Stonewalled for a year of bargaining by Portland Public Schools district, Portland teachers are frustrated.
Mary C. King is a professor emerita of economics, Portland State University.
Students need more support to recover from the pandemic, class sizes are way too big, teacher salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation or housing prices, and the bill for administrators’ salaries is growing much faster than for our teachers.
Meanwhile, across the river, Vancouver and Camas teachers just made significant gains — but only after walking out for the first week of the school year. Portland teachers don’t want to have to strike to get what they and our children need but may have little choice. We should support them as they bargain for the health of the whole community.
Teachers are the heart of strong schools, and strong schools are essential for social inclusion, economic prosperity and a working democracy.
Class sizes too big
More than 10 years ago, the American School Superintendents Association asserted that decades of research showed the importance of small class sizes, especially in the early grades. They recommended 15 students in a classroom with one teacher. Last year, Portland Public Schools’, or PPS, largest kindergarten class included 29 students, with 30 in the biggest first-grade and 31 in the biggest second-grade classroom.
High school and middle school students also thrive with smaller classrooms and more individual attention. Students need to practice their skills and receive feedback on their work. Imagine a high school English teacher with six classes of 30 kids who assigns written homework just once a week.
Even if that teacher spent only five minutes on each paper, it would take them 15 hours a week to provide feedback and grade those papers. And there are up to 40 students in some PPS high school classes.
Critics dismissive of the imperative to lower classroom size don’t deny the educational impact of lower class size. Instead, they argue that it may be even more important to raise teacher pay. That’s a line that only makes sense if you accept permanently limited education budgets in the richest country in the world at the richest point in our history. We need smaller classes and higher pay for teachers.
Teacher salaries too low
PPS teachers struggle with inflation and especially high local housing costs. PPS ranked as the second least affordable school district in the country for a new teacher looking to rent a one-bedroom place. Only San Francisco was worse, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
With high rates of graduate education, many educators carry student debt. Student debt particularly burdens younger teachers and teachers of color. Five years ago, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 79% of Oregon teachers held master's degrees or more education.
Teaching is a big, influential and essential profession in permanent demand. U.S. schools hire about 200,000 teachers every year. But teachers are undervalued and underpaid, partly because it has been a profession dominated by women who, in the past, had few other professional opportunities. It was easy to pay them low salaries since they had few alternatives. Now, teaching has to compete with occupations that pay far more for comparable levels of education.
But school boards are going in the wrong direction. Nationally, teacher pay fell over the 2010s, falling further behind other occupations that require similar levels of education and training.
Pay and numbers aren’t falling for PPS administrators. The PPS Proposed Budget for the next school year, 2023-2024, shows that spending on administrative salaries has grown one-and-a-half times as fast as teachers’ salaries over the past four years.
Teachers work a lot of unpaid hours
Portland teachers work many more unpaid hours than teachers in other nearby districts. PPS contracts include many fewer paid hours for planning, grading and communicating with students’ families. Teachers’ strategies need to be tailored to students with different learning styles and needs.
Many classrooms include kids with a range of learning and behavioral challenges. Other students’ families speak English as a second or third language, and still others lack stability due to precarious economic situations.
Teacher job satisfaction at a 50-year low
On top of low pay, pandemic demands on teachers, school shootings and the culture wars haven’t helped. But even before these issues loomed so large, teachers’ status and job satisfaction have plummeted along with pay, and fewer people are becoming teachers.
According to a recent study from Brown University: “The number of new entrants into the profession has fallen by roughly one-third over the last decade, and the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50- year low. Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81% to 42% in the last 15 years. Although recent attention has focused on how the pandemic has made teachers’ work substantially more challenging, most of these declines occurred steadily throughout the last decade, suggesting they are a function of larger, long-standing structural issues with the profession.”
Reasons aren’t hard to find: increasing numbers of stressed students whose families are homeless or facing eviction, insufficient mental health support for students, loss of classroom time to more and more standardized testing, lack of culturally relevant curricula developed with the participation of educators, inadequate resources for special education and on, and on.
You would think reasonable temperatures could at least be taken for granted, but apparently not. The PPS teachers’ 2023 bargaining platform includes a demand for classroom temperatures between 60 and 90 degrees! That’s still too cold and too hot for learning.
What can we do?
It’ll be important to show our support for Portland teachers in the coming weeks as they bargain for their students and the community, as well as salaries high enough to recruit and retain dedicated teachers. We can express our support by signing a petition supporting PPS teachers, sending emails to PPS School Board members, posting messages on social media and by writing letters to the editor.
If ongoing mediation fails to bring the PPS administration to agreement on a reasonable contract, and teachers feel that they have to strike, we can show up to walk the picket line with them, bring refreshments and contribute to a strike fund.
In the longer run, we’ll have to forcefully advocate at the state level for more education funding and the political leadership to raise taxes on the affluent to raise revenue.
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