where is the picket line?

[adrian_turtle]

As some of you know, I do math and science tutoring. Finding students independently stopped being feasible during the pandemic, so I just work with an agency these days. (My contract with the agency includes a non-disparagement clause.) Students or their parents go to the agency and buy one lesson or a series of them. Maybe they are completely lost and don't even know where to start. Maybe they have an A- they want to polish up to an A. Maybe the parents think the student is capable of more/better work than the school is asking of them, and wants a tutor to design a more challenging curriculum. (No. Not this turtle.) Maybe the student resents studying and the parents want somebody else to hold them accountable. (No. Not this turtle.) Maybe they are discouraged and intimidated as well as confused. (Please don't run away!)

In the last 9 months or so, the agency has started offering me another kind of work. School districts, hiring LOTS of tutors. Sometimes they're clearly looking for actual tutors, just paid for by the school. They were doing after school programs. Ok, fine. Or they were pulling groups of five 7th graders out of class, putting them in front of computers, and looking for tutors to teach them remedial 6th grade math for a month. (Well...clearly it needs to be done. I just don't want to do it.) Then they started advertising for online substitutes to teach a whole semester including curriculum development. Clearly some of these school districts are overwhelmed with hybrid classes and struggling students, especially when so many teachers are out sick with covid. But it looks like the adjunctification of K-12 and wow do I ever not want to do it.

As many of you know, the teachers of Minneapolis are on strike this month. They are underpaid and not getting nearly enough support while working in crisis conditions.

Obviously, if anyone asked me to work for Minneapolis Public Schools this week, I'd turn them down. (Probably more politely than many of you. But I'd obviously turn them down because the gig would obviously be working as a scab and decent people don't do that.) Less obviously, there's this family in Minneapolis that went to the agency back in February. The school recognized then that the kid was very far behind and a tutor would be a good idea. There are weekly assignments going back to September; some of which he did badly and some of which he was so discouraged he didn't even try. His classroom teacher (wisely) offered him the opportunity to try them all again. Clearly, this is going to take quite a lot of time and effort. Would it be crossing the picket line to help him?

I'm not sure. It doesn't look like it undercuts anything the union does because it ordinarily runs parallel to union work, in cooperation with it. And it doesn't make it easier for the district to function with the teachers on strike. It's just about this kid; will he learn this, or graduate without knowing it, or not graduate. I don't understand union strategy well enough to know if it matters.

Comments

[machiavellijr]

Ouch, that sounds like a tricky one. I'd say anything you do with an individual student outside of class time isn't undercutting the union's strike action - as you say, the union members wouldn't be doing anything of this sort if they were not on strike.

One could argue that tutoring a kid in public school *at all* undercuts the public sector, because it means the richer parents, who have disproportionate power to affect things, don't feel the full impact of public education policies (their kids can just get tutoring and be academically OK) but I think that is excessively scrupulous and rather navel-gazing. I had that thought when I was tutoring full-time but decided on balance that the underserved kids I was teaching were the most important and useful part of my job.

[adrian_turtle]

I agree with everything you say. If I were raising a child, I'd have hard choices to make about whether to put resources into the public schools or private help for my own kid...but that's not where I am.

[mrissa]

Yeah, there are not enough individual tutors in the world to allow MPS to make the argument that the kids all got private tutoring and therefore the teachers OR EPS (that latter part is really key this time around) are not called for. I think you're a restaurant cook when some grocery workers are on strike--you've got supplies that were delivered direct from the farm, people are going to need to eat either way and the grocery workers do not need your restaurant to go out of business for their grocery to thrive.

[adrian_turtle]

To extend your analogy, the farm delivery trucks are striking in solidarity with the grocery workers. It turns out that my student does not have access to any of his assignments or textbooks during the strike. I'm not going to design curriculum based on "Um...I think it had something to do with triangles?"

[mrissa]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[murumatsu]

hi, you don't know me, but I live in Minneapolis and my kid goes to MPS. Or, at the moment, DOESN'T go, obviously. Since there are no classes at all right now, I fail to see how your tutoring someone would have any effect on the strike at all, but might be of benefit to this one kid.

Really really hoping they settle this thing SOON. It has been 2 solid weeks now. They have just given ESP (support staff) a "last best offer" that involves having to make major cuts in as yet unspecified other things. It's not that the teachers/support staff shouldn't have all that they ask for, but...where is it supposed to come from?? The fact taht the state has a budget surplus doesn't mean that the school budget has any of that money.

[adrian_turtle]

Oh, definitely! There are so many places where the budgets are divided up so you can't even see who has the power to re-allocate money from police lawsuits to school ventilation systems. (Much less do something about it.)

[hiranu]

I think you have enough evidence here that you aren't crossing a picket line. The work is ongoing and was going even when the teachers were not on strike.

[silveradept]

I have no advice to give on the question, but I sympathize with the difficulty of making the decision one way or another.

[anne]

Chiming in to say I don't think this is undercutting the strike. Especially if the kid was struggling in September, and the parents asked for help in February.

[siderea]

Aren't the right people to ask the teachers' union in question?

[adrian_turtle]

Well, yes. But I don't know any of them, so I'm asking here under this streetlight. A friend with more connections on FB threw the question out there, summarized much more generally than I put it above. Union organizers who are not teachers were all very emphatic that I should not tutor the kid. Teachers far from Minneapolis thought it was a tough call but it might be ok to tutor the kid. I got a response from a St Paul teacher (where they just won a contract) with a kid in Minneapolis schools...they suggested tutoring the kid and contributing to the strike fund.

My decision process turns out to be irrelevant, as the teachers' union cleverly shut down the online learning portal. For the duration of the strike, the student has no access to his textbooks or the assignments he wanted help with. The kid thinks he just isn't using the right password or something, but I think the union is making a very deliberate statement. I hope the bosses give in quickly.

[siderea]

!!! Thank you for this update. Fascinating.