The Seattle teachers aren’t the scandal. The state legislature that has spent fifteen years losing this fight in its own courts is the scandal — and the Wall Street Journal editorial board knows it. That’s the move in their Seattle Teachers Threaten an Illegal Strike: dress up an $87 million budget hole as a morality play about a union that just voted 91 percent to strike, so nobody has to explain where the hole came from.
Let me concede the parts they get right, briefly, so I can be plain about the parts they get wrong.
Yes — strikes by public employees are illegal in Washington, and yes, five days out of school in 2022 cost working parents childcare, cost kids the meals they count on, cost classrooms instruction. Yes — Seattle teacher salaries, which the board’s own column pegs around $117,000, sit above the national average. Yes — Seattle Public Schools has an $87 million shortfall. None of those facts are the story. They’re the costume the Journal has dressed the story in.
The story is this: an $87 million shortfall doesn’t fall out of the sky. Somebody decided the district would have an $87 million shortfall. The state of Washington has, in fact, been repeatedly ordered by its own Supreme Court to stop doing this.
In McCleary v. State (2012), Washington’s high court ruled the legislature’s school-funding regime unconstitutional — a violation of the state’s paramount duty to amply provide for the education of all children. The court held the legislature in contempt in 2014 and kept it there, fining the state $100,000 a day until it declared full compliance in 2018. The mechanism behind the court’s anger is what matters. Seattle Public Schools still depends on local property-tax levies capped under the state’s Levy Lid Act — a 1977 law passed in response to the Doran decision, after Seattle’s own school district had sued the state over levy failures. The lid ties how much Seattle can raise locally to a percentage of what the state contributes. State underfunding starves Seattle of the local dollars it’s allowed to raise on top. Rich districts stay rich. Poor districts stay poor. Seattle sits in the upper middle, perpetually one revenue earthquake away from a budget crisis.
So when the Journal tells you teachers are the problem because the district has an $87 million hole, ask: where did the hole come from? On OECD numbers, the United States spends about 5.8 percent of GDP on education, against an OECD average of about 4.7 percent — and U.S. outcomes in reading and math sit in the middle of the pack. We don’t have a teacher-pay problem. We have a system that takes real money and produces middling results because the funding is politically starved and structurally lopsided.
Now look at what the teachers are actually asking for. The union wants 1 to 3 percent raises on top of cost-of-living adjustments. That’s not a jump. That’s an attempt to keep up. Classified staff — paraprofessionals, classroom aides, the adults who keep a school running — want 3 to 5 percent on top of COLA. These are people earning $67,858 a year in a metro where a one-bedroom apartment runs north of $1,800. The board’s own column prints that figure, then turns around and calls the ask unreasonable.
The Journal then warns Seattle could end up like Los Angeles, where teachers won a 12 percent raise and are now facing major layoffs. The lesson it draws: don’t give raises you can’t afford. The actual lesson is the opposite. LA’s contract was a one-shot on top of a base budget the district couldn’t sustain — the trap is the structural underfunding, not the raise. When the base budget is starved, every contract becomes a choice between teacher pay and teacher headcount. Give teachers a raise without fixing the revenue side and the raise gets clawed back through pink slips. That isn’t an argument against paying teachers. It’s an argument for paying teachers and funding the system.
The Journal’s house philosophy is free markets and free people. Fine. So where’s the free-market answer to a state legislature that refuses to honor its own court order? There isn’t one. There is a public-school system that already exists — the most efficient mass-delivery institution this country has ever built — and a political choice, made year after year, not to pay for it. The $87 million isn’t a market outcome. It’s a budgeting choice by people who don’t get yelled at when classrooms lose teachers but would get yelled at if their property taxes went up a tick.
The piece leans on a procedural point worth taking seriously: Washington makes public-employee strikes illegal and sets no penalty, so unions “get away with it.” True as a matter of statute. Also a confession. The reason the legislature hasn’t set a penalty is that it understands the workers it strips of the right to strike need some recourse when the system starves them. The criminalization without enforcement is the legislature admitting, in writing, that the underlying relationship is broken.
A strike is a stop sign, not a destination. The destination is a system that pays the adults in the building enough to stay, then pays for them. The state needs to revisit its basic-education funding formula — fix the parts that have eroded since McCleary, and put a real floor under special education, which the federal government covers at roughly 14 percent of identified costs and the state has been backfilling unevenly for decades. Federal K–12 funding shouldn’t disappear in downturns or stay frozen at Great Society scale. A statewide teacher contract — or, short of that, automatic interest arbitration when districts and unions hit the kind of impasse that produces strikes — so the kids aren’t the leverage in a fight between Olympia and a local school board. Seattle voters should look hard at renewing the local education levy and at the mayoral and council candidates who will sit across the table from the next round of bargaining. And the union, when it sits down, should publish its full ask and the district’s full offer in the same room, on the same day, so parents can see the gap with their own eyes.
None of this is radical. Washington took halting steps on the funding side after the 2018 compliance ruling, then the legislature drifted back to its old patterns. The Journal would call that socialism. The Danes, the Finns, and the Norwegians would call it Tuesday.
The teachers aren’t the crisis. The crisis is that we keep treating public schools like a budget line to be cut and the people who work in them like the cause of the line being in the red. The $87 million has a name on it, and the name is not the Seattle Education Association.