Frustrated by years of budget cuts and stagnant wages, thousands of teachers in Oklahoma walked out and joined the protest in the State Capitol.
A Facebook group formed overnight to start the revolt. In one day, it picked up 21,000 members
It went from one 25-year-old teacher to 70,000 people in three weeks. Margaret Mead said that a small group of thoughtful, dedicated people could change the world. It is happening in Oklahoma and Kentucky.
State legislators pride themselves on low taxes, especially on oil and gas production. They do not pride themselves on paying teachers a living wage.
It takes a 3/4 legislative majority to raise taxes.
Students are just as angry as teachers. They are being teachers. In one school, they cancel sports games because the roof leaks in the gym.
Thousands of teachers in Kentucky walked out and joined the protest in the State Capitol.
What kind of a country is this anyway? Billionaires want lower taxes and don’t care about the future of our nation.
Oklahoma teachers: Stay strong. We are with you!
Kentucky teachers: Stay strong. We are with you!
Remember in November who stood with you!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Soon, none of us will have agreed upon unions and we will all literally be with you, fighting for fairness and dignity. In the meantime, you are heroes on the front lines of the billionaires’ war against the middle class. Proud to call Oklahoma teachers colleagues! Proud as can be!
I just heard that my old school district just pink slipped all probationary(1-4yr) teachers. They are supposed to reapply for their jobs. What a joke! I have not heard whether the union has protested or not, but they have no power to do anything. I was riffed both my first and second year as were all 1-2 year teachers, but we were all called back in August. Of course that meant that we could do no planning for classes with no access to resources. I never knew what I was teaching until a day or two before classes started not that it made that much difference.(snark alert) There was no curriculum.
speduktr : I got canned from four districts in Illinois and none would give me tenure. I gave up and left the country to work. I often wonder what happened to the other music teachers who were looking for jobs. There is only so much ‘new job’ searching that one can stand.
While applying for the next ‘new job’, I noticed that in many cases the same districts again had music openings. It was a case of ‘hire and fire’ to keep wages low. They kept the music program open with a rotating group of teachers.
One tenured music teacher in Frankfort, IL told me that I was the 8th music teacher to be hired. He indicated that we all couldn’t be that bad.
Weingarten was on NPR this morning suggesting that the end result of doing without collective bargaining was strikes, and that this was to become the new normal without strong union participation. Perhaps she should also note that the Oklahoma spring was brought to you by the West Virginia spring. Let us hope that these movements do not follow the Arab Spring, which has spawned some pretty vicious confrontations.
Before there were established unions, wildcat strikes spawned by the nineteenth century equivalent of social media, the poster, produced violent strikes and almost civil war.
Weingarten blows with any wind that will keep her in power, but she is right that strikes will occur with or without unions. She is making her rounds currently and nursing everyone’s wounds when in fact, she has helped the enemies out there hold their muskets straight and aimed. She never told any reformers to light the cannon, but she also stood in proximity to the cannon as she slightly and complicity witnessed the match being struck to the fuse.
That’s Weingarten and the reformers for you: they are both VERY civilized, well spoken, and genteel while their governance and politics are vicious.
I think you are right when you say, “vicious confrontations” that potentially can befall teachers. But if anything has been vicious, it has been the underfunding of public education, the vicious testing policies, the viciously low pay of teachers, and the vicious tying of scores to teacher evaluation, and the vicious privatization of public schools by siphoning away tax dollars from taxpayers in a viciously undemocratic process.
Vicious is as vicious does as vicious begets.
May everyone who works for a living go on strike and bring the overclass to its knees. It’s the only language most of them are capable of understanding.
After years of oppression, civility and politeness might turn into modalities and approaches that will seldom get anything done. People might not realize that the 1930s was a very violent time when workers tried to gain rights and dignities in their pay, level of safety, and length of work week. There were fights and shootings, arsons, and bombings. It was s dark period in America’s history, but it had a purpose.
I don’t condone violence and I do HATE it with a passion! But I would be lying if I did not acknowledge its presence in many a society’s struggles for justice.
You make my point. If we expect to make policy that hurts people in a vacuum, we deceive ourselves. I cannot dispute that the issues that lead to violent revolution are usually those which do institutional violence to segments of the population. Nor is the inevitability of these revolutionary movements lost on me as a historian.
Still, I fear violent revolution. The guilotine and its machinations are not for this kind and generally agrarian individual. Thus I advocate for fairness out of the hope that we all can get along. It is growing more difficult these days.
Weingarten does not appreciate irony.
About the walk out in W Virginia, which was organized by teachers (not union heads), Weingarten said
“Whether it’s the teachers in West Virginia or the kids in Parkland, people are organizing. You saw it with the women’s marches last year and now, with the strikes and protests this year, there is a developing sense that we need the power in our hands to change this. We can’t keep outsourcing this power to others. There is a recognition that if we want things changed, we have to do it ourselves.”
You have to love how Weingarten attempts to ingratiatewith herself with W Virginia teachers by using the word “ourselves”.
Kentucky teachers: “Stay strong. I am with you!”…Retired teacher who worked in Illinois. This is an injustice that must be overcome!!! Good for YOU!!
I had a teacher who was from Oklahoma, she taught French and she lived in California for a while, but then moved back. I still keep in contact with her through facebook and it really is hurtful knowing that teachers do not get paid enough. I’ve seen her have 2 jobs, in and out of relationships. No teacher should ever have to go through this pain. I am in my last few weeks of university and people have been asking me so much, “Are you sure you want a shitty job?” the problem isn’t the job, it’s the way we get treated. Teachers do deserve to get paid so much more. Teachers should never have to worry about living when they have worked their butts off to teach the future generation. I remember that even attending a CSU (California State University), they almost went on strike because professor were not getting paid enough. My professors (or teachers) shouldn’t have to be living in their cars! I am with these teachers all the way.