1
As we were getting ready to send our kids back to school for the new year, the teachers’ union voted to strike, which threatened to delay the scheduled start date for an indeterminate time. It was a real nail-biter. The union (SEA, or Seattle Education Association) and the district were at an impasse. A strike seemed certain.
My son’s high school PTA group runs a Facebook page where parents were posting supportive messages for the teachers. One parent posted, “If your student has ever had an IEP or 504, it is time for us to stand up in solidarity of our educators fighting for appropriate [special education] support for our kids.” My son has had an IEP since second grade, and I had a different opinion on how special education is structured at Seattle Public Schools (SPS), and how that structure is enforced in the union’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA). I felt a familiar urge: an urge to engage in a debate on social media.
2
I stopped posting to Facebook—actually all social media—back in the spring of 2022. This was a complete reversal from prior years. Previously I had a habit of composing essays on various personal and political topics, and I would often participate in contentious online arguments that dragged on for days or weeks. I would also post about mundane fare: look at these tomatoes I grew, look at this beautiful sunset at the beach, here’s a poem I like, check out this pecan pie I made. It was a mix. One day I’d express gratitude for some needed rain, and the next I’d post a robust endorsement of efforts to defund police departments.
I would describe my online behavior as that of an addict. I spent way too much time scrolling through threads, getting little dopamine hits when people would “like” something I wrote. Even when I wasn’t online, I could be anxious about a thread that exploded, or might. I felt compelled to check in on whatever device was handy, day or night.
Social media allows you to respond as you see fit. You can respond in the moment, expressing whatever you feel instinctively, or you can hold back and consider your reaction. You can craft a response that reflects whatever you want to imagine as your truest self. You can create versions of your truest self, the way you do in real life. When you have to interact with people face-to-face, you edit yourself to suit the audience, but on social media, you broadcast the depths of your soul to the broadest possible audience. You’d better make it good. Make it provocative, but reflective. No, make it hurt. Make it true. Make yourself sound amazing, or superior, or humble. This is your platform, your brand. What you send out into the world of social media is your shibboleth.
In a polarized society there’s a vulnerability in offering your two cents, the “stubborn ounces of [your] weight,” as Bonaro Overstreet wrote in verse. Social media is a court of public opinion, and everyone is a judge. An “actually…” reaction is contrary and automatically puts you in a defensive position, but my quest was prosecution, not defense. What I was reading didn’t sit well with me, and I wanted to step in and present my case.
3
In reaction to the parent’s post about standing in solidarity with the teachers’ union, I wrote:
“My kid has had an IEP since 2nd grade, sometimes with great supports, but usually not, especially throughout middle school. I’ve never been a fan of SPS’s segregated pathways model (the one SEA seems to defend), and my kid has done his best work when he’s been included in the gen ed environment with appropriate supports. In general, I’m in favor of the district’s proposals to restructure the pathways for better inclusion, more like those in districts who are celebrated for their inclusion models. Seattle’s outcomes are really not very good for special ed kids like mine. I hope the teachers don’t strike.”
I knew my opinion would locate me in the category of “parents who are willing to question the SEA union narrative about special education.” The category was entirely unrepresented in the Facebook parent group so far. If I managed to give one or two people pause, I’d be glad to have played that role, but my ambitions were a bit larger.
Though I can’t claim any privileged knowledge about the inner dealings of the contract negotiations, I know that SEA has—as long as I’ve been a parent in the school system—enjoyed negotiating in the court of public opinion. This might be true everywhere in the U.S., but the progressive party line in Seattle is that teachers can do no wrong. Teachers, the story goes, are underpaid, under-appreciated saints and martyrs whose every action is driven by a professional dedication to the interests of all children. In this political climate, if the teachers’ union says something, it’s true, and if the district is opposed, the district is wrong, and probably bad besides.
I want to be clear: I do not have any malice toward teachers as a group, and I know they perform an often-thankless public service. Teachers are also people, like other people. Some are very good at teaching, and some are awful. Teachers can act in self-interest, as we all do at least sometimes. A teachers’ union protects the collective interest of teachers, whether they are good or bad at their jobs, whether they serve the interests of all children, or whether they privilege the children who are easiest to teach.
The substantive disagreement between the union and the district concerned special education pathways. Seattle Public Schools has, for a long while, offered several tiers of special education support. The various tiers represent levels of need, and the collective bargaining agreement between the union and the district specified things like class size headcounts. In practice, the pathways are different classrooms. In some classrooms, a bunch of neurotypical kids participate in the general education curriculum, whereas in other classrooms, kids with, say, ADHD, give up their electives to participate in a “study skills” class, and in yet other classrooms, some kids just wait out the school day under the supervision of a well-paid babysitter with an advanced degree, learning “life skills” like conflict resolution, active listening, and emotional regulation. In my son’s majority-white middle school, this last tier was often a classroom full of Black boys—kids who commonly are as bright and capable as their white peers, but who are deemed disruptive or aggressive or delayed. It would take another essay to explain why and how this happens disproportionately to Black boys, especially in majority white environments, but that essay has already been written by more qualified authors. For this essay, the observation simply illustrates my skepticism about the true value of “specialized pathways.”
