Blame the Union, Free the Schools

Originally published in the Delaware Valley Journal

The commonwealth’s largest teachers union, the Pennsylvania State Education Association (PSEA), recently induced yet another local union into “authorizing” a strike, this time in Indiana County’s Penns Manor Area School District. It was typical performance art for teachers unions in Pennsylvania, where government union executives seem more interested in keeping and displaying power than doing their job.

Pennsylvania leads the country in teacher strikes—and it’s not a close race. A Commonwealth Foundation study counted 131 strikes over a 19-year period (1999–2018), which resulted in 1,383 missed school days and affected some 300,000 students. The progressive magazine Mother Jones reported that from 1968 to 2012, nearly 90 percent of all teacher strikes happened here in Pennsylvania.

Read more in the Delaware Valley Journal