Arizona Joins Red State Revolt: Teachers’ Strike Reaches Day Five

Teachers' Strike in Arizona/Colorado 2

TEACHERS WALK OUT IN ARIZONA, COLORADO: "Thousands of teachers in Arizona and Colorado walked out of their classrooms on Thursday to demand more funding for public schools, the latest surge of a teacher protest movement that has already swept through three states and is spreading quickly to others," Simon Romero and Julie Turkewitz report in the New York Times. 

"Widespread teacher protests have in recent months upended daily routines in the conservative-leaning states West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky," the Times reports. "But the sight of public workers protesting en masse in the Arizona capital, one of the largest Republican strongholds in the country, and demanding tax increases for more school funding, spoke to the enduring strength of the movement and signaled shifts in political winds ahead of this year's midterm elections."

"Educators in both states want more classroom resources and have received offers either for increased school funding or pay, but they say the money isn't guaranteed and the efforts don't go far enough," Melissa Daniels and Anita Snow write in the Associated Press. "Most of Arizona's public schools will be closed the rest of the week, and about half of all Colorado students will see their schools shuttered over the two days as teachers take up the Arizona movement's #RedforEd mantle." More from the Times here and the AP here.

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/opinion/teachers-arizona-walkout.html

Teacher Strike in Arizona and Colorado

This year, fights at state capitols across the country are looking different than ever before. Educators are tired of the budget cuts to schools, tired of low pay, and tired of being ignored or disparaged. And they are willing, like never before, to act collectively to fight for their kids, their schools, themselves and their communities. 

From West Virginia to Oklahoma, Kentucky, and, this week, Arizona and Colorado, educators are walking out of their classrooms to protest low pay, austerity budgets, and the threat of privatization and closing schools. 

And they have the support of parents, students and their communities. A new poll says that 78 percent of Americans support increasing teacher pay and more than 50 percent would support raising their own taxes to pay for it.  

Today, teachers in Puerto Rico will rally at the Capitol and create a human shield around it to show they will protect public education. Demonstrate your support by joining their shield virtually in solidarity on Facebook and Twitter. 

The usual Republican playbook isn’t working anymore. Economist Paul Krugman gave a great analysis this week of why. He said that tax cuts sharply reduce revenue, wreaking havoc on state finances, which forces states to cut spending. And since education is central to state and local budgets, that puts educators in the crosshairs. 

Oklahoma Teachers Strike Against Austerity

Oklahoma teachers proudly marked themselves absent from school since Monday, and they had an excellent excuse: They made themselves present in politics instead, with a historic march on the Capitol in hopes of finally capturing the legislature’s undivided attention

Lawmakers thought they could eke through another austerity budget with the last-minute addition of a $6,100 wage hike. But an estimated 30,000 educators stopped work starting Monday to force some 200 schools to shutter, in order to send the message to elected representatives that their gesture is insufficient. The planned raise paled against teachers’ demands for a fully funded school budget, as part of a $3.3 billion package to restore massive cutbacks across state agencies, as well as the basic dignity of a living wage for all state workers.

Following a decade of bruising austerity, the numbers still don't add up for Oklahoma schools. They lead the nation in annual budget cuts, and rank 45th in funding equity levels and 46th in academic performance, according to recent national rankings. With pay scales for teachers statewide frozen since the recession, salaries have declined in real terms to rank near dead last in the country.

School Funding Crisis - But, not in California

The crisis described below is real in many states.  It is not a crisis in California because the voters- not the legislature, passed Proposition 30 and then Proposition 55.

Jeff Bryant,

This week’s disturbing news that Oklahoma schools are so poorly funded some of them may move from five days a week to four got a lot of people’s attention, including my colleague Richard Eskow, who called this an example of “the Republican party’s sickness of the soul.” Unfortunately, the illness is highly contagious.

The contagion stems from revenue shortfalls in states that counted on money that never materialized – at least 29 states, according to Education Week. Although unemployment rates have generally declined in these states, and economies have improved since the Great Recession, lawmakers in many of these states also decided to enact tax cuts and to do nothing about stagnating wages, so income tax and sales tax revenuesflattened or even dipped.

