PORTLAND, Ore. – A handful of student activists have injected themselves into the ongoing contract dispute between Portland school officials and the teachers union, the local teachers union.

The Socialist Worker reports that some 70 students walked out of school on Dec. 13 to show solidarity with the Portland Association of Teachers. A handful of parents and community members joined the rally.

It was the third pro-union demonstration that Portland students have joined in recent weeks, the Worker notes.

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During their most recent display, students held signs that called for smaller class sizes, a reference to one of the major sticking points in the district-union contract negotiations.

During previous contract talks, district leaders ceded some control of school operations to the teachers union, in lieu of hefty pay raises. But with this contract, Portland school officials are making a stand and demanding that strict class size limits and unreasonable teacher transfer policies be eliminated from the contract.

Many studies have shown that effective teachers help students learn, regardless of class size. There is no need to keep extra teachers on the payroll, just to provide more dues revenue for the union.

The two sides are also at odds over the size of salary increases for teachers.

Both the union and the district have gone to extensive lengths to win the public to their side in preparation for the district’s first-ever teachers’ strike, which could happen within a matter of weeks.

It’s unclear in the student activists have been coached by PAT leaders, but that certainly doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility. PAT leaders have made no secret of the fact that they’re patterning their behavior after the radical Chicago Teachers Union.

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CTU leaders have masterfully used parents and students in their protests to make the union’s demands appear student-centered, instead of self-serving. Amazingly the naïve students and parents fall for the strategy and allow themselves to be used, over and over again.

That’s probably what’s happening on Portland.

Comments from one Portland student organizer suggest there will be more walkouts and student action in the future. His words also strongly hint that he’s been coached in union-talk and brainwashed to blindly accept the union point of view.

So this is what they’re being taught in classrooms, when they are supposed be learning math, English and History.

“Solidarity is our weapon. We can walk out here at Wilson (High School), but we also need to talk to our comrades and our students across the city, and we need to organize walkouts and actions all across this town,” said Ian Jackson, who participated in one of the earlier protests.

“We can’t just speckle walkouts across the city; we have to create a movement. We need to come together as students.”

Jackson may get the chance to apply his strategy. Friday marks the end of a state-imposed “cooling off” period. After today, the Portland school board can impose its final contract offer on the PAT, and the union has the right to go on strike.

It promises to get quite ugly, and unfortunately some well-meaning but ignorant Portland students may end up being the primary victims of a completely unjustified teachers strike.