This is amazing. The ink wasn’t even dry on the Janus Decision, and letters from a rightwing policy shop in Michigan were delivered to teachers in New York, urging them to leave their union. The letters came from the Mackinac Center, which has been a recipient of DeVos family funding.
Mackinac says it plans to spend $10 million on its anti-union campaign.
How do these people sleep at night?
I wrote this article, which was posted just online by the Washington Post.
Charters are not “progressive.” They pave the way for vouchers. They divert funding from public schools, which enroll 85% of American students. They are more segregated than public schools. Ninety percent are non-union. The far-right Walton Foundation is spending $200 million a year on charters and Betsy DeVos is currently spending $400 million, which may soon increase to $500 million. The vaunted “high performance” charters have either higher attrition or cherry pick their students.
Our nation is evolving a new dual school system, with one system choosing its students and the other required to find a place for all who apply.
This is a big step forward. The union gained the right to block unnecessary tests. The ultimate goal must be to block all standardized tests because they are inherently designed to favor advantaged students over disadvantaged students.
Some network chiefs are trying to saddle students and teachers with useless and unnecessary tests. But we know what our students need – and we’re using powerful new language in our contract to reject these tests.
As part of our demand for respect for our professionalism and decision-making, we’ve fought against tests that are unduly burdensome and not useful. In the current Board-Union Agreement, we won the right to vote on ALL assessments that are not mandated by the State of Illinois, REACH, or particular programs like IB or bilingual education.
This is huge. This year, dozens of schools have held discussions in their PPCs, school communities and union meetings, and held votes where members have said “NO” to ‘optional’ assessments.
Some Network Chiefs are pushing back and trying to persuade members to add more tests – but members have held firm and confident in their judgement about the assessments their students need – or don’t need.
Cases which cannot be resolved at the school level will be brought to Strategic Bargaining for resolution. Our view is that the contract is clear and that teachers know their students’ needs.
If you’re having problems resolving testing issues at the school level, contact your field rep so this can be brought to strategic bargaining. And remember to email your plan and vote results to Vera Lindsay.
Both teachers and students have been victims of over-reliance on high-stakes testing for decades. Way too much teaching time has been taken up with prepping students for test-taking and administering numerous assessments — often, it seems, to profit big testing companies. A serious side effect: counselors are so busy with test prep duties on top of huge caseloads that they lack adequate time to counsel students who need the help they’ve been trained to provide.
But we know what our students need, and we’re using powerful new language in our contract to reject the time wasted on unnecessary and pointless tests — and take that time back for teaching.
The New York Times published an opinion article yesterday by Conor P. Williams of the New America Foundation, in which Williams argues that liberals should love charter schools and ignore the fact that Betsy DeVos loves them too.
He selects one school in Minneapolis to make his point. Hiawatha Academies, where 95% of the students are Hispanic. The school is non-union, like most every charter school. Williams proposes Hiawatha as a charter very different from the views of Betsy DeVos. But he forgets to mention that DeVos just gave Hiawatha Academies $1.8 Million. Maybe not so out of step with Betsy as he pretends.
But even though it is segregated and non-union, writes Williams, liberals should love it because it is good for Hispanic children.
But liberals are critical of charters, and Williams doesn’t understand why.
“And now the teachers are being forced to respond to criticism from people who by most measures should be their allies. Robert Panning-Miller, the former president of the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, has called Hiawatha schools emblematic of a “corporate reform movement” that values “compliance and test scores over critical thinking” and criticized them as being part of an “apartheid education” movement, because their students are almost exclusively children of color.
“It’s true that nine out of 10 Hiawatha students are Hispanic. But if Hiawatha schools enroll a high number of minority students and English learners, that’s because they serve them well.”
Now why in the world would the leader of the state union reject a non-union school? Shouldn’t all schools be non-union?
Williams says certain liberals are picking on charters because they are part of the DeVos agenda.
“Progressive critics are taking advantage of the moment to tie charter-friendly Democrats to her toxic public image. On the day after President Trump’s inauguration, Valerie Strauss, a Washington Post education writer, accused Democratic reformers like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former Newark mayor, of “advancing corporate education reform” through their support of school choice.”
Corey Booker is not only in favor of charters, he also supports vouchers. Is it possible for Booker to be completely aligned with DeVos’ school choice beliefs and still be a “liberal?”
