When San Francisco’s public school teachers walked off the job on February 9th, shuttering 111 schools and leaving 50,000 children with nowhere to go for a week, the headlines treated it like a breaking point — a beleaguered workforce finally pushed too far.
That framing is wrong. And the people behind this strike were counting on you to believe it.
This strike was not a breaking point.
It was a scheduled event.
One Year in the Making
The California Teachers Association didn’t stumble into this moment. They built it deliberately, spending the past year aligning the contract expiration dates of district unions across the state so they could all apply maximum pressure simultaneously. The CTA called this campaign “We Can’t Wait” — and the explicit goal, in their own words, was to make “a set of shared demands” at “the same time across the state.”
By the time teachers hit the picket lines in San Francisco, at least 18 California school districts had already declared impasse with their unions — including Los Angeles, Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento-area districts, and more. In the Sacramento region alone, five districts are at impasse, with teachers in at least three indicating they are ready to walk. This is not a wave of organic, spontaneous labor unrest. This is a coordinated campaign, timed and targeted, with children as the leverage.
The Manufactured Crisis, By the Numbers
Let’s look at what actually happened in San Francisco, stripped of the union messaging. Teacher starting salaries in San Francisco already begin at approximately $80,000, with an average salary of $100,000. The San Francisco Unified School District was operating under a $102 million deficit and state financial oversight — it literally cannot spend money it doesn’t have.
After keeping 50,000 children out of school for a full week, the union settled for a 5% raise over two years — below their original 9% demand — plus fully employer-funded family healthcare. The total deal costs a reported $183 million. In a district already declared fiscally insolvent. At the deal announcement, Superintendent Maria Su issued a direct warning: layoffs are “on the table” in the years ahead.
The children of San Francisco traded a week of their education for a contract their district may not be able to honor.
We’ve Heard This Before
Those of us who spent years fighting to reopen schools during COVID recognized this playbook immediately. The same unions that insisted schools were too dangerous to open — while teachers collected full salaries at home, while children fell into depression, anxiety, and academic freefall — are the same ones now refusing to teach until their financial terms are met.
In both cases, the messaging is about children.
In both cases, the reality is about power and money. And in both cases, the children pay the price.
Nobody captured the union’s true priorities more honestly than Cecily Myart-Cruz, the president of United Teachers Los Angeles, representing the second-largest school district in the country. In a 2021 interview with Los Angeles Magazine, she was asked about the learning loss her insistence on keeping LA’s schools locked down had inflicted on 600,000 children. Her response:
“There is no such thing as learning loss. Our kids didn’t lose anything. It’s OK that our babies may not have learned all their times tables. They learned resilience. They learned survival. They learned critical-thinking skills. They know the difference between a riot and a protest. They know the words insurrection and coup.”
— Cecily Myart-Cruz, UTLA President, Los Angeles Magazine, August 2021
The head of one of the largest teachers unions in America looked at the wreckage of a year and a half of closed schools — the lost reading skills, the math deficits, the mental health crisis, the kids who simply never came back — and said: it’s fine. They learned the word “coup.”
That quote didn’t end her career. She was re-elected to a second term.
And Now, Breaking Today: California Is Being Sued for Antisemitism
In case you needed any more evidence that California’s public school system has lost its way, today The Free Press broke an exclusive: a coalition of Jewish parents and civil rights organizations have filed the first antisemitism lawsuit ever brought against a U.S. state, naming California, the California Department of Education, and State Superintendent Tony Thurmond as defendants.
The suit was filed in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and StandWithUs on behalf of Jewish families across the state. The 48-page complaint alleges that the process for filing and investigating antisemitism complaints is fundamentally broken — leaving Jewish families with no real recourse. The filing accuses the state of offering only “toothless remedies” through a “glacial and opaque administrative process.”
What are Jewish children in California’s public schools actually experiencing? The lawsuit documents antisemitic behavior across San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Fremont, San Jose, and Los Angeles. One Berkeley High School student watched his art teacher display an image of a Star of David being punched through — and then encourage the class to join a pro-Palestinian walkout the next day. Antisemitic incidents in California’s K-12 schools have increased 623% over the last decade.
Meanwhile, what has the California Teachers Association done? The CTA president opposed AB 715, the state’s new anti-antisemitism law, saying it “raises serious free speech concerns.” The union that just orchestrated a statewide strike campaign cares deeply about “free speech” — when it comes to protecting teachers who show antisemitic imagery to children. The same union that has no problem using children as bargaining chips has plenty of problems protecting Jewish ones.
This is the institution managing the education of millions of California’s children.
A Real Question: What If We Started Over?
It’s worth asking something the political establishment considers unthinkable: if union-controlled public schools are going to manufacture crises, coordinate strikes on a planned schedule, use children as leverage, foment antisemitism in classrooms, and dismiss catastrophic learning loss as political inconvenience — why are we so determined to preserve this structure?
California spends $27,418 per pupil annually. Gavin Newsom’s education budget is $149 billion. With that kind of money flowing into a system that just locked 50,000 children out of school for a week — on a schedule coordinated a year in advance — parents should have real choices. Education savings accounts. Microschools. Charter expansion. A system where the money follows the child, not the institution that holds them hostage.
Using these closures as a forcing function to finally, permanently reimagine who controls American education isn’t a fringe idea. It’s the logical conclusion of watching what happens to children when the adults running their schools decide their interests come last.
What’s Coming
San Francisco settled. But the CTA’s coordinated campaign is not over. Eighteen districts remain at impasse. Sacramento is a powder keg. Teachers in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Berkeley are watching, waiting, ready. This is the opening act of a multi-year strategy to extract maximum concessions from cash-strapped districts by weaponizing school closures — timed for maximum pain, planned well in advance.
The CTA planned this a year ahead. They will plan the next one too.
The question is whether the rest of us will be equally prepared — and whether, this time, we’ll finally stop pretending the union is acting in the interest of children.
🎬 Watch 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures — the documentary that first exposed how “15 days to flatten the curve” became years of devastation for 50 million students. Available now at 15daysfilm.com →