The Teacher Revolt Spreads to Arizona

Photo credit: Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press.

Slashing funding for public education has long been a favored tactic of Republican politicians who realize that their wealthy supporters could care less about public schools as their place their little darlings in private - and often  segregated - schools.  The other pillar of the Republican base, the Christofascists and evangelicals in turn hold hatred for public schools since they teach inconvenient things like science, especially the theory of evolution, and  fact based sex education.  Hence all the GOP efforts to provide vouchers and/or charter schools to the cheers of Christian extremist groups.   

For most Americans, however, public schools are an essential part of what the government is supposed to provide.  Good public schools maintain property values, make an area attractive for business investment, and provide their students with a path for upward social mobility.   Belatedly, more and more of the public and school teachers are waking to the damage that GOP attacks on funding for public schools is causing.  Soccer moms may be brain dead politically on most issues, but trash their child's school and even they can grasp the fact that things need to change.  As a column in the New York Times notes, the revolt against GOP efforts to defund public education has spread to Arizona.  Here are excerpts:

On Thursday, a historic walkout by teachers and the support staff closed more than 1,000 public schools in Arizona. The state became the latest and the largest to be swept by a labor insurgency among underpaid educators that started in February in West Virginia, then spread to Oklahoma, Kentucky and, also on Thursday, Colorado.

The wildfire spread of the teachers’ movement — in parts of the country that are singularly hostile to organized labor — is one of the more surprising and exciting developments of this otherwise bleak political moment. Conservatives are right to worry: We’re seeing a citizens’ revolt against their policies.

There are several interrelated factors behind the teachers’ movement’s explosive growth. Most significant, of course, is that teachers in some red states feel backed into a corner after a decade or more of disinvestment by Republican governments. Because of a series of tax cuts, particularly over the last 10 years, Arizona teachers are among the worst paid in the nation, and they have some of the country’s largest class sizes — up to 40 students to a single teacher, according to Joe Thomas, president of the Arizona Education Association teachers’ union.

This week, I visited a K-8 school in the scrublands of South Phoenix, a flat, dusty, wide-open area that’s only a 15-minute drive from downtown but feels much farther. (The principal asked me not to identify it, or him, for fear that his school would suffer administrative reprisals for letting a journalist in.) The science teacher told me her classes have 30 to 36 students each. Aside from desks, she’d either bought most of what was in her classroom, or had it donated — not just books, but also chairs and even a water dispenser, which the class needed during the seven months when the school’s drinking fountains were broken. The teachers’ strike in West Virginia made Arizona educators think that something could happen. Teachers told me they were also inspired by other bursts of activism nationwide, from the Women’s March to the Never Again movement for gun control. In Phoenix this week, I went to an organizing meeting in the suburban backyard of an elementary school teacher named Lisa Wyatt, where teachers and parents made plans to knock on their neighbors’ doors to build support for the walkout. “To see these kids organizing marches across the country, it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, we can do that!’” she told me. The impetus for the walkout in Arizona, like those in other states, . . . began with a Facebook group, Arizona Educators United, and a hashtag, #RedforEd, which an elementary school music teacher, Noah Karvelis, had created to encourage school employees to wear red in solidarity with their brethren in West Virginia.

It’s not a coincidence that the teacher walkouts have happened in states where unions are weak. . . . . because of its abysmal salaries, Arizona has such an acute teacher shortage that many schools are already hiring teachers without formal education training, some with only high school diplomas. Small-government conservatives have pushed teachers to the point where many feel they have nothing to lose.

Still, it’s not clear how long the educators can hold out. This month, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, scored a public relations victory by offering teachers a 20 percent raise. Many educators didn’t trust him to deliver, saying that his plan had no dedicated revenue source. Nor did it address the teachers’ demand to restore education funding to 2008 levels.

But as we’ve seen all over the country since Donald Trump’s election, protest is contagious, and builds on itself. Ducey, meanwhile, is up for re-election this year in a state that’s trending blue. “Maybe I’m foolishly confident, but we have a ton of power,” Karvelis told me. “We have the truth on our side. We have the people on our side. And we have people who are not afraid to take a risk.”

Kudos to these teachers.  Let's hope the revolt expands further.

Could a Democrat Score an Upset in Arizona?

Democrat challenger Hiral Tipirneni, MD

If nothing else, Donald Trump's election has ignited a fire in many women, especially college educated women, who are horrified by both Trump's election and the reverse Robin Hood and misogynistic agenda of today's  Republican Party. Women have been throwing their hats into the political ring in record numbers and now a Democrat is within potential striking range of scoring an upset in a reliably Republican district in Arizona.  Combined with the ongoing teacher strike in Arizona - Arizona has among the lowest teacher pay in America - Democrat Hiral Tipirneni strong campaign suggests that Arizona may be on its way to joining Virginia in as a purple or even blue state in the near future.  A column in the New York Times looks at the changing scene in Arizona.  Here are column excerpts:

On Tuesday, there’s a special election in Arizona’s Eighth Congressional District, which Donald Trump won by 21 percentage points. It’s to replace Trent Franks, the abortion opponent who resigned amid reports that he tried to create his own personal version of “The Handmaid’s Tale” by pressuring female employees to serve as gestational surrogates.

In the past two elections, Democrats didn’t contest the district, which encompasses suburbs northwest of Phoenix. This time, a Democrat named Hiral Tipirneni, a former emergency room physician and first-time political candidate, is running against a Republican state senator, Debbie Lesko. Though Lesko is expected to win, some polls show the race in a dead heat, and Republicans have spent more than $1 million on the campaign.

On Thursday, public school teachers in Arizona, among the lowest paid in the country, are planning to walk out, following the lead of teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky. For 15 years, “we’ve continued to get cut and cut and cut,” Theresa Ratti, who teaches high school in Mesa, told me. “My A.P. government textbook that I teach from, the new president is George W. Bush.” These two events — an unexpectedly competitive Eighth District election and a rare labor action by teachers — are connected. Partly this is because Lesko is a villain to many local champions of public education. . . . . Lesko has been an advocate of vouchers and privatization and pretty much anything she can do to destroy the public school system.” But there’s a deeper link. Both the walkout and the surprising viability of Tipirneni’s campaign are manifestations of the explosive activist energy, particularly among women, set off by the catastrophe of Trump’s election. Since Hillary Clinton’s defeat, “college-educated women have ramped up their political participation en masse,” . . . . women who were once politically disengaged felt demeaned by Trump