Williams writes, “Progressives can ill afford this kind of sniping. The last thing the left needs right now is a war between teachers unions and liberal charter supporters.”
He does not explain why teachers unions should support non-union schools.
The New America Foundation has a long list of big donors. The biggest is Eric Schmidt ($4 Million), former CEO of Google. The second biggest is the Gates Foundation.
What Williams forgets to mention is that the biggest funder of charter schools is the far-right Walton Family Foundation, the far-right Anschutz Foundation, the far-right Koch Brothers, the Heritage Foundation, plus ALEC, plus every red state Governor and Legislature. The Waltons funded one of every four charters in Minnesota. This article is fundamentally dishonest.
Thomas Frank, author, commends the striking teachers in Arizona and elsewhere for dashing the neoliberal dream of demonizing teachers.
He writes in “The Guardian”:
What I like best about the wave of teachers’ strikes that have swept America these last few months is how they punch so brutally and so directly in the face of the number one neoliberal educational fantasy of the last decade: that all we need to do to fix public education is fire people.
Fire teachers, specifically. They need to learn fear and discipline. That’s what education “reformers” have told us for years. If only, the fantasy goes, we could slay the foot-dragging unions and the red-tape rules that keep mediocre teachers in their jobs, then things would be different. If only some nice “tech millionaires” would step in and help us fire people! If only we could get a thousand clones of Michelle Rhee, the former DC schools chancellor who fired so many people she even once fired someone on TV!
Now just look at what’s happened. We’ve seen enormous teacher protests in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Arizona, with more on the way. Actions that look very much like strikes by people who, in some of these states, are legally forbidden to strike. It was the perfect opportunity for education “reformers” to fire people, and fire them en masse. It was the politicians’ chance to show us what a tough-minded boss could do.
And in most cases, it was state governments that capitulated. It was hard-hearted believers in tax cuts and austerity and discipline who caved, lest they themselves get fired by voters at the next opportunity.
That, folks, is the power of solidarity, and the wave of teacher walkouts is starting to look like our generation’s chance to learn the lesson our grandparents absorbed during the strike wave of the late 1930s: that given the right conditions and the right amount of organization, working people can rally the public and make social change all by themselves. Irresistibly. Organically. From the bottom up.
Teachers won’t stand for austerity any more. They are rising.
It is a wonderful article. I urge you to read it in full.
Read this story if you want to understand why teachers need tenure and unions.
Ralph Ratto is in a state of shock.
His small district is successful by current measures. But a new superintendent decided to disrupt everything and everyone.
“Today the administration decided to shuffle the personnel in our very successful district. Our small K-6 district (New Hyde Park- Garden City Park) has 4 buildings and 145 teachers. I am the local President ( full disclosure).
“Take a look at our NYS report card. Even though I am totally against this type of data, the data shows that we are extremely successful. With this success, one would think that our new Superintendent and our 4 brand new building principals would look towards our successes, collaborate with staff and look to build on them.
“Unfortunately, they have chosen to do the exact opposite. They announced a major shake up of most of the teachers here. They changed our grades we will teach, changed rooms and have us even changing buildings They are taking teachers who have spent many years in lower grades and assigning them to upper grades and vice a versa. They have refused to share the rationale for this upheaval.
“I am well aware that every year there needs to be some changes, due to enrollment and other needs. Those changes are often rational decisions with some teacher input. Not this year! We have been told nothing except this is your new assignment.
As our Local President, I believe my new assignment in another building is due to my position as President. That will not stand. I have has a successful 19 year career and I will be damned if they will get away with this.”
Why? He doesn’t know. No one will say. Disruption is not an end in itself.
John Thompson, teacher and historian in Oklahoma, writes here about Deborah Gist, now superintendent in Tulsa, formerly State Superintendent in Rhode Island during the infamous mass firing of the staff at Central Falls High School in 2010.
He writes:
What’s the Matter with Deborah Gist’s Tulsa?