Governors in these states say education finance is a priority – at least according to an annual survey of them. The poll, conducted by the Education Commission of the States, asked 42 governors about their education-related priorities. School finance was at the top, with 32 wanting to improve K-12 education through funding. But obviously, these state leaders forgot the revenue side of the equation. Oops!

Detroit Teachers Strike Against Appalling, rat infested, Schools

President Obama visited Detroit on January 20th, 2016 to tout the city’s resurgent auto industry, which, after the federal government’s bailout, has seen a spike in job growth.

Detroit’s educators have taken advantage of the President’s visit to bring attention to the city’s “toxic” schools suffering from years of neglect. They are holding “sick outs,” a protest strategy that bypasses Michigan’s anti-strike laws by having  teachers collectively call in sick.

As the New York Times reports, the district recently had to close over 60 schools when teachers didn’t show up for work on a Monday. The teachers demand the district and state alleviate the financial problems of the school system, which appears headed toward bankruptcy. Instead of addressing the teachers’ demands, the district sought a court injunction to prevent further sick-outs. The judge refused to act, and the sick-outs spread, causing nearly every school in the 100-school district to close.

Pictures of the moldy, rat-infested, freezing cold buildings have been shared by teachers on the ground. After a recent visit to one of the schools, American Federation of Teachers’ president Randi Weingarten summarized: “dedicated and caring staff teaching kids in appalling conditions.“

Why I Can No Longer Teach in Michigan Public Education

What happens to teachers and teaching  when Republican austerity extremists gain control of a state ?

Stephanie Keiles

 I am sitting here in my lovely little backyard on a beautiful Michigan summer day, drinking a Fat Tire Amber Ale, and crying. I am in tears because today I made one of the hardest decisions of my life: I resigned from my job as a public school teacher. A job I didn't want to leave -- but I had to.

A little background. I didn't figure out that I wanted to be a math teacher until I was 28. As a kid I was always told I was "too smart" to be a teacher, so I went to business school instead. I lasted one year in the financial world before I knew it was not for me. I read a quote from Millicent Fenwick, the (moderate) Republican Congresswoman from my home state of New Jersey, where she said that the secret to happiness was doing something you enjoyed so much that what was in your pay envelope was incidental.

Sequester cuts hit hardest students and schools that can least afford the cost

Sequester cuts hit hardest students and schools that can least afford the cost

Day of Action for Public Education

“Public education is under attack,” comes the warning from Philadelphia in a riveting new video from community and youth organizers in that city.

Their accusations are that education policies are “an attack on poor children” … policy makers “don’t care about the students” … public education “is being defunded” … and “it’s not something specific to Philadelphia.”

Indeed, Philadelphia “is an early warning sign for America,” a former science teacher wrote recently at the progressive news site PolicyMic. Chronically low per-pupil spending – “behind suburban districts” – combined with a “powerful charter school movement” intent on privatizing schools, have eroded Philly schools to the state where basic supplies like paper, pencils, and books seem like luxuries.

It’s a story that mirrors what’s happening across the country.

Americans everywhere are seeing their local schools being ground into pieces between the twin political augers of government austerity and top-down, corporate-backed “reform.”

Day of Action for Public Education. Dec. 9

“Public education is under attack,” comes the warning from Philadelphia in a riveting new video from community and youth organizers in that city.

Their accusations are that education policies are “an attack on poor children” … policy makers “don’t care about the students” … public education “is being defunded” … and “it’s not something specific to Philadelphia.”

Indeed, Philadelphia “is an early warning sign for America,” a former science teacher wrote recently at the progressive news site PolicyMic. Chronically low per-pupil spending – “behind suburban districts” – combined with a “powerful charter school movement” intent on privatizing schools, have eroded Philly schools to the state where basic supplies like paper, pencils, and books seem like luxuries.

It’s a story that mirrors what’s happening across the country.

Americans everywhere are seeing their local schools being ground into pieces between the twin political augers of government austerity and top-down, corporate-backed “reform.”

More students, fewer teachers- it is called austerity

The Teacher Gap: More Students and Fewer Teachers

http://www.epi.org/publication/teacher-gap-students-teachers/

Portside Date: 

October 25, 2013

Author: 

Heidi Shierholz

Date of Source: 

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

Economic Policy Institute

Over the last five years, government employment has dropped by 657,000 as a result of the Great Recession’s effects on federal, state, and local budgets. With kids getting settled back in the classroom this fall, it’s worth considering how much of that drop has hit public K–12 schools.
Of the decline in public-sector employment in the last five years, around 40 percent (258,000) is in local government education, which largely consists of jobs in public K–12 education (the majority of which are teachers, but also included are teacher aides, guidance counselors, and administrators, among others). Over the same period, public K–12 enrollment increased by 1.6 percent. Just to keep up with this growth in the student population, employment in local public education should have grown at roughly the same rate, which would have meant adding 132,000 jobs. Putting these numbers together (i.e., what was lost plus what should have been added to keep up with the expanding student population) means that the total jobs gap in local public education as a result of the Great Recession and its aftermath is around 389,000 jobs, as shown in the figure below.

Chicago Teachers Union oppose school closings

This is what austerity looks like.

Chicago Teachers Speak Out Against School Closings - CTU President Karen Lewis Statement on CPS School Closings CTU Communications March 21, 2013 Chicago Teachers Union   Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.     Mahalia Jackson Elementary second- grade teacher Tamara Faggins passionately condemns the CEO's recommended school closings., Photo by Nathan Goldbaum, CTU Communications.,     Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the following at a news conference regarding proposed school closings:   "We are standing here today in the beautiful Mahaila Jackson elementary school in our city's Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. This school was named for one of the greatest gospel singers in our nation's history, a woman who sang at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, a woman who was instrumental in our Civil Rights struggle. Unfortunately, we are gathered here today not to talk about this pioneer or even about how this school does an outstanding job of providing a great learning community for some of our special needs students. We are standing here because this school, along with scores of others, has been targeted for closure by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Chicago Public Schools district.   "Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.     "Closing 50 schools is not grand or glorious. This is nothing to celebrate or marvel.   "These actions unnecessarily expose our students to gang violence, turf wars and peer-to-peer conflict. Some of our students have been seriously injured as a result of school closings. One died. Putting thousands of small children in harm's way is not laudatory.

Teachers Lay Offs decline.

Excellent news.  Teachers lay offs have  declined.  Only 2,900 teachers received these notices this week in time for the mandatory lay off notices.  Less than 350 teachers received these notices in Sacramento county.  How did this happen?  WE – the voters- passed Proposition 30 and to a lesser extend Prop. 39 in the 2012 elections.  If you didn’t vote- you did not contribute.  Voting makes a difference.

Working together we passed Prop. 30, to fund schools, universities and social services.  This is a floor under austerity.   It raises taxes on the rich to pay for services.  It does raise sales tax by ¼ of  percent – but 90% of the tax increases are on the rich . A tax of 1-3 % on those who make over $250,000 per year.

Bad news  The number of police officers is shrinking  reducing public safety.   This is happening as a result of government austerity programs included in the California budget. 

Republican austerity campaign hurts schools/ students

The Republican campaign for austerity  makes educators and students, as well as millions of others,  the victims in a  strategy to make the middle class and the poor pay for the excesses of the banking /economic crisis.

California schools have just begun to recover from 4 years of extreme budget austerity and recklessness at the state level.  It would take at least 3 years to return to normal.   Now, the federal sequester will impose new cuts on school districts which receive federal funds- such as Title I, and Migrant Education.  The Obama Administration estimates that California schools will lose about $88 million this year.  The vast majority of schools and districts will not be directly affected until the 2013–14 school year because of the “forward funded” nature of federal education spending. However, when children have less food to eat, don't receive their vaccinations and lack medical care, schools suffer. 

From the Coalition on Human Needs

“The Sequester’s Beginnings.  Congress included sequestration – or across-the-board cuts in all but a number of exempted programs – in its deficit reduction legislation, the Budget Control Act of 2011. 

Sequester + austerity = stupid budget cuts

Take Action: The Senate will vote Thursday on legislation to prevent harmful cuts.  Please tell your Senators to vote for the American Family Economic Protection Act, S. 388 and for more information on how your state would be affected by the cuts, see our state fact sheets.

 In economics austerity is the  policy of reducing government spending by cutting social services such as health care, education, food assistance, and other welfare assistance.   At the federal level, Republicans and some Democrats  seek austerity by cutting social Security and Medicare. Republicans also are insisting on massive budget cuts known as the sequester.  By any name, these cuts are bad.  In the case of state governments  public tax money is used for police, fire fighters, park services, nurses, doctors, social workers and health assistants.  State  and local austerity efforts cut these services.

In the current economic crisis, the governments of Ireland, Greece, Italy, the UK, Spain and Portugal have implemented austerity programs and cut their budgets  creating  more unemployment and making  the recessions in these countries worse.

Martin Luther King Jr. and Economic Justice

Martin Luther King, Economic Justice, Workers’ Rights,

and Multiracial Democracy

by Thomas Jackson

In 1968, a united black community in Memphis stepped forward to support 1,300

municipal sanitation workers as they demanded higher wages, union recognition, and respect for

black personhood embodied in the slogan “I Am a Man!” Memphis’s black women organized tenant

and welfare unions, discovering pervasive hunger among the city’s poor and black children. They

demanded rights to food and medical care from a city and medical establishment blind to their

existence. That same month, March 1968, 100 grassroots organizations met in Atlanta to support

Martin Luther King’s dream of a poor people’s march on Washington. They pressed concrete demands for economic justice under the slogan “Jobs or Income Now!” King celebrated the “determination by poor people of all colors” to win their human rights. “Established powers of rich America have deliberately exploited poor people by isolating them in ethnic, nationality, religious and racial groups,” the delegates declared.

So when King came to Memphis to support the strike, a local labor and community struggle became intertwined with his dream of mobilizing a national coalition strong enough to reorient national priorities from imperial war in Vietnam to domestic reconstruction, especially in America’s riot-torn cities. To non-poor Americans, King called for a “revolution of values,” a move from self-seeking to service, from property rights to human rights.

King’s assassination—and the urban revolts that followed—led to a local Memphis settlement that furthered the cause of public employee unionism. The Poor People’s March nonviolently won small concessions in the national food stamp program. But reporters covered the bickering and squalor in the poor people’s tent city, rather than the movement’s detailed demands for waging a real war on poverty. Marchers wanted guaranteed public employment when the private sector failed, a raise in the federal minimum wage, a national income floor for all families, and a national commitment to reconstruct cities blighted by corporate disinvestment and white flight. And they wanted poor people’s representation in urban renewal and social service programs that had customarily benefited only businesses or the middle class. King’s dreams reverberated back in the movements that had risen him up.

Here come more cuts

      California fell almost $2 billion below estimates in personal income taxes paid in April.  The Legislative Analyst Office says that the state is some $3.5 billion behind the state forecasts for this year which are the basis for the current budget.    Thus, the legislature will again face cuts.  More cuts to schools, more cuts to social services, health care,  child support, police and fire protection.

            This approach to economics is called austerity.  It doesn’t work.  Austerity is being tried in Greece, Italy, Spain, Great Britain, and Ireland, among others.  It does not work.  Austerity makes the economy worse – and thus further reductions of tax receipts and further cuts.

The economic crisis of 2007 to the present made matters worse.  The state took in some $30 billion less in taxes and thus had less to send to the schools.  School budgets have been cut by some $10 billion.  K-12 education receives about 40% of the California budget.  Thus any decline in the state budget leads directly to cuts in school services.

            The question for the corporate agenda, promoted by  the Chamber of Commerce among others  is can the economy prosper with a poorly educated work force.  California grew and prospered from 1970- 1994 based upon a well educated work force.  Then, in the 1994-2008 period over $10 billion of tax cuts were passed – making the current crisis much worse. This week we learned that Apple, and other corporations, are avoiding over $10 billion in taxes by moving one small office to Nevada.   California suffers from a decade of  corporate tax cuts and public disinvestment.  Today,  instead of following the education  approach,  conservative anti tax forces have imposed an Mississippi approach on California.

California public schools are in crisis- and they are getting worse. This is a direct result of massive budget cuts imposed by the legislature and the governor in the last four years.  Total per pupil expenditure is down by over $1,000 per student. The result- massive class size increases.  Students are in often classes too large for learning.  Supplementary services such as tutoring and art classes have been eliminated.  Over 14,000 teachers have been dismissed, and thousands more face lay offs this fall. This is not the fault of teachers. 

Faculty Union at CSU authorizes state wide strike

Faculty Union in California votes to authorize a strike. Would be the first system wide strike in state history.

California State University faculty voted to  approved a measure to give their union leaders the power to authorize a strike next fall that could delay the beginning of school for thousands of students across the 23-campus university system.  The CSU is the 23 campus system of California.  The University of California does not have a faculty union with collective bargaining recognition although some of its staff and employees belong to unions.

A powerful 95% of the  faculty voters agreed that the CSU’s instructional faculty, should initiate rolling walkouts if the CSU administration continues to demand concessions.

Equally as impressive was the turnout, with 70% of CFA members voting to send an unmistakable message to Chancellor Charles B. Reed – state austerity is killing higher education in California.

Lillian Taiz, president of the California Faculty Association, said, “Today, the faculty has spoken loud and clear – we have had enough of the way in which they are being treated by the CSU administration.”

Greece and California budgets

Pain without Gain.  Paul Krugman. 2/20/12. NYT.

“And this downturn is hitting nations that have never recovered from the last recession. For all America’s troubles, its gross domestic product has finally surpassed its pre-crisis peak; Europe’s has not. And some nations are suffering Great Depression-level pain: Greece and Ireland have had double-digit declines in output, Spain has 23 percent unemployment, Britain’s slump has now gone on longer than its slump in the 1930s.

Worse yet, European leaders — and quite a few influential players here — are still wedded to the economic doctrine responsible for this disaster.

For things didn’t have to be this bad. Greece would have been in deep trouble no matter what policy decisions were taken, and the same is true, to a lesser extent, of other nations around Europe’s periphery. But matters were made far worse than necessary by the way Europe’s leaders, and more broadly its policy elite, substituted moralizing for analysis, fantasies for the lessons of history.

Specifically, in early 2010 austerity economics — the insistence that governments should slash spending even in the face of high unemployment — became all the rage in European capitals. The doctrine asserted that the direct negative effects of spending cuts on employment would be offset by changes in “confidence,” that savage spending cuts would lead to a surge in consumer and business spending, while nations failing to make such cuts would see capital flight and soaring interest rates. If this sounds to you like something Herbert Hoover might have said, you’re right: It does and he did.

Governor Brown continues austerity program and failure

Image via Wikipedia

Brown- further commitment to austerity.

Jerry Brown gave his required State of the State address today and committed himself to continuing budget cuts and austerity as an economic policy. 

The first problem is- austerity programs do not work !

 The Governor continues his poorly informed, misguided austerity program which proposes  to reduce the budgets through cut backs in services, reductions in public education, cuts to public employment, and reduction in public pensions.

Budget cutting to balance the budget will not get us out of this hole.  Look at Ireland, Greece, or Spain or Michigan, Wisconsin, and  Mississippi (each of these economies is smaller than California)?   Budget cuts only start a downward spiral of pain. We can not simply cut our way out of the crisis, budget cuts and lay offs make the recession worse.  We have witnessed this for the last two years.

The current budget crisis was caused by the real estate crisis, the sub prime loan crisis, and the  national economic crisis.  This crisis was created by finance capital and banking, mostly on Wall Street ,ie. Chase Banks, Bank of America,  Washington Mutual,  Country Wide, AIG, and others.  

Brown says,  Again, I propose cuts and temporary taxes. Neither is popular but both must be done. In a world still reeling from the near collapse of the financial system, it makes no sense to spend more than we have. The financial downgrading of the United States, as well as of several governments in Europe, should be warning enough. It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions and digging ourselves into a deep financial hole--to do good--is a bad idea. In this time of uncertainty, prudence and paying down debt is the best policy.- This is the definition of an austerity program.

Brown’s proposals are modest- too modest.  The High Speed Rail authority is a stimulus plan, but California needs an educational stimulus plan and the funds to pay for the needed investment.