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Students in the Detroit Public Schools now have something in common with the Detroit Tigers: they’ve both been out on called strikes.

A week before the scheduled start of the school year, the Detroit Federation of Teachers (DFT), upset at the Detroit Public Schools’ attempt to eliminate a budget deficit by reducing teacher benefits, voted to strike.  A Detroit judge ordered lengthy negotiating sessions to encourage a deal before the first day of school, but progress was scarce; after a brief attempt to hold school without the striking teachers, administrators yielded to reality and canceled school.

Early in the strike, many painted the strike as an effort to improve education for the students.  Variations of “this isn’t about the teachers” were a common refrain; DFT president Janna Garrison said, “What we’re fighting for is not only for ourselves, it’s for the students. The two are connected.”  Perhaps that was believable while the strike was consuming only the last days of the teachers’ summer vacations, but as everyone now knows, the strike consumed much more than a summer vacation.  And what was initially purported ultimately to be for the good the students is now harming everyone: the city, the district, the teachers – and especially the students.

The city of Detroit has been touting a push toward a renaissance; significant efforts have gone into renewing and rebuilding a city burdened by years of decline, neglect and mismanagement.  Still, the construction and restoration has not yet stemmed the flow of people from the city.  For the city to turn around its fortunes, it will need to attract a strong, vibrant population, at the heart of which ought to be families; to attract families, it will need strong schools to which parents want to send their children.  Parents are not wooed by a district that fails to start school on time due to a strike; with such a district, the city is left with one fewer attraction to entice new residents, and the renaissance becomes that much more difficult.

Similarly, the district has been engaged in a long struggle to change both the perceptions and the realities of its performance and culture; a city and its schools are closely tied, so Detroit’s decline has not been kind to the district.  A dwindling population and administrative mismanagement have compounded the challenges of education in a declining city; the situation once reached a point so low as to prompt a temporary state takeover.  And then, when the district sought to repair its finances in part by looking for concessions from teachers, the DFT membership voted to strike – a very public blow to a teetering school system.  With the sad combination of city and school mired in the same decay, students have been leaving the district for other schools in the area; early reports indicate the strike has accelerated the drain from Detroit’s student body.  With each departing student, more funding walks out of Detroit and into other districts, making a difficult financial situation worse.

This student flight hurts the district, and in doing so, it hurts the very parties seeking benefits by striking: the teachers.  Even if the teachers do gain the benefits and pay raises they are seeking, the accelerated student loss and its accompanying funding loss will force cuts not just of benefits or wages, but of jobs themselves; the teachers who now find themselves campaigning for their benefits may soon find themselves without a class to teach in Detroit.

But those are secondary issues.  The damage to the city, the district and the teachers is significant, but ultimately, it is not as important as the damage being done to the very people who are supposed to be the focus of this fight: the students.  The city is trying to salvage its image, the district is trying to rebuild its finances, and the teachers are trying to save their benefits; the resulting conflict has pushed education to the back of the line, and the students, the very people who are supposed to be the focus of the district and the teachers, are out of luck.

Some of the sights and sounds of the strike belie the notion that it is truly for the students.  Picket lines feature signs bearing slogans such as “Hands off my benefits”; striking teachers express sentiments that are decidedly not student-focused: “It’s not like we don’t want to work, but we have to do what’s right for us,” said one elementary science teacher.  Other area schools provided further context to dispel the idea of a student-motivated strike; while Detroit teachers refused to work in the absence of a new contract, other area teachers chose not to disrupt school, even as contract negotiations continued.

As Detroit teachers do what’s right for them and district officials deal with the consequences of mismanagement and an unwilling workforce – and both discover the fallout of the failure to engage in timely negotiations – students are left in a serious predicament.  Some have been able to escape the strike by enrolling in other schools in the area, but most are unwilling or unable to follow their lead.  Some remaining students have been pushed to keep their minds busy; others lack the necessary support structure to push them to do so, thus making every lost day of school costly.

Previous court rulings had mandated only marathon negotiating sessions, but the continued stalemate compelled futher action; on Friday, September 8, Judge Susan Borman acknowledged the harm being done to the students and the district as she ordered the teachers back to work.  But even with a clear court order in place, union officials say they cannot predict the response of the teachers; the union’s response is essentially that the teachers will choose their own response.  Under those circumstances, the district continued the indefinite cancellation of classes.

Detroit’s students are its future; for its students to better themselves and their city, a solid education is a necessity.  The longer it continues, the more the teacher strike damages not just education in the city, but also the future of the students and the city.  In the face of the court order, the teachers now have a choice: put the students and their education first, or put their own benefits first.  Or, to put it in Tigers terms: when it comes to Detroit students’ education and future, they have the choice to give them a bright Comerica Park or a rotting Tiger Stadium.

Burrill Strong works at the University of Michigan and photographs local high school sports in his spare time.  He lives in Chelsea.