As explained previously, teacher walkouts started in Oklahoma and other “red” states are primarily caused by the rightwing agenda described in Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? And so far, the teachers’ rebellions are mostly coming from places where corporate school reform was imposed. But as Jeff Bryant notes, teacher resistance is growing in the “purple” state of Colorado and other regions. Bryant explains:
“The sad truth is financial austerity that has driven governments at all levels to skimp on education has had plenty of compliance, if not downright support, from centrist Democrats who’ve spent most of their political capital on pressing an agenda of “school reform” and “choice” rather than pressing for increased funding and support that schools and teachers need.”
https://dianeravitch.net/2018/04/18/john-thompson-the-oklahoma-teachers-walkout-what-we-learned/
http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/why-teacher-uprisings
Data-driven, charter-driven reforms incentivized by the Race to the Top and edu-philanthropy likely contributed to recent walkouts by weakening unions and the professional autonomy of educators. This undermined both the political power required to fight budget cuts, and the joy of teaching and learning.
And that brings us to the question of What’s the Matter with the Tulsa Public Schools?
Whether its Dana Goldstein writing in the New York Times, Mike Elk writing for the Guardian, or Oklahoma reporters, the coverage cites disproportionate numbers of Tulsa teachers. Their complaints start with budget cuts but often mention the ways that the TPS is robbing teachers and principals of their professional autonomy.
Goldstein notes that Deborah Gist is now allied with the Oklahoma Education Association in advocating for increased teacher salaries, even though she was “the hard-charging education commissioner in Rhode Island [who] tried to weaken teachers’ seniority protections and often clashed with their union.” I wonder, however, whether Gist’s policies have contributed to the anger and exhaustion that prompted the walkout. After all, Gist is a member of the corporate reform “Chiefs for Change,” and a Broad Academy graduate in a system with nine other Broadies, and who is now expanding charter and “partnership schools.”
Tulsa started down a dubious policy path of “exiting” teachers around the time when Gist was attacking Rhode Island teachers. It accepted a Gates Foundation “teacher quality” grant. A Tulsa World analysis of turnover data showed that the Gates effort was followed by “a significant uptick … when it suddenly went from about 200-250 exits in any given year and jumped in 2011 to about 360-400 per year. That’s when the district began using its then-new teacher evaluation for ‘forced exits’ of teachers for performance reasons.”
From 2012 through 2014, “some 260 ‘forced exits’ were reported by TPS leaders.”
The World reports that teacher turnover grew even more after Gist arrived. Over the last two years, there has been an “exodus of 1,057, or 35 percent, of all 3,000 school-based certified staff.” The district’s average turnover rate was 21% in 2016-17, with turnover reaching 47% in one school.
And what happened to student performance? Tulsa’s test score gains are now among the lowest in the nation, with 3rd graders growing only 3.8 years during their next 5 years of schooling.
The World’s data shows that the exodus is not merely due to low salaries. About 28% of former teachers “are not in higher-paying states but in other Oklahoma school districts with comparable pay.”
The World quotes a former Tulsa teacher criticizing the implementation of “personalized learning.” He could understand how standardized laptop technology “could help bad or inexperienced teachers, but for him, it made him feel like little more than a computer lab attendant.” The teacher said the TPS “standardized it so we’re all at the low-rung of the totem pole. … That’s like a huge slap in the face for a teacher. That’s the best part of teaching for most people is to be able to design and use your creativity.”
Earlier this year, Tulsa teacher resistance began in Edison Preparatory School, a high-performing school with a five-year teacher turnover rate of 62%. An Advanced Placement teacher, Larry Cagle, has been quoted extensively by the national press. Cagle recounted how “year after year, high-quality teachers retire early.” So, he and fellow teachers started to address both the deterioration of school climate and the increase in turnover.
Even though Cagle has sympathy for the administration which has to face serious budget challenges, he challenges its Broad-style, top-down policies. Despite the teacher shortage, the administration is incentivizing the retirements of older teachers. It is also using philanthropic donations to fund the Education Service Center (ESC), which sounds to me like a misnomer. Its highly-paid administrators have disempowered rather than served administrators and teachers.
