Sadly, the Penn Hills SD (Allegheny County) strike has materialized. As usually happens, the two sides are charging each other with bad faith. I noted two days ago that the PSEA negotiator representing the teachers claimed that that board statements were designed to mislead the public and teachers. A statement by the board president on the Penn Hills district website says that the union is “playing games.”

Neither side’s assertions are easily verifiable from information available to the public in brief news reports. No one should expect transparency to be some magic way of making everyone happy. But a lot of bad feelings stem from failure to disclose the terms of proposals actually on the table (the full terms, not just the bits that will sound best or worst to whichever audience you are trying to reach).

The board president’s statement contains one puzzling line: “The item that has been most at issue, however, has been teacher accountability.” I wish he’d said what he meant by that.