Kendra Rose, who teaches at Franklin High School, recently had an upsetting conversation with a "dude" about the teachers' strike, which began on Wednesday. The dude, an engineer, expressed with great confidence the opinion that Seattle Public Schools teachers should not go on strike because they are asking for too much. They already have more than most others in society, and so should be reasonable about what the school district can and cannot afford.

He went on to accuse Rose and her kind of being selfish, and pointed out that firefighters are not allowed to go on strike. Also, because teachers are salaried employees, extending the school day should not be an issue to them. Lastly, he felt that if the teachers' union sucks so bad and hasn't been able to get its members a cost of living increase, maybe the teachers should fire the union and spend their money on a lobbyist.

I do not want to directly challenge or examine or expose the inanity of these points made by the dude. They are common enough. All what I want to make clear is that the system we have right now is structured not to solve actual problems but to generate vacuous conversations of this kind, to direct bad feelings toward teachers and unions, and to reproduce the inequalities of our society.

In a normal world, we would never say such nonsense about teachers being out of touch with reality or being a touch too selfish. But in our upside down world it is normal to actually say these things, which means the system we have—one which forces teachers to strike, that leaves parents and students politically frustrated, and finds the city's major daily deliberately directing this frustration away from the actual disease (unconstitutional under-funding) and toward its symptom (teachers demanding more funds)—this is actually the normal condition and not the exception.

What we see when examining this political and economic processes is not an education system that's malfunctioning, but one working as desired.

And you can tell it works not only by the vacuous conversations it makes possible, and the air of reasonability it provides to editorial boards who make plainly bizarre statements ("the teachers are demanding too much"), but also by the results: the kind of society we see all around us.

We have an education system that continues to send specific racial and class groups to the army, to the prison, to the streets, and other groups to local colleges, the Ivy League, to top jobs. What is it about the current system in Seattle and elsewhere that does not reproduce the society we really see everyday? And if we look at the historic record, which Jen Graves did in her post "Hey Parents, Here's What You Need to Know About the Teachers' Strike," it is plain that not much real effort has been made to change this state of things. In fact there is even hard evidence that things are getting worse. From Huffington Post:

If state budget trends reflect the country's policy priorities, then the U.S. currently values prisoners over children, a new report suggests.

A report released this week by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the growth of state spending on prisons in recent years has far outpaced the growth of spending on education. After adjusting for inflation, state general fund spending on prison-related expenses increased over 140 percent between 1986 and 2013. During the same period, state spending on K-12 education increased only 69 percent, while higher education saw an increase of less than six percent.

The exception to this system would be a school district that pays its teachers well, provides them with the resources they need to perform their jobs well, and makes big investments not in children who already have the means to succeed but those who face greater financial and educational challenges. At present, this system, as the Washington State Supreme Court well knows, exists only as an ideal. If it were a reality, however, you would see all around us a completely different composition of our society with other kinds of institutional arrangements. But as long as the society we have with us today, which is structurally the same as the society that consolidated in last quarter of the 20th century, is reproduced, we can expect more strikes, more bad feelings, more misdirected frustrations, more pointless conversations—in short, more of the same.