Cagle says, “We would like the ESC to stop lobbying philanthropists,” and start lobbying legislators.
http://www.tulsakids.com/Editors-Blog/Web-2018/Edison-Teacher-Talks-Money/
A detailed analysis by Tulsa Kids shows that the Tulsa micromanaging is consistent with that of other failed Broad-run districts. And its comments by TPS teachers is especially revealing. A teacher who worked with the Broad-laden administrative team wrote that they identified themselves as the “Super Team.”
http://www.tulsakids.com/Editors-Blog/Web-2018/Its-Not-Just-Edison/
And that helps explain why so many Tulsa teachers walked out of their classrooms before the statewide walkout. If the reign of Gist is not stopped, even the $6,100 pay increase will not be enough to start rebuilding its schools. What happens, however, if Oklahoma’s reenergized teachers fight back against the Billionaires Boys Club’s mandates? Maybe Colorado teachers will do the same with its corporate reforms that were choreographed by the Democrats for Education Reform, as Arizona teachers resist their state’s mass privatization, and Kentucky teachers challenge last year’s attacks on their state’s profession.
Matt Barnum of Chalkbeat obtained additional portions of the postmortem analysis of why the corporate reformers lost in a state referendum to expand charter schools in Massachusetts (here is his first report). It makes for fascinating reading, both his summary and the original document itself. The Walton family and their allies invested millions in the referendum, hoping to increase the number of privately-managed charter schools in the Bay State. The Walton Education Coalition funded the postmortem, hoping to learn from the resounding defeat of the “Yes on 2” campaign.
The referendum was held in November 2016. “Yes on 2” advocated for expanding the number of charters in the state by 12 per year, anywhere in the state, indefinitely. “No on 2” warned that charters took funding away from local public schools. The YES campaign was funded by the Waltons, out-of-state financiers and corporate interests, and the New York City-based Families for Excellent Schools (FES). The NO campaign was funded mostly by the unions (including the National AFT and NEA) and small individual contributions. The YES campaign spent about $25 Million, the NO campaign spent about $15 Million. The successful message of the NO campaign boiled down to: “Do you support public schools or school privatization?”
If you read the original memo, you will see that the consulting firm really doesn’t understand why voters supported their local public schools and trusted teachers rather than the governor. Massachusetts public schools are the best in the nation, which raises the question of why the Waltons and FES decided this state was ready for privatization. Maybe they thought that if they could win in Massachusetts, they could win anywhere.
The second memo paints Massachusetts Teachers Association President Barbara Madeloni as a radical villain, because she outsmarted the charter lobbyists. She mobilized teachers and parents and did not compromise, and her side won. The consultants don’t understand or sympathize with her point of view, so they call her an “ideologue,” who “vowed to stop the corporate takeover of the public schools.” She beat the privatizers, and she rallied the public to save their public schools. I’d call her a successful strategist.
Their recommendation to the Waltons and other charter friendly groups is that in the next battle, they must activate charter teachers to sell their message, to counter the messaging of public school teachers. In liberal states, they said, the charter advocates must pretend to be liberals:
” Consider specific Democratic messages, or at least targeted messages, particularly in liberal states. Advocates should test owning the progressive mantle on education reform and charters: this is about social justice, civil rights, and giving kids a chance. While this is a problematic frame for the electorate as a whole, it may speak to the values of a Democratic electorate. The initial message recommendations to refrain from splintering the electorate was not wrong; this messaging discussing achievement gaps or inequality have sunk in other case studies. However, it could be the right approach for liberals in this new Administration.”
There is something inherently ironic—if not comical—about the notion of the far-right anti-union Walton Family donning the garb of “social justice” and “civil rights” to sell their non-union charter chains.
After the Question 2 referendum was defeated by a large margin, the Massachusetts campaign finance board fined Families for Excellent Schools $426,000 dollars for failing to reveal the names of its donors (“Dark Money”) and banned it from operating in Massachusetts for five years. Soon after, FES closed its doors in reaction to a #MeToo scandal involving its CEO.
Supporters of public schools can learn about the thinking of the charter lobbyists by reading these memos and preparing for the battles ahead, if the charter lobbyists ever again dare to compete in a referendum instead of their customary practice of giving campaign contributions to legislators and governors.
