Opinion: This time, striking Oakland teachers have gone too far

In 2019, Oakland teachers went on strike for well-deserved higher pay, and every family I knew supported their strike. Kids, including mine, joined them in the picket line.

In 2022, the Oakland Education Association staged a strike to protest school consolidations. But the strike was only one day. No one actually likes school mergers, so we parents took the day off and got over it.

This is the third teacher strike in five years, and the union has misread the room. This strike harms children unnecessarily and is deeply unpopular with parents across the city. Organizations and leaders are rapidly lining up to oppose it. The union is on the wrong side of history.

I have been a parent leader at my sons’ elementary school for seven years. Most people know that my support for teachers and for student equity has been steadfast. I am pro-public school, pro-labor and pro-fair pay.

But I am also pro-child. So, with the strike continuing even after the promise of historic pay increases and many other well-deserved union requests, now is the time for me to speak up for the sake of kids in asking for the strike to end.

Supporting hard-working teachers and supporting a disastrous strike are not the same thing. Here is why:

• Huge numbers of Oakland families across the city do not support the strike. Just like during the pandemic year, parents suffer from having no organized representation to advocate for our views. Many people find local media coverage generally biased in favor of the union, whose talking points can be misleading. It’s parents who have no voice here, and from where I sit, they are extremely angry.

• The union is holding our kids hostage over “common good” principles that we all agree on but which have no place in a labor contract. Most of us are liberal people who choose to live in a liberal city, but activism has a time and place, and this isn’t it. OUSD doesn’t have the authority or money to do everything we all might want right now. Even if it did, keeping kids away from school yet again is a harmful way for one side to get what they want.

• The strike is cynically opportunistic and likely illegal. Union representatives didn’t follow the proper steps before striking: There was no impasse, bargaining was ongoing, and there was no state mediator when they walked out. A union that strikes three times in five years does not consider it an unfortunate tool of last resort.

Here’s a thought experiment: Imagine you are moving to the Bay Area, maybe from out of state. You hear that Oakland teachers are finally paid better. Maybe teacher retention will improve, and the teachers who stay can better afford to live here. But you also hear that the teachers’ union will strike regularly, make impossible demands and create a toxic dynamic between teachers and most parents. Yay? Show us apartments elsewhere, please, and sorry about your enrollment declines.

The teachers’ union seems to believe that the end justifies their damaging means, and they are more concerned with activism at any cost than they are with playing by the rules and doing right by kids. They chant for “justice” — as if any of us doesn’t believe in it — while skirting democratic process, intimidating kids and families who come near school, and above all doing children the grave injustice of denying them the education that is their right.

I am not okay with this, nor should anyone be. Teachers could vote today to approve the last fair offer and then work within our community to get other shared goals met. Parents need not stand silent while our kids are kept from school where they belong.

Jesse Antin is a parent of two boys attending schools in the Oakland Unified School District.