It’s not unreasonable for me to surmise that SPS’s segregation model serves the teachers more than it serves the students. A general education teacher can more efficiently teach a room full of students who have similar intellectual endowments. But what of the students who are excluded? Are they better served in a cohort of peers who are also in some way disadvantaged? As it turns out, no. Seattle’s outcomes for its special education kids are not good, not only relative to districts like those in Massachusetts, but even our local neighboring districts in Bellevue and Shoreline. When you compare “specialized pathways” to “full inclusion” models, the latter wins by a landslide on every metric. Seattle Public Schools took a wrong turn, and that wrong turn is enshrined in SEA’s CBA. This is what the teachers’ union was prepared to strike about: the right to segregate kids by ability, or perceived ability, framed as “appropriate support for our kids.”
As the strike grew imminent, SPS’s new superintendent, an East-Coaster with a direct communication style, sent out a 3000+ word email challenging the union’s narrative around the special ed tiers, and criticizing the union for promoting misinformation in the court of public opinion. His email pissed people off. The district has no recent history of going head-to-head with SEA publicly during negotiations. He also laid out some facts that were inconvenient for the union to deal with so soon before their planned strike, namely, that there was no “forcing function” for a strike. The CBA already had provisions for retroactive pay during any interim period of continued negotiation. Teachers could start school on time and lose nothing at the bargaining table.
Teachers and their parent cheerleaders were incensed by the superintendent’s audacity. I thought his email was a stroke of rhetorical and tactical brilliance, matching the union’s heat in the public forum. It was a power play, and one I was glad to witness.
4
As soon as I published my reply to the parent’s post in the school group, I detected waves of familiar feelings pulling me back toward the allure of my old habits. My words contradicted the pro-SEA echo chamber; how would they land with the audience? Would I get any likes? Would I get any angry faces? Would anyone challenge me, or start a flame war? My midbrain immediately triggered a variable reward schedule, like I’d just pulled the handle on a slot machine. I wasn’t merely expressing a political opinion; in the context of social media, my words were an identity statement, armed for battle, seeking the validation of allies.
For added complexity, my statement was at odds with a left-leaning orthodoxy with which I often align in other contexts. I had expressed a sentiment that might be applauded by right-wing trolls. If anyone engaged, I might be thrown into a position of picking sides with people I would oppose on most other topics, arguing against people I would normally consider friendly. The “union vs. district” dichotomy provokes people to heightened emotional conflict wherein they fall into opposing camps, reducing grown-ass adults to squabbles better suited to feuding high-school social groups.
Our evolved brains tend to put people into social categories quickly: friend or foe. Are you a freedom fighter or a boot licker? An oracle or a propagandist? A lamb or a lion?
I had left this kind of bullshit behind four years prior, after I finally realized that social media wasn’t doing me—or the world, for that matter—any good. The same mechanisms that trigger addiction in turn reward polarization. That’s not only my personal experience; a 2023 study of 177 countries correlated online political disinformation and hate speech by political parties with deeply polarized societies. Social media is inherently anti-social, eroding democratic norms in exchange for constant engagement with the outrage machine. It’s never just a conversation, because social media is less populated by people than it is by personae.
5
I quit smoking in 1988. I had my last cigarette in 1998. Well, not quite. Whenever I’d go out clubbing with friends, I’d think: “it’s been months since my last cigarette; I can handle just one.” And the next day I’d buy a new pack. My single reply to a Facebook post in the parent group felt like “just one.” I wondered if I’d jump back into internet flame wars the next day.
Fortunately, I was spared. No one engaged with my opinion. There were no likes or angry faces (I may have checked it a few times). It’s a tiny school with a tiny parent group. The people who post there are pretty chill for the most part. I avoided further temptation and returned to my former life away from all social media.
The union didn’t strike. I can’t say if the superintendent’s call-out email caused them to change their collective mind, but it was a rhetorical move that gained popular traction in media spaces. It seemed like the superintendent forced the union back to the table by calling them out: after he matched heat with heat in the public sphere, the two sides returned to negotiating in private. They worked through late nights up until the last minute. The night before school was to begin, a little after 11pm, parents received emails and robocalls affirming that school would start on time the next day.
As for SPS’s tiers, the union and the district made compromises. They finally agreed to a structure that would allow the teachers, the district, and parents to explore alternatives to segregated pathways over the following 18 months. Nobody got everything they wanted, but both sides got something meaningful. Best of all, when they finally stopped trying their cases in the court of public opinion, they brought in a professional mediator who did a better job of centering the needs of 50,000 SPS students.
My son is one of those students. He’ll graduate in a couple more years, and won’t be able to retroactively reap any benefits of changes that may or may not take hold in the system. We don’t have much of a stake remaining. We have our testimony.
