To: The Newton Teachers Association
From: An Avuncular Netherlandish Nag
Re: Your Do-or-Die-But-Can’t-Justify-Why Strike
NTA members, I know you’re busy trying to put shine on your scuffed strike sneakers, but somebody on the center-left needs to be blunt with you, so I’ll play Dutch uncle here.
You made yourselves look pretty silly with your illegal 11-day strike. Awash in manufactured indignation and an aggravated sense of grievance, you bailed out of negotiations and took to the picket lines, leaving your students in the lurch. Then, when you realized community sentiment was turning against you, you settled for an offer that competent negotiators should have been able to win at the table.
To put it more simply, you lost perspective.
Badly.
So let me help. You work for a community that cares deeply about its schools and pays its teachers well. That’s why Newton has such a high teacher-retention rate.
But you got caught up in your parent union’s strike mania. The Massachusetts Teachers Association wants to legalize strikes, and if that can’t be done, it obviously hopes to normalize unlawful work stoppages, thereby making them a regular teachers union tactic. Indeed, it has been fined or reproved by judges responding to illegal strikes by MTA locals in Haverhill and Woburn.
We know the MTA playbook because we’ve watched it a half dozen times now, all in districts where teachers are part of the MTA. A local union goes out on strike, usually on a Friday afternoon, when it’s difficult for the district to secure a return-to-work court order. MTA chief Max Page soon declares that as difficult as it is for teachers to tear themselves away from their classrooms, for the love of their students, they absolutely had to strike.
After a few days, the strike is settled, often for little more than the school district was already offering. Still, the MTA and its local hail it as a great victory and revel in their supposed demonstration of union power.
But this one got away. Things went on too long in Newton. Got bitter. Vehement. Almost ugly.
And honestly, in part that’s because the MTA, which had representatives in the solve-the-strike negotiation sessions, is helmed by a doctrinaire university ideologue who exists in a far-left echo chamber.
Remember when Page dismissed the idea that schools should prepare kids for college or careers as the trivial preoccupation of capitalism? That’s a stellar example of a well-paid academic leftist’s disdainful view of real-world concerns.
NTA President Mike Zilles used to seem more sensible.
“We are not planning to strike,” he said some months back. “That would be illegal.”
Yes, just as it was illegal on Jan. 19, when the NTA stopped work.
Self-righteousness has a reality — and a language — all its own. Because they won’t grant all you want, your fellow citizens in city government become the enemy. You declare the mayor isn’t worthy of her title. You sing “We Shall Overcome,” as though this strike was somehow the equivalent of a civil rights march.
“You will never break us,” you chant, as though you are not well-paid teachers but rather penniless peasants engaged in an existential battle.
With the NTA having finally ended its strike, there remains some rancor — and a raft of rationalization.
Page, of course, is portraying the teachers as having had no other choice. “This was never anyone’s strategy or choice,” he told WCVB-TV. Oh, come on. This is precisely the MTA’s strategy.
Perhaps the only sillier utterance came from the mouth of Zilles, when partway through a strike that left kids and families stranded for 11 school days, he declared that he had become enraged with city leaders. “They are just unaware of how much harm they are doing,” he declared. (Good news! You apparently can be inoculated from the pesky itch of introspection.)
Nor was he magnanimous after the strike’s conclusion, which is a strange posture for a union portraying this contract as a “when we fight, we win” victory. The ill-will would take years to heal, Zilles declared, adding of city leaders: “They are going to have to earn our trust.”
Which gets things pretty much exactly backward. Fortunately, Newton is a forward-looking place. It won’t take you years to regain community regard. Not if you learn something from this misadventure.
But please, reclaim some perspective. Act like the mature, law-abiding community role models you should be.
And no matter what the MTA urges, don’t repeat this foolishness next time around.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.