Maurice Cunningham, the University of Massachusetts political science professor who tracks Dark Money, said this on Twitter about the secret memo:
“My initial reading reaction. 1. Without Walton and Strategic Grant Partners money, there is no Q2. 2. Voters hate Walton money and corporate education interests – the whole Financial Privatization Cabal. 3. @bmadeloni was absolutely right. #MaEdu #mapoli #bospoli”
Dana Goldstein writes in the New York Times about the looming teachers’ strike (walkout) in Arizona, a right to work state, where most teachers do not belong to the Arizona Education Association. The state has cut $1 Billion out of the K-12 education budget since the 2008 recession, and is currently among the lowest-spending states in the nation on education. The tax-cutting Governor Doug Ducey has promised a 20% raise by 2020, but has offered no new taxes or revenue source to back up his promise. The New York Times is fortunate to have Dana Goldstein working the education beat because she is knowledgeable, having written “The Teacher Wars,” a history of the teaching profession in the U.S.
She writes:
Arizona educators voted late Thursday in favor of a statewide walkout, as teacher protests over low pay and school funding continued to sweep across the United States.
The spread of the protests to Arizona from West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky, all Republican-dominated states with weak public sector unions, signaled the depth of frustration from teachers and parents over years of education budget cuts.
The movement first arose in West Virginia, where teachers walked off the job in February, winning a $2,000 raise. In Oklahoma, the threat of a walkout garnered a $6,000 raise for teachers, but they still picketed the Capitol for nine days, calling for additional school funding that mostly did not come. In Kentucky, teachers have rallied outside the State Capitol to protest changes to their pension plans and to demand more money for schools.
“It’s clear that our educators are inspired by what they’ve seen in West Virginia and Oklahoma and Kentucky,” said Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union. “They see educators rising up and lifting their voices for their students, and doing so in a way that can’t be ignored.”
The vote in Arizona followed weeks of protest across the state and promises from the governor to raise salaries. The Arizona Education Association and Arizona Educators United, a group of teachers who organized independently on Facebook, said that 78 percent of the teachers and school workers who cast ballots supported a walkout.
The groups said the walkout would take place on April 26 if legislators and the governor did not meet their demands, not only for a raise for teachers but also one for school support staff. They also called for an end to tax cuts until Arizona’s per-pupil spending reaches the national average.
Unlike West Virginia and Oklahoma, Arizona has never before had a statewide teacher walkout, and has experienced only a handful of districtwide strikes over the past four decades.
The state has cut approximately $1 billion from schools since the 2008 recession, while also cutting taxes. It spent under $7,500 per pupil annually in 2015, the last year for which census data was available; only Utah and Idaho spent less.
As in the other states where teachers have picketed, many districts in Arizona are facing teacher shortages in subjects like math, science and special education, with principals reporting that staff members are moving to deeper-pocketed states to earn up to $20,000 more per year, or to work in better-funded classrooms.
Noah Karvelis, an elementary school music teacher and the founder of Arizona Educators United, said he was sympathetic to the disruption that widespread school closings would cause students and parents. But, he said, that should not forestall a walkout.
“If we maintain the status quo, that is way worse than missing a couple of days of school,” Mr. Karvelis said at a news conference outside the union headquarters in Phoenix. “The biggest disservice any of us could do for our students right now is to not act in this moment.”
Across Arizona, tens of thousands of teachers, parents and students, clad in red, participated in protests outside schools on April 11. Gov. Doug Ducey said he was “impressed” by the movement, which calls itself #RedForEd. He promised to provide teachers with a 20 percent raise by 2020, and to restore school budgets to pre-Recession levels over the next five years. He said he could do so without raising taxes, because the state’s economy is improving and existing state programs could be cut.
But many teachers rejected that plan, or said they distrusted Mr. Ducey, a first-term Republican.
“You don’t rob Peter to feed Paul,” said Kassandra Dominguez, who teaches kindergarten and first grade in the Pendergast school district, near Phoenix. “That’s so wrong, and I wouldn’t want that money.”
Alternate proposals for raising school budgets include increasing an education sales tax from six-tenths of a cent to one cent, or closing corporate tax loopholes.
The average teacher salary in Arizona is about $47,000 per year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But starting salaries are much lower, and many teachers leading the protest movement are in their 20s and 30s.
Ms. Dominguez, 27, earns $38,250 per year, and says that because of low education budgets, she has had to pay out of pocket, or raise money from private donors, to buy her students science supplies, chairs and snacks. She voted in favor of a walkout. Her district had lost a total of $1.6 million over the past five years because of budget cuts, according to administrators, and the school board had come out in favor of the #RedForEd movement.
