John Thompson writes in “The Progressive” about the aftermath of last spring’s teacher uprising in Oklahoma.
Read it all.
“Teachers who walked off the job this spring protesting poor salaries and inadequate school funding in multiple states are winning in the court of popular appeal. According to a new survey: “In the six states where there were wide-scale teacher strikes and walkouts—West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Colorado—63 percent of respondents favored raising teacher pay. Public support in those states jumped by 16 percentage points since last year.”
“The strong sentiments expressed by those in the teacher walkout states carried over to support for teacher pay raises from survey respondents across the country, with nearly half of those provided with information on average teacher salaries in their state saying pay should increase. Support for higher teacher pay increased from a year ago among both Democrats and Republicans.
“In Oklahoma, the teacher revolt prompted 112 current or former teachers and family members of teachers to run for local, state, and federal office. More than seventy of those advanced in primary elections.
“But since the walkout and the primaries, the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v AFSCME decision essentially imposed “right to work” on teachers across the nation, and anti-union “reform” groups and politically conservative organizations have followed up with campaigns encouraging teachers to leave their unions.
“Also, with a new school year starting, local teachers unions find themselves back in a familiar, but uncomfortable situation of having to collaborate with school systems and government leaders in the now super-charged political environment created by the walkouts.
“Teachers have a good shot at continuing to build popular support and even at winning at the ballot box this November, but they need to stay unified in the face of new challenges to their unions. Key to this is confronting an emerging divide over whether their movement is being led from the top down or the bottom up.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Very good that militant teachers and allies are running for office, send those folks donations and bang the doorbells to bring out the vote. It will be very bad though if the battle shifts from the outside walkouts and wildcats to the inside of invisible govt. mtgs. Only an outside movement of militant teachers and their many, many allies will move govt. in a progressive direction. Govt. at all levels is hostile to labor and friendly to business billionaires and their cronies. The brave teacher walkouts last spring were historic in their statewide solidarity. The top-down leadership of the two teacher unions refused during all these terrible years to fight against the decimation of public schools, so leadership from below had to finally take the lead. Let’s hope this lesson is not lost in the coming months, that only militant leaders from below and extra-parliamentary mass action will force govt. at any level to stop the private looting of the nation and start the recovery of the common welfare.
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I think it is terrific that more teachers are running for office. My grandmother was a school teacher, and her husband, my grandfather served in the state assembly (Kentucky). She often gave him advice on educational matters.
One of our finest presidents was Woodrow Wilson. He was an academician, and our only president with a PhD.
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THAT is a telling statement about our country: out of 45 Presidents only one had a PhD.
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Not so bad. PhDs were rare until recently.
FDR didn’t have one and he was a good president.
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Borrowing methods and strategy from Russia, the Alt-Right led GOP will do all it can to create discord and cast doubt and distrust of teachers among teachers and parents.
Will Facebook let them run their misleading propaganda campaign through Facebook? Will Twitter? Will any of the social networking sites?
For money, I think the answer will be yes.
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Yay! Public School Teachers ROCK.
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