Teacher strikes should not be allowed in state

We have long lamented Pennsylvania’s antediluvian liquor laws. Wouldn’t it be grand, we have argued seemingly since the end of Prohibition, if you could walk into a grocery store, buy a bottle of wine, and pay for it at the same cash register where you purchase the rest of the items in your cart?
Despite some feints toward modernization, there’s every likelihood the state’s liquor monopoly will continue, decades after other states have trusted the ability of adults to buy both a bottle of Zinfadel and a carton of cottage cheese without incident.
But should the sun rise and a new day dawn when it comes to liquor sales, Pennsylvanians can still rest assured that our commonwealth will continue to lag behind the rest of the country in other ways. And one of those is allowing public school teachers to strike.
Right now, Pennsylvania is one of just nine states that allows its teachers to strike. It’s also the national leader in teacher strikes. Most other states, including labor-friendly blue states that you would expect to allow strikes, such as Massachusetts and New York, prohibit strikes by schoolteachers and other public employees. Pennsylvania sets a limit on the number of days a strike can wear on, but the strikes are still enormously disruptive to families who have to seek out child care during walkouts by teachers, or to the fortunate moms and dads who have scheduled vacations during Christmas break or the early part of the summer, when make-up days from strikes are often scheduled.
Above all, strikes harm the education of our children.
Educators have long believed that summer breaks that last two months or more result in students losing some of the knowledge and skills they have gained in the previous school year. If a strike starts in late September or October and stretches on for a month, which happened in the Washington School District a handful of years ago, how can students be expected to regain the momentum they had at the start of the school year when they go back to classrooms with Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays looming? What about students who have to take advanced-placement tests in the spring? And let’s be honest: How much quality learning happens when students are captive in classrooms between Christmas and New Year’s Day, or in late June, when most of their peers have been liberated from classrooms to enjoy the summer sunshine?
Police, firefighters and other public employees are prohoibited from striking because it is commonly held that their jobs are too crucial to the everyday functions of society for them to walk a picket line. Police or firefighters, of course, have had their share of grievances over the years when it comes to salaries and benefits, but when those disputes arise, their union representatives and employers go before an arbitrator who can then resolve the impasse with a binding decision. The same should happen for teachers.
Teachers in the Ringgold School District started striking this week, with salaries being a sticking point. Teachers in the Peters Township School District left their classrooms in the spring of last year. Thankfully, they are not a recurring feature of life in Washington and Greene counties. We wish they did not happen at all.