In San Tan Valley, an exurban area an hour southeast of Phoenix, Mary Stavely, an elementary schoolteacher, said she had also voted in favor of a walkout. Ms. Stavely, 34, earns $36,800. Thirteen of 38 teachers at her school, Circle Cross Ranch K-8, are planning to resign at the end of this academic year, she said, because of factors like low pay and a lack of rental housing in the area.
“It directly affects students” when teacher turnover is high, Ms. Stavely said, because children “lose morale and the connections that were made” with caring adults. Ms. Stavely, a single mother, is currently living with her parents, and said she has considered looking for a higher-paying job. Still, she said she had spent her spring break going door to door to recruit parents to enroll their children at her public school. Arizona has aggressively expanded charter schools and private school vouchers in recent years, leading to enrollment declines — and potential budget cuts — for some traditional schools.
More than 57,000 educators filled out a ballot in the Arizona walkout vote. There are approximately 90,000 certified teachers in the state, but only 20,000 members of the Arizona Education Association, the union. As in the other red states that have had recent teacher protests, union membership is optional for Arizona educators, and labor organizing is new for many of them.
Among those who oppose a walkout is Jim Segar, 64, a colleague of Ms. Stavely’s at Circle Cross Ranch K-8 and a physical education teacher.
Mr. Segar said the proposal from Mr. Ducey was the best teachers could realistically hope for. “You can’t get everything at once after years of neglect,” he said. “I think people would be crazy to walk or strike now.”
John Thompson, teacher and historian in Oklahoma, reflects on the recent statewide walkout and the lessons learned.
The nine-day Oklahoma teacher walkout was the result of two risky, ideological experiments. As the National Education Association’s Jason Walta explains, the work stoppage also previews the dilemmas that are likely to become more frustrating if the U.S. Supreme Court does what is expected and issues an antiunion decision in Janus v. AFSCME .
The first theory which drove teachers out of their classrooms was “Supply Side economics.” Oklahoma replicated the extreme budget cutting that Thomas Frank documented in What’s the Matter with Kansas. Income tax cuts that were tilted in favor of the rich cost the state $1 billion per year. The 43rd richest person on the planet and Trump supporter, Harold Hamm, has further enriched himself by ramming though a reduction of oil Gross Production Taxes (GPT) from 7 percent to 2 percent. Consequently, by 2016, the state agencies that provide the most important social and medical services had been cut by one-quarter to one-third of their 2009 levels.
https://okpolicy.org/the-cost-of-tax-cuts-in-oklahoma/
Secondly, the resulting education cutbacks began as corporate school reform was imposed. In 2009, I was surprised to see how many legislators were bringing a New Yorker Magazine to an interim committee on education policy. It featured Steve Brill’s article on the New York City “Rubber Room,” which claimed that value-added teacher evaluations were a valid and reliable tool for firing “bad” teachers. The legislators believed Brill’s flawed reporting and they bought into the corporate school reformers’ self-proclaimed plan which included the replacement of Baby Boomer teachers with twenty-somethings.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-room
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2011/08/grading_the_education_reformers.html
I emailed Brill and learned he didn’t really understand what value-added models could or could not do, and it became clear that he had not properly cross-examined the reformers’ claim that effective teaching, alone, could close the achievement gap. When completing his book, Brill had to make a dramatic change in the pro-reform narrative. Its hero, a 26-year-old with supposedly superhuman stamina and commitment named Jessica Reid, grew too exhausted to continue at her charter school. Today’s worn-down teaching profession is still enduring the effects of schools being “deputized”” as the agents for overcoming poverty.
https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/from-whence-come-ideas-for-reforming-teaching-practices/
Oklahoma joined almost all of the rest of the nation in passing legislation that allowed it to compete for federal Race to the Top funds. Oklahoma’s grant wasn’t funded, but as in more than forty other states, teachers’ due process rights were compromised. The state spent millions of dollars on standardized testing, computer systems for keeping track of test score increases, and for using an unreliable and invalid statistical model for firing teachers. Veteran teachers (and their higher salaries) were often pushed out so newbies could be socialized into bubble-in accountability.
http://newsok.com/article/3432650
Reformers didn’t bother to inventory the capacity that would be required to implement such a half-baked agenda. They simply imposed huge workloads on teachers and administrators trying to comply with dubious mandates. Unions were hard-pressed to merely minimize the damage done.
