The author is a public school educator in the San Francisco Unified School district and a proud member of United Educators of San Francisco.
Teachers in Denver are striking for the first time in 25 years. Oakland Education Association, the union of educators in Oakland, California, is mobilizing for a strike after teachers and students organized two wildcat sick-out strikes over the last two months. The Los Angeles educators just made history with a week-long strike of over 33,000 workers with vast support from families and communities.
Charter school teachers have gone on strike in Chicago and Los Angeles. Because charter schools are exempt from many public education mandates, charter school teachers are some of the most exploited educators with little recourse because so few of them are represented in unions. One hundred and seventy-five educators that work for the private Chicago International Charter School corporation have been striking for a week now over pay, class size and working conditions.
The teacher strikes have built up over the last year and show no slowing. The West Virginia teachers just overwhelmingly voted to have a statewide action to protest the state legislature’s attempts to undermine public school teachers’ power and public education there. The House just passed a version of what is now Senate Bill 451 that includes anti-strike provisions and promotes charter schools amongst other malicious legislative proposals.
In general, worker action has increased in the last year. The Bureau of Labor Statistics revealed on Feb. 8 that 485,000 workers participated in work stoppages in 2018, more than in any year since 1986. Hundreds of thousands of these were teachers in West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky and elsewhere. Fed up with decades of privatization attacks on public education, teachers and other education workers went on the offensive and made impressive gains.
These numbers aren’t limited to teachers or public workers, and the overall numbers speak to a potentially revitalized labor movement. The hotel workers’ organized important strike campaigns in multiple cities targeting Marriott Hotels, too, that won impressive raises and protections against sexual assault. The Communication Workers of America also went on strike in West Virginia in March and the Midwest in June. However, school workers did make up a large percentage of the work stoppages last year.
What are teachers rising up against and what are they struggling for?
While each of the strikes have had different qualities to them, the demands often included the following:
- address ridiculously low pay
- institute smaller class sizes
- improve resources (like textbooks) and support (like nurses, counselors, social workers and librarians)
- slow the charter school privatization efforts
- limit insane amounts of testing
The working conditions of the teachers and the learning conditions of the students reflected by these demands are the result of an intense campaign of privatization and attacks undermining public education for decades now.
The attacks on public education have their roots in the Reagan administration, and the wishes of the ruling class in an era of de-industrialization to wage war on many of the gains the working class has fought and won, like Social Security and union organizations. So-called social services, voting rights, and worker protections have been on the chopping block, not just public education.
But the federal legislation that marks the outright war on public education was passed in 2002 by the Bush administration: the “No Child Left Behind Act.” Dianne Ravitch wrote: “NCLB, as it was known, is the worst federal education legislation ever passed by Congress. It was punitive, harsh, stupid, ignorant about pedagogy and motivation, and ultimately a dismal failure. … This is what we got from NCLB: score inflation, cheating, narrowing the curriculum, obsession with test scores, more time devoted to testing and less time for the arts, physical education, history, civics, play, and anything else that was not tested. Among other consequences: demoralization of teachers, a national teacher shortage, more money for testing companies, and less money for teachers and class-size reduction.” The NCLB morphed into “Race to the Top” under the Obama administration, legislation that pitted schools against each other for funds while encouraging the charter movement and threatening union and teacher stability.
Linking teacher pay to test scores is flawed
The Denver strike is challenging a growing issue that hasn’t been at the center of all of the teacher strikes but has been a desire of the anti-public education reformers, that is merit pay. In Denver, it is called ProComp and awards teachers for high test scores. Linking teacher pay to test scores is flawed on so many levels and in Denver has been shown to do nothing to increase teacher retention or improve conditions for either teachers or students.
In each economic downturn since 2002, budget shortfalls were used as an excuse to carry out the legislative policies in a practical way. Teachers were fired en masse and/or took massive pay cuts. Support services were cut. Charter schools were pushed on unsuspecting communities, undermining both teacher unions and public education as charter schools use public money for private means. The heavy testing, and reliance on then-abysmal testing data, were used to rationalize the increased hiring of expensive consultants and excessive numbers of highly paid administrators, rather than teachers and critical support personnel.
In reality, the money for public education has always existed. Each of these budget shortfalls and crises were manufactured. Not once did the military or the police face budget cuts on the level public education has been forced to accept over and over again.
When teachers have gone on strike, are on strike right now, or plan to go on strike, they are confronting the outcome of this assault on education. The teachers are stopping the assault in its tracks and winning important gains.
It is incredible to see the organization and discipline with which educators are carrying out these struggles, from West Virginia to Los Angeles and now Denver to Oakland. They are sending a powerful signal to other teachers and workers in many areas under attack, that the power is ours. When we do come together and organize ourselves and don’t back down from the demands for our communities, we can win.
