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The MTA pressed that matter in its election-endorsement interviews, and MTA President Max Page recently served notice to the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that legalizing teacher strikes ranks high on his list of legislative goals.

“We are going to reclaim the right to strike,” he said. “It is a human and labor right, and our members will be exercising it out of love for their students and out of public service to each commonwealth [sic] when there is a necessary need to do that to secure the working conditions and learning conditions.”

Exactly what that inelegant word-salad sentence means is hard to decipher. One presumes that MTA will confine its efforts to Massachusetts, but it’s unclear what matters will prompt MTA members to feel the necessary need to stop work. For his part, Page refused several interview requests.

Sadly, however, we do know that for Page, the MTA’s professed “love” for students doesn’t necessarily extend to ensuring they are well-prepared for work or college. In remarks at the board’s August meeting, he spoke dismissively of the panel’s “focus on income, on college and career readiness” as “tied to the capitalist class and its needs for profit.”

The MTA, which spends heavily to elect Democratic officeholders, has so far enlisted about a dozen lawmakers in this particular policy pursuit. On the Senate side, Senators Becca Rausch, Democrat of Needham and an MTA endorsee, and Marc Pacheco, Democrat of Taunton and a stalwart union ally, have cosponsored the union’s legislation.

Why their support? Apparently in part because teacher strikes are already occurring.

“Teachers are striking. Period,” Rausch said in an interview. She is right that there have been a scattering of teacher strikes over the past few years, encouraged by the MTA.

But that rationale makes violating the law a justification for changing the law. Further, it rewards scofflaws, and on this matter, the MTA has indeed been scoffing at the law.

As the MTA has fallen under the sway of a hard-left university unionist in the last decade, striking has increasingly come to be seen as a way for the labor organization to increase its power. Thus the quiet push to encourage locals to violate the law — and the union’s public effort to legalize teacher strikes.

Currently, fines for striking serve as something of detriment to prolonged and disruptive work stoppages. In Haverhill, for example, the Haverhill Education Association, an MTA affiliate, has been tagged with fines and damages of some $360,000 for its four-day October strike and may be on the hook for several hundred thousand more. That has severely strained the local’s coffers.

Rausch, however, believes public employees need added clout to enhance their bargaining power.

“There is inherently a power imbalance between employers and employees, which, without the ability of employees to come together, favors the employers,” the senator said.

That is certainly true in the private sector, where unions serve as an important counterweight to corporate power. But the political economy of the public sector is quite different. Through their campaign contributions, endorsements, and other spending, public-sector unions have considerable influence in electing the officials who are then their ostensible bosses.

Public employees have the added advantage of having been granted a virtual monopoly on the provision of many public services. When schools close because of a strike, most students and families have no readily available alternative. Teacher strikes cause huge inconvenience to families, depriving kids of the ability to attend school and forcing parents of younger children to make alternative plans for the days lost to the school work stoppage. We saw that last week in Woburn, where the MTA local had been striking. (A strike-ending deal was struck on Sunday.)

If teachers gain the legal — read: consequence-free — right to strike and thus can stop work for as long as they want without facing escalating fines, strikes will become much more frequent and much longer. That will disrupt family and community life in ways that will create public pressure for settlements that are unrelated to the actual merits of the bargaining positions.

So despite Page’s invocation of “public service” as a rationale for legalizing teacher strikes, the opposite is true. Legalizing those job actions runs counter to the public interest in both theory and practice.

“I believe teachers understand that our kids desperately need to be back in school after years of disruption due to the pandemic,” said Jeff Riley, state commissioner of elementary and secondary education. “I am concerned, however, that certain members of union leadership are not working in the best interest of students and families who need stability in their schools now more than ever.”

That’s exactly right.

Now, today’s MTA being today’s MTA, it won’t drop this quest.

Thus it would be in the best interest of students, families, communities, and the state if every legislator the MTA lobbies on this misplaced priority said a firm, final, and unflinching no.

And, further, if they all told Max Page and his MTA messengers to drop their silly effort to cloak their union’s power-enhancing scheme in the garb of what’s good for Massachusetts schoolchildren. Why? Because that is simply untrue.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us on Twitter at @GlobeOpinion.