A teacher strike to end gun violence? Kansas GOP might just use it to defund schools | Opinion
We’re at the brainstorming stage of the gun massacre crisis now.
When you get a group of folks together for a brainstorming session, the official motto is often, “There are no bad ideas.” In the real world, everybody knows that there really are bad ideas. But the point is to get all the possibilities on the table — no matter how extreme or off-kilter they might seem — just so no it’s-so-crazy-it-might-just-work proposal goes unmentioned.
We need that attitude for the gun crisis. After this week’s massacre at a Louisville bank, after last month’s murders at Covenant School in Nashville, and after gun slaughters have become a dreadfully routine feature of American public life, it’s time to say it together out loud: There are no bad ideas.
Well, Aaron Schwartz has an idea.
The Kansas City-area writer and teacher offered his proposal this week in The Kansas Reflector. He wants his fellow educators — in Kansas and across the nation — to go on strike until some kind of meaningful gun reform becomes law.
After all, he points out, gun violence has become a significant workplace safety issue in schools. Teachers have a right to demand their classrooms be protected, both for themselves and their students.
No peace? No school.
“As a teacher, I’m tired of waiting my turn,” he writes. “I’m tired of wondering which of my students will graduate alive. I’m tired of wondering if I will go home at night. And if courage is a moral act in the face of unjust consequences, then I propose we act in spite of the consequences.”
It’s a bold proposal. I love the audacity. And it makes me nervous.
Why? Because here in Kansas, the Republicans who control the Legislature — the folks least likely to be sympathetic to big new gun regulations — seem pretty iffy in their support of public education across the state.
We’re just finishing up a 2023 legislative session that saw a massive (and failed, so far) effort by GOP leaders to defund the state’s schools with a voucher system that would send taxpayer money instead to private academies and home schools. And we’re not out of the woods yet: The Star’s Katie Bernard and Jonathan Shorman report GOP leaders may make another push to pass the bill before the legislative session officially ends.
My fear, then, is that Republican legislators in Kansas — and in other red states, for that matter — wouldn’t treat a teacher strike as a negotiation to be resolved, or a challenge to be met, but as an opportunity to further undermine public education and the teachers who serve in our community and neighborhood schools.
President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. That moment is still celebrated among conservatives. And Kansans need only look across the border to Missouri — where lawmakers have voted to defund community libraries — to see just how far Republicans are willing to go these days in pursuit of their ideological goals.
Schwartz believes teachers have the leverage. “What we learned during COVID-19 is that the nation needs teachers far more than they care to admit,” he writes. “When education closed, the economy did as well.”
Those school closures also arguably set the stage for the current right-wing backlash against public education.
Understand: The problem that Schwartz is trying desperately and creatively to address is very real. A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation reveals just how widespread gun violence is in America: Twenty-one percent of respondents said they had been threatened with a gun. Nineteen percent said a family member had died by gun. Seventeen percent said they had witnessed someone being shot.
Those are astounding numbers. They don’t reveal the full, rippling impact of gun violence across our communities — how every attack makes the rest of us more fearful of shopping, or going to school, or simply being with each other in public spaces.
Solutions are desperately needed. So is creativity. Schwartz’s proposed teacher strike offers both. There are no bad ideas right now. But not all ideas are prudent.