The experiment failed, and the law was repealed, but the money and energy squandered in the reckless experiment are gone forever.
And that brings us to the ways that the Oklahoma walkout and other teacher revolts in “Right to Work” states preview a new resistance for a post-Janus world. Harold Meyerson recently recalled his old wisecrack, “‘China has strikes but no unions; America has unions but no strikes.’” These teachers’ rebellions show that the United States is “becoming more like China every day.”
http://prospect.org/article/what-teacher-strikes-mean
The Oklahoma walkout epitomizes what could be great and what is worrisome about the new era of political activism which is likely to counter Janus. It was a grassroots uprising, organized on social media. As the National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen Garcia says, this is the “education spring.”
Teachers are challenging a system that had been created by the decades-long campaign to shrink government to the size where it can be strangled in the bathtub. Oklahoma unions and other traditional advocates for progressive causes are stymied by the 3/4ths legislative majority which is required to raise taxes. And term limits mean that the legislature lacks institutional memory. Most lawmakers weren’t in office in 2010 when the fateful decisions were made to gut the progressive tax system and to impose corporate school reform on educators.
In the long run, interactions between a youthful teaching profession and the newbies in the legislature are likely to produce better outcomes. Both groups are now frustrated, but they should recall the advice American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten offered on the first day of the walkout. Weingarten said that in every job action, there is “always a moment of truth.” She also said that it is “as important to find a way back in as it is to find a way out.”
At the end of the first week, it looked like a way back to work had been found. The legislature passed $40 million in additional taxes. When combined with the already agreed upon $6100 average pay raise, 95% of the teachers’ demands would have been met. But the fervor of the teachers at the Capitol meant that union leaders couldn’t call off the work stoppage. Besides, plans had already been made for the next week.
On Sunday, a prayer vigil at the Capitol drew hundreds of supporters. Monday’s crowd was far bigger than the 30,000 to 35,000 people who came to each of the first week’s events. Thousands of education supporters marched from Edmond, Del City, and Norman. The next day, marchers arrived from Tulsa. On Thursday, the Moore schools reopened but hundreds of teachers stayed out of class and marched to the Capitol. Had the walkout ended after one week, teachers could have proclaimed an unambiguous victory, but those and other consciousness-raising accomplishments would not have happened.
Many rank-in-file teachers are frustrated with the decisions to return to school, but several key points must be emphasized. First, it took both the threat of a walkout and an initiative petition to raise the Gross Production Tax to persuade the legislature to increase the GPT to 5%. Now, energies must be devoted to initiatives that would raise it all the way back to 7%, as well as defeating an initiative that would defund the pay increase. Both efforts have great potential for building unity among education allies and dividing their opponents. (The same applies to the need for citizen actions to end the constitutional requirement for a 75% majority to raise taxes, and to curtail extreme gerrymandering.)
http://oklahomawatch.org/2018/04/13/ballot-questions-could-boost-teacher-pay-or-put-raises-at-risk/
Moreover, none of these victories would have been possible without the support of local school boards and district administrations, not to mention students and parents. As it became clear that no new money would be appropriated, teachers needed to support their allies in keeping the rest of the school year from degenerating into chaos.
http://www.oklahoman.com/article/5590781?access=17a8dbf82012571d5b94781d849851c5
Just as important, teachers should remember the needs of state employees who pulled out of the walkout just before the OEA announced its end. The Oklahoma Public Employees said, “Recent discussions focus solely on education funding and exclude public safety, veterans’ services, mental health, protective services or any other state agency services.” Given the legal and political complexities of the job actions, that mistake probably was inevitable. But, educators must refocus on the overall needs of their students and families.
http://newsok.com/state-agencies-say-they-have-funding-needs-too/article/5589886
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/02/07/harmful-tax-cuts-helped-fuel-oklahomas-budget-woes
Finally, while understanding that this new, evolving activism won’t always be pretty, we should listen to former teacher, Sen. J.J. Dossett (D-Owasso) who says that teachers had been apathetic but tens of thousands of them became activists. Led by teacher-candidates, hundreds of additional candidates filed for office last week, leaving almost no Republicans unchallenged. So, teachers should avoid recriminations, celebrate a victory, and focus on November.
Diane Ravitch's blog 