered to be widespread in Sacramento County. But if daily new cases and positive test rates keep dropping, and the county’s color-coded COVID-19 rating from the state moves from purple to red, then the older kids at Natomas can return for a short schedule of in-person learning. The caveat here is that the bigger kids can’t go back until Sacramento County stays red for five consecutive days.
Families will be given the option to return or to remain in distance learning and only about 43% of Natomas parents have said they want to return to in-person learning, according to district questionnaires, Evans said
“But I think that number will increase,” he added.
Is the Natomas agreement ideal? No. Shorter hours of live instruction two or three days a week is not ideal. But it’s better than no instruction at all and it makes allowance for extraordinary circumstances.
Even more significant, the deal was cut before all Natomas teachers were vaccinated. Parents won’t be forced to return to school, which is fair given that a majority have said they are not ready yet to do so..
Allowances will be made for more senior teachers with health concerns to continue distance learning and parents should be allowed to get over their fears and be convinced that schools are safe.
Parents and community leaders at SCUSD should demand a similar deal for our kids, one where the interests of the children come first.
It won’t be easy because three people who run the Sacramento City Teachers Association – John Borsos, Nikki Milevsky and David Fisher – wouldn’t even agree to teach our kids to state standards when SCUSD was the only local district that failed to reach a distance learning plan last fall. When SCTA says they put the kids first, do you believe them? Did the kids come first in the threatened 2017 strike? Did they come first last fall when SCTA refused to make a distance learning deal?
These three labor leaders seem to be setting themselves up as the arbiters of whether SCUSD kids go back to school, as opposed to state health officials, county health officials, the Centers for Disease Control and other health experts who say schools can safely reopen before all teachers are vaccinated.
How long are we going to allow our children’s rights to be hijacked by politics?
