Portland students will return to school Monday morning after a month-long teachers’ strike driven by financially untenable demands and the willingness of activist educators to subject families to pandemic-shutdown déjà vu.
While the walkout started on November 1, the Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) and Portland Public Schools (PPS) began negotiations in October with a massive divide between their respective opening positions. The union insisted that the district had the money to expand the annual education budget by $200 million. The district maintained that the money, which the union claimed could be drawn from recently appropriated state funds, just wasn’t there.
The union, which represents over 4,000 teachers, as of early November wanted to increase salaries by 8.5 percent this year, 5.5 percent next year, and 5 percent the following year. Members also asked for a significant cost-of-living adjustment to mitigate high housing costs.
While the district said the money was not available, it stretched its checkbook in exchange for cuts to offer a 4.5 percent salary increase this year, 3 percent next year, and 3 percent in the third year.
Still, PAT was not satisfied. The union insisted the district was hiding a secret store of cash. It took a visit from the state’s top financial officer to convince the union otherwise, according to local reports.
To debunk the false narrative, “the governor basically had to send the chief financial officer of the state to the mediation and spent three days persuading PAT that the money wasn’t there,” PPS parent Kim McGair, who has a high-school senior, told National Review.
“And that was while our kids were still out of school,” she said. “Why didn’t that happen in January?”
The district ultimately agreed to a sizable cost-of-living increase. The holdout for the last week was over a “really silly conversation about whether parents should be involved in classroom-level decisions,” according to PPS parent Eric Happel.
PAT wanted parents to serve on a committee that would decide whether additional students could be added to a classroom after it reached capacity. The union said the idea was not appropriate or legal.
Happel has a high-school senior and freshman who’ve attended PPS since kindergarten. He disagreed with the school board’s Covid response, which he said kowtowed to the union at the expense of kids. However, the school board has been “forthright, honest, and doing the right thing” on the strike, he said.
The union was first angry that school-board members, who are unpaid volunteers, wouldn’t attend bargaining sessions, McGair said. To appease the union, the board started attending. But last week, PAT claimed the board reneged on a pledge to rubber stamp a new version of a deal after bargaining went late into the night of November 20.
That night, activists vandalized the car of board chairman Gary Holland, who is black. They also spray-painted the property of board member Julia Brim-Edwards.
Jamie Partridge, a labor organizer for the Portland Democratic Socialists of America, revealed board members’ home addresses on Twitter.
A march was held outside the home of PPS superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero, although it’s unclear whether it was sanctioned by the union. The union also recently led a march to the Oregon Convention Center, where it disrupted a work meeting held by board member Andrew Scott.
PAT did not immediately respond to request for comment.
“Meanwhile, our kids are home,” Happel said. “PAT has forgotten that there are kids involved here. I don’t know how anyone can argue that what’s going on in good for kids.”
PAT has hosted quasi-celebrations for its cause while school is out – a slap in the face to the students struggling with academic deficiencies and seniors watching their last year slip away.
“They’re partying on the picket line,” McGair said. “It’s quite a rager down there. Dancing and cheering. They had a strike-a-palooza. They had beer and roller skating. It’s like a party. And that hurts the kids, the high schoolers who are old enough to understand what’s going on.”
The small group of teachers who have crossed the picket line are still getting paid. Those who have not crossed the picket line get $120 a day from the Oregon Education Association, the state union of which PAT is an affiliate, if they show up at the strike and scan a QR code, Happel said.
“Teachers have Go Fund me accounts because they’re not getting paid,” he said.
Some teachers have resorted to pressuring their own students to garner support. A post on X from a high-school teacher read, “Next year, if you need a letter of recommendation, and you never showed up to support your teachers, DO NOT ASK ME.”
“I will not be writing letters for anyone who didn’t show up,” she added. “Showing up=walking the line. Talking with us. Being there for us.”
PAT had also lobbied heavily for a class size cap of 25 kids, even though class sizes throughout Oregon are near their lowest points in years because of declining enrollment and the recent injection of federal pandemic recovery funds, Oregon Live reported. In the city’s elementary schools, the average class size is 23 students.
Only 14 percent of classes in PPS elementary schools host over 25 kids, and most of them are not low-income, Title 1 schools.
“If you accommodate what they wanted, you’d be helping the wealthier schools, not the ones who need help the most,” Happel said.
The class size issue is a “red herring,” McGair said.
“We’re keeping kids out of school for a month for a minor issue that’s demographically going to go away on its own anyway,” she said. “All of the big classes, especially at the high-school level, are in our richest schools. The smallest classes are in our Title 1 schools on purpose. What they want is to put more teachers in our rich schools and fewer teachers in our poor schools. They’re hypocrites.”
Much like the union’s other propositions, the class-size idea is financially unsound, a teacher who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of professional retaliation told NR.
“You can’t get paid more money and have smaller class sizes,” she said. “That is mathematically impossible. You pick one or the other.”
Despite its limited funds, PPS had already promised to exceed its existing budget by $170 million over the next three years. While the union is gleeful, as it has received many of the items on its wish list, its activism might backfire in the near term.
“We have deep cuts coming,” Happel said. “And not all of those can be administrative because there’s not that much money to cover all of that in the central office.”
Student programs will shrink, and teachers will be let go, he predicted, as “that’s the only way this deal pencils.”
Many younger teachers have participated in the strike, but they’ll be the first to go with layoffs because of seniority, an older PPS teacher told National Review.
“This is protecting the older teachers who have been in the district for a while,” she said. “A lot of teachers are on the picket line; they could be losing their jobs next year.” Portland’s enrollment is already plummeting, and this strike will likely drive out more families, she added.
Many families are still haunted by Portland’s Covid-19 school closures, which were among most the stringent in the country. In March 2020, PAT said school closures were “not a matter of if, but when.” PPS schools were shut down for 18 months, making Oregon one of the last states to reopen schools. Some districts in upstate New York returned to school in fall 2020, a full year before Portland.
Portland students of all ages struggled academically in in 2023. In math, no grade level had more than 56 percent of students meet or exceed state standards, according to test score data. Eleventh graders had an average pass rate of just 27 percent in math. In science, no grade level had more than 44 percent of students meet or exceed state standards. Eleventh graders again fared the worst in the subject, with a 39 percent pass rate.
“This strike couldn’t have come at a worse time,” Happel said. “Striking just when our kids were starting to show some progress and some steps forward after losing so much ground to the pandemic, it was really frustrating to see.” Happel said that teacher strikes in the middle of the year, or even the beginning of the year, should be illegal, as they are in over 30 other states.
“Weaponizing kids to get something done is unethical, unequivocally wrong,” he said.
PPS parent Kara Colley, a former teacher, was like many parents put through the wringer by remote schooling. Her elementary-aged child could not learn outside the classroom setting.
“I cried every day,” she said. “I felt like a failure every day. At the time, I was a community college math teacher. I know how to teach. It physically could not work within the confines of our parent child relationship. It just was impossible. I was desperate for a return to in-person instruction . . . I felt so much rage and so powerless.”
The strike is opening deep old wounds for her. Colley said she experienced a PTSD-like response when the strike was announced, causing sleep deprivation and physical sickness.
“At some point, it broke me,” she said. Colley went down to the picket line to beg teachers to call off the strike. While two teachers empathized with her concerns, five others dismissed her, she said. One asked, “Why are you still talking about 2021?,” according to Colley.
While Colley has deep respect for public-school teachers, she opposes the strike because “this particular cohort of students have already been out of school.”
Colley’s kids were not sent any homework for the duration of the strike, she said, although the district provided tutoring websites. Teachers are not allowed to do remote learning or contact the students, per the district, the anonymous teacher said. Activities such as sports, drama, and some clubs are still happening at the high-school level though, she said.
On Sunday, the parties were stuck on the seemingly trivial issue of compensating educators for an additional day added to next year’s academic calendar.
“The district is demanding that educators work that additional day for free,” a union statement obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting read.
PPS argued that the demand came at the last minute and would increase the contract price tag for the district by about $4 million. The updated compensation package would already require the district to make over $126 million in cuts that would likely hit administration and contract spending as well as support services for students, PPS Superintendent Guerrero said Saturday.
“What we have agreed to is already on the edge of what is fiscally sustainable; we simply cannot accept $4 million more spending,” he added.
“At every stage of our negotiations, we’ve given PAT annual-salary schedules — and when the district agreed to add an extra day for teacher planning time, we raised our annual compensation offer to cover the extra day,” Will Howell, director of communications for PPS, wrote in a statement Friday night. “To be clear, we’ve already included extra pay for an extra day. We have a limited window of time to get students back on Monday and PAT’s 11th-hour demand for an additional $4 million threatens to derail this agreement.”
Happel said his high-school kid’s worry is that when school is back in session, teachers “are just going to dump the work on top of them in bucketloads to try to catch up because they haven’t been able to do anything for the last three weeks.”
“The students don’t know where they should be in the curriculum right now,” he said.
An anonymous PPS parent said her high school senior enrolled in local community college to continue his schooling “because we no longer trust the PPS system this year to help him graduate.” McGair said there are many students like him who are fed up.
“This whole school strike has just been a complete déjà vu of Covid for my children except worse,” the parent said. “They don’t have any type of structured online learning or designated teacher. They’re left to be by themselves.”
After weeks of sparring and stalemate, board chairman Holland announced in a statement Sunday night that a tentative agreement had been reached and kids will return for a late start Monday.