Students in several major school districts in the United States had classes canceled in 2023 as teachers union strikes forced schools to close in several cities, costing students more time in school.
Three years after the COVID-19 pandemic school closures kept students out of the classroom for sometimes as much as a year, students are still missing out on school days as teachers unions engage in labor disputes with school districts that have forced the cancellation of classes through strikes.
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The longest and most high-profile strike of 2023 occurred in Portland, Oregon, where students spent most of November away from school. The Portland Association of Teachers went on strike on Nov. 1, and students did not return to class until Nov. 27, following a weekslong negotiating standoff between the union and Portland Public Schools.
Also in the Pacific Northwest, students in Evergreen Public Schools near Seattle started school two weeks later than planned after the Evergreen Education Association went on strike and demanded pay raises.
In California, two major city school districts lost school days because of strikes. On May 4, the Oakland Education Association initiated a strike that lasted until May 16, as the union and Oakland Unified School District negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement that included 15% pay raises for all teachers.
Teachers in Los Angeles Unified School District also went on strike in March for three days as an act of solidarity with the school district’s service workers, who were negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement at the time that ultimately included a 30% wage increase for workers making an average of $25,000.
While the strikes ultimately ended and the districts scheduled make-up school days for the missed instruction time, the disruption of learning has raised concerns that students are still facing barriers to addressing learning loss that began during the pandemic.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos said that the strike-induced school closures “are continuing to exacerbate a problem [the unions] created by the extended lockdowns and shutdowns during COVID.”
“They’re doing it at the expense of the kids they are supposed to be serving,” she said. “The unions continue to try to amass more and more political power and extort taxpayers for more and more money and continue to promote a very leftist ideology across the board.”
DeVos said that lost learning due to missed school days is “devastating for kids [and] families” and noted that closing schools creates difficulties for families beyond the missed time in the classroom.
“For those people who have jobs to go to on a daily basis, [they] now have to scramble to try to figure out what to do with the children that are left at home because their schools aren’t opening to serve them,” she said. “These unions continue to really whipsaw the people around who are supposed to be their customers; they’re supposed to be the people they’re serving. And yet there’s no regard for the impacts on them.”
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The former education secretary, who has made fighting for school choice a career-long endeavor, said the only real solution to mitigating the influence of the teacher unions is to “introduce education freedom for every single family in the country.”
“When families have control of the dollars that are expended on their children’s education, the entire system will change,” DeVos said. “Until that happens for every child and every family, the government-run schools are going to conduct themselves in ways that are in their interests, not in the interest of kids.”
