"Since 2008, per-pupil instructional funding has been cut by 28 percent -- by far the worst reduction in the whole country. As a result, a fifth of Oklahoma's school districts have been forced to reduce the school week to four days. Textbooks are scarce and scandalously out of date. Innumerable arts, languages, and sports courses or programs have been eliminated. Class sizes are enormous.... Many of Oklahoma's 695,000 students are obliged to sit on the floor in class."
Meanwhile, Mike Elk reports that the Oklahoma Education Association released a statement saying: "Over a decade of neglect by the legislature has given our students broken chairs in classrooms, outdated textbooks that are duct-taped together, four-day school weeks, classes that have exploded in size and teachers who have been forced to donate plasma, work multiple jobs and go to food pantries to provide for their families."
All of the states engaged in wildcat strikes, demonstrations and protests have been subject to similar toxic austerity measures that have come to characterize a neoliberal economy. Once the teachers realized that the terrible conditions under which they worked were commonplace in other schools and states and that many other teachers had reached a boiling point, they were ready to act regardless of whether they had the support of their unions. This was another important thread running through demonstrations. The strikes were not initiated by the leadership in the unions, and when they did act, they were too slow to be consequential. As working conditions for teachers deteriorated and the assault on public schools reached fever pitch, teachers bypassed their unions while using social media to speak to other teachers, communicate across national boundaries and educate a wider public.
In spite of a number of attacks by conservative politicians such as Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, who stated that teachers were displaying "a thug mentality," the striking teachers gained broad popular support. It is hard to miss the irony here of the neoliberal apostles of austerity labeling teachers as losers, given that many teachers have extra jobs to support themselves and use their own money to provide books, basic resources and in some cases, even toilet paper for their students.
Recent findings by the National Center of Educational Statistics show that 94 percent of teachers pay out of their own pockets for school supplies -- such as notebooks, pens and paper -- which amounts on average to $480 annually. The real losers are the politicians who defund public schools, deskill teachers, force students to put up with repressive test-taking pedagogies "while whittling away at [teacher] salaries, supplies, tenure arrangements, and other union protections ... lengthening teaching hours, [and] reducing vital prep periods."
This is a neoliberal script for the social abandonment of public goods, the termination of the democratic ethos and the precondition for the rise of an American version of fascism. What is particularly promising about these widespread protest movements is that they have the potential to move public consciousness toward a wide-ranging recognition in which the assaults on public schooling will be understood as part of a larger war on schools, on youth, and on the very possibility of teaching and learning, and that these struggles cannot be separated.
The use of the social media by the teachers was particularly effective in getting their message out. Individual teachers talked publicly about having to donate blood, visit food pantries and teach with textbooks that were 10 years old. Images of broken chairs and desks, along with rodents infesting classrooms, and students complaining about books that were held together with tape offered a compelling visual archive of not only dilapidated schools, impoverished classrooms and overburdened students, but also a political system in which Republican governors and legislators were willing to implement economic policies that slashed the taxes of the rich and big corporations at the expense of public schools, teachers and students.
Arizona is another case in point: Not only does it have abysmal teacher pay, it is also a state that lacks collective bargaining rights. Debbie Weingarten offers a succinct summary of the effects of budget cuts on Arizona schools, teachers and students:
"During the Recession, the Arizona state legislature cut $1.5 million from public schools, more than any other state, leaving Arizona schools more than $1 billion short of 2008 funding.... Arizona currently ranks 49th in the country for high school teacher pay and 50th for elementary school teacher pay. When adjusted for inflation, teacher wages have declined more than 10 percent since 2001. Per-student spending in Arizona amounts to $7,205, compared with the national average of $11,392. There are currently 3,400 classrooms in Arizona without trained or certified teachers, and the state has over 2,000 teacher vacancies."
Arizona teachers ended their strike after a six-day walkout, and while they did not get everything they demanded, the state gave them a "20 percent raise by 2020 and investing an additional $138 million in schools." Most importantly, the Arizona teacher strike -- along with other strikes and teacher walkouts -- proved not only the power of organized labor prompted by the radical initiatives of teachers willing to fight for their rights even if the unions do not support them, but also the growing support of a public unwilling to allow neoliberal fascism destroy all vestiges of the public good, especially schools. As Jane McAlevey observes:
"Remarkably, these strikes have garnered overwhelming support from the public, despite years of well-funded attacks on teachers' unions. In a recent NPR/Ipsos poll, just one in four respondents said they think teachers are paid enough, and three-quarters said teachers have the right to strike. Remarkably, this support cut across party lines. 'Two thirds of Republicans, three-quarters of independents and nearly 9 in 10 Democrats' support the teachers' right to strike, the poll showed."
Protests against the gutting of teacher salaries, pensions and health care benefits are not simply about school budgets. They are also about a larger politics in which big corporations and the financial elite have waged a war on democracy and instituted polices that produce a massive redistribution of wealth upward into the hands of the ruling elite. Energized young people and teachers are creating a new optics for both change and the future.
A Mass Movement to Resist Neoliberalism
The teacher strikes and walkouts point to a grassroots movement that will no longer allow the apostles of neoliberalism, the Republican and Democratic parties, and the financial elite to ruthlessly take apart public education. Implicit in the current walkouts and strikes is the necessity of such groups to learn from each other, share power and work to create a mass-based social movement. This type of social formation is all the more crucial given that no one movement or group organized around singular issues can defeat the prevailing concentrated economic and political forces of casino capitalism.
Given the public support the striking teachers have received, it is crucial that such a struggle connect the struggle over schools to a broader struggle that appeals to parents who still view public schooling as one of the few avenues their children have for economic and social mobility. At the same time, it is crucial for the striking teachers to make the case to a larger public that without a quality and accessible public education system, the protective and crucial public spaces provided by a real democracy are endangered and could be lost.
Teachers, young people and others are creating both a new and potentially radical language for politics and educational reform. Given the authoritarian times in which we live, this language is desperately needed by a society facing an impending crisis of memory, agency and democracy. If American society is to offset the deeply anti-democratic populist revolt that has put a fascist government in power in the United States, progressives and others need a new language that connects the crisis of schooling to the crisis of democracy while at the same time rejecting the equation of capitalism and democracy. The attack on public schooling is symptomatic of a more profound crisis that involves the extension of market principles to every facet of power, culture and everyday life. Public schooling is under siege along with the values and social relations that give viable meaning to the common good, economic justice and democracy itself.
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