I wrote this last year when the teachers’ union in my home district went on strike for (and won!) a better contract for the educators and students in our diverse and quirky little community. And, I’m reposting here in honor of the strikerversary earlier this week. Enjoy!

It’s Monday October 17, 2022 and, as Malden teachers are striking, my daughter Emmy and I head out for the short walk to her school. Along the way, we pass by several physical reminders of how state policy decisions create unnecessary barriers to communities that embrace racial and socio-economic diversity. As narrated below, our walk sheds light on how the strike came to be in the first place, on what the teachers were fighting for, and on how funding inequity threatens the sustainability of places with genuine racial and socioeconomic diversity. 

Immediately out of our front door, Emmy notices that students from the nearby charter school are out for recess. I expect that she’s going to ask why those students are in school today and she is not. So, I explain that the strike doesn’t affect them, though I avoid offering more info. She’s six and isn’t all that interested in the policy details. When you dig into it, it doesn’t make all that much sense anyway.

According to the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the city of Malden will lose over $9 million to Mystic Valley Regional Charter School (MVRCS) this year, and that’s after receiving a state reimbursement of about $1.3 million. That annual cost has been about the same for nearly a decade. It’s also unlikely to change anytime soon. MVRCS’s charter is protected by our state and national obsession with test-based school ratings. Relying largely on MCAS scores, MVRCS is ranked at the 92nd percentile in Massachusetts, while Emmy’s school came in at 26th. 

In a sort of passing comment, Emmy says the charter school should be more fair. We briefly rehash a version of the story from earlier this fall when a student was disciplined for wearing what the school labeled a “jihab.” I adapt key parts for my audience, but the main theme is unchanged: some students “get in trouble” for wearing their hair differently or dressing differently at that school. Emmy understands fair vs. unfair intuitively; so, she says that kids should be able to wear their hair however they like, and I can’t help but agree. 

Out in Maplewood Square, we pass by a diverse assortment of restaurants, convenience stores and businesses. In just the last week, a second restaurant closed, a fast-food place for fried chicken and pizza. It’s not the Davis Square that my daughter is familiar with from nearby Somerville, where we were renting a few years earlier. That’s for better or worse. Maplewood Square isn’t hunted by developers looking to cannibalize its character, but it’s also not ranked as one of the top 10 best places to live in the United States. Because you don’t have to be particularly wealthy to own a business in Maplewood, it has a diverse character that can be refreshing in a time of cultural division.

That diversity comes with a cost to the city, however, or an opportunity cost of additional business revenue that could be used for city services, like its public schools. It’s a trade-off that the city shouldn’t have to face, a policy decision that makes diversity hard to sustain. 

We’re about halfway through our walk, and we stop at Dunkin Donuts. Across the street is a Malden Housing Authority complex that offers 216 units, all of which are capped at 30% of resident income. It’s another example of how policy essentially levies a tax on socio-economic and racial diversity. As a largely residential town, Malden’s main source of revenue is property tax. It’s not making a lot of money off its affordable units. The same is true, even, for its market units, due to Proposition 2.5, which places strict limits on the amount of revenue that a city can generate through personal property tax. Even though new sales – like the home we bought in 2021 – are exempt, Proposition 2.5 has been in place for 40 years now, and, over that time, it’s had a devastating impact on city budgets across the Commonwealth. Places like Malden, without a large commercial base, have been hit particularly hard. 

We get a Box of Joe, munchkins, and a donut for Emmy, and we walk the final stretch to Salemwood school. Each morning, the first person we see is the music teacher who plays the Ukulele outside at the morning dropoff, and incidentally that’s the same person we see when we arrive at the picket line. Sitting in a camping chair this time, he gives us the same warm smile.

My daughter’s Kindergarten teacher and assistant teacher are together, holding signs and cheering with colleagues at honking cars. Emmy’s assistant teacher greets her at the door every morning. She’s learned my daughter’s quirky sense of humor and used it to help ease what was – just a few weeks earlier – a very difficult transition to Kindergarten. Under Malden’s old contract, her salary could have started at an incomprehensibly low $20,761.53. Even with additional credentials and years of service, that figure was unlikely to exceed $30,000, hardly fair compensation for her role in the classroom, and it’s the main sticking point in negotiations with the school committee. 

Emmy hides behind me as if she isn’t loving all the attention. She emerges to talk about her birthday that past weekend, and it quickly becomes obvious that the teachers have learned a lot about our lives in just the six weeks of school so far this year. They know what she wanted for her birthday, the names of her friends from her pre-school in Somerville, the location of her birthday party, even the very specific pizza toppings requested for the party. It’s also obvious that they care deeply about all of this. 

When talk shifts to the strike, the adults all embrace a general level of “how can this be happening.” Nevermind that the federal government is sending schools a historic infusion of funding, the state also approved a massive school funding increase in the Student Opportunity Act. Even if the federal funds can’t sustain long-term financial needs, surely that can be buttressed with state money, we say. 

Undoubtedly, some mix of federal and state funds helped the city meet teachers’ needs, as the union and school committee ultimately agreed on a new contract later that day. There’s still an open question, however, about why the district found itself in this situation in the first place. Near the end of the 2021-22 school year, Malden sent non-renewal notices to 105 educators. Although the district had recently received a large influx of new students, its enrollment numbers were down when the state took its official count on October 1st 2021, and that’s what determined its funding. Again, Malden’s on the short end of another policy decision. The city’s relative affordability means that the district regularly receives and serves new students throughout the school year. A single annual snapshot, early in the year, doesn’t accurately capture its enrollment, and so it doesn’t fairly allocate funds. 

As a result of all of the above and more, Malden finds itself in a peculiar spot: it’s perhaps the most evenly diverse district in the state, and it’s struggling to find sustainable funding during what is otherwise a rare time of relative abundance for public education.

Typically, the media covers teachers’ strikes as a horserace between the teachers’ union and district leadership. Decades of this sort of coverage has come to obscure what should otherwise be obvious: school politics are affected by a complex mix of factors far outside the control of the city and far beyond the purview of K-12 teachers and district leaders. In a time of gentrification in some places and concentrated poverty in many others, the city has maintained a safe distance from either. At the same time, Malden faces obstacles to maintaining that diversity and appropriately funding its schools.

In national polling parents regularly express preferences for diverse schools. Similarly, the research documents clear benefits for students of color and white students in racially diverse schools. And, because integrated schools are good for children, they are also good for society more generally. Especially now, as our democracy crumbles under the weight of racial tension, it feels particularly important to nurture one of the few places where children from different racial backgrounds have opportunities to interact and form friendships. 

If we believe this, we can and should orient policy towards this reality. We could think about regional solutions to regional challenges, like providing enough affordable housing or addressing resource inequities across school districts. We could scrutinize state education policy for provisions, like charter school reimbursement or the local aid formula, that might unfairly disadvantage socio-economically diverse communities. Ultimately, policy well beyond the local level played a major role in creating the segregation that we see across our communities, and policy can play an important role in creating something better.