California Sunday Magazine published interviews with teachers about their role in striking, walking out, negotiating, bargaining.
It begins:
On February 22, 2018, some 20,000 teachers in West Virginia — many of them wearing red in solidarity — walked out of their classrooms. That April saw strikes in Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma, as teachers vented their collective frustration in what became known as the #RedforEd movement. In early 2019, educators picketed in Oakland and Los Angeles, in districts across Washington state and Oregon, and again in Colorado. And this fall, educators in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest school district, took to the streets.
After years of system-wide underinvestment, educators are pushing back hard. They have married concerns about pay with their ability to adequately educate students . They have made a few gains — one or two fewer students in their overcrowded classes and significant raises in some cases. But many still see a long way to go, and as another election ramps up, the public will have to decide how much these issues matter. In these pages, we hear from teachers who made the decision to walk the picket lines and others who decided to stay put.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Go teachers!!!! Teach other workers how it’s done!!!!
may union leadership across the nation be looking EXACTLY at how the most effective strikes and actions have been organized
I LOVE Public School Teachers. I couldn’t have chosen a better profession.
Public School Teachers ROCK.
Yes!
It is SO sad that this country doesn’t recognize how important teachers are to the future of this country. Teachers should be making a very good salary. Schools should be in good repair and class sizes should be small enough to allow individual attention. Supportive services should be adequately funded.
It’s hard to understand why people continue to pick politicians who don’t want to fund schools but look for ‘choice’ as a ‘solution’, allow hours of worthless standardized tests and never complain about under-qualified people who get jobs to teach.
There are things wrong with this country and underfunding public education is at the top of the pile…as far as the future of this country stands. This whole thing is sickening and stressful. I applaud anyone who stays in teaching today.
More teachers must be prepared to strike. It is the only way to get political attention and give students the resources that they need to learn.
[In my dreams the whole country will strike at one time and demand better! OUT with standardized testing and tech to take the place of teachers. Maybe someday this will occur. When is ‘enough” going to happen?]
Teacher strikes are victories all. Honestly, I didn’t really go on strike to get class size reductions, school nurses, counselors, librarians, psychologists, and a myriad of other important rights and services that have been thrown under the school bus for charters and testing. I went on strike to fight for the survival of public schools. I went on strike because billionaires bought my school board, and that school board secretively and with no input from anyone hired an investment banker as superintendent to privatize half the schools in the district, which would effectively destroy public education in my city. I went on strike to put a stop to the hostile, corporate takeover, to turn the tide, to take back public education from recklessly greedy billionaires. It was a huge victory and I will always be proud, and I will always stand ready to do it again.
LeftCoastTeacher: GOOD FOR YOU!!!
Thank you, Left Coast Educator. Well said!
Magnificent, LeftCoast!
I commend all the Red for Ed teachers for their walk-outs and strikes. I believe many more job actions will be necessary in the future. We need parent and social justice groups to join as well. The wealthy have no intention of stopping their undemocratic usurping of the common good. They are plotting behind closed doors how to create the perfect dystopia for everyone except the wealthy few at the top.
For the last several decades public education has been the whipping boy for inept politicians and industry. When Detroit built substandard autos and Deming went to Japan, who listened to him, built better cars and Detroit became what it is today, our schools were the culprit.
When the Soviet Union put sputnik in orbit it was public education which was to blame. [If a foreign country were to destroy our country they could not do a better job than does our public education. – The gist of their argument.]
STRANGE; when we put a man on the moon, schools were never mentioned as a contributing factor.
Ad nauseum.
An AZ teacher notes that he had only to change districts, and went from 38 kids in a middle school soc stud class – where as he says, “teaching stops”—to another AZ school where class-sizes are much smaller and there are after-sch prgms and tutoring pgms… The recent EdBuild study on school funding singles out AZ (among 3 states) with the most ‘hot-spot’ borders between advantaged & disadvantaged schools that result in outlandishly discriminatory differences to the tune of $4+k per-pupil funding!
In Denver it’s all about bonuses based on student test-scores, which means all the teachers of ave-to below-ave test-scorers chip in $600-&800 so that a few ‘stars’ [teachers of econ-advantaged students] can score as much as an $18k bonus! And you see this teacher w/the $18k bonus self-justifying [I do a damned good job!]—as if others not scoring that house-tilted jackpot didn’t—& rationalizing because she’s supporting a disabled spouse—who in any other OECD country would be getting appopriate govt support, obviating her need! That’s just… sick.
The CA teacher, speaking about post-Prop 13 teaching: “So your traditional schools were teaching black and brown students with less funding.” This is no exaggeration. I had a neighbor in ‘90’s, 20 yrs my jr [but same-aged kids] who’d moved to NJ from CA & put her kids in an expensive private school despite our outrageous RE taxes that fund one of the top schsys in the state… “Why?” I asked her. She explained that she’d been raised early in Prop 13 days, which meant midclass kids went to reasonably-priced Catholic schs, moving to higher-echelon privates as soon as they could afford it; pubschs were for poor kids. Despite facts, she was mentally married to this paradigm that mandated privsch if you could afford it.
Ths striking Denver 1st-3rdgr teacher illustrates how underpd they are: “Every week, I would go buy some fresh fruit and vegetables. But after the strike, when I got the paycheck that didn’t include money for those three days we were picketing, I was like, All right, I guess I don’t get apples or salad for the next few weeks.”
I empathize w/ the 30-yr-old Oakland teacher who moved to teach in Seattle so as to no longer have to have roommates. But it’s all relative. Here in more-expensiive NJ, my 2 music-teacher sons have assayed sharing houses w/several roommates more than once post-college, periodically moving home between leases—and have had to wait until age 28 to be able to comfortably afford a two-roommate apartment. They have peers who’ve moved to cheaper states [most have returned]. The draw here is the combination of well-off parents who pay plenty for kids’ music lessons, & huge network of NYC-metro musicians who they gig & tour with. Those peers who actually have families w/at least one kid either live in cheaper S NJ w/long commute, or have some sort of family venture which supports them (e.g., an available deceased grandparents’ home, or regular $ support from boomer-parents)… That is the reality for NE-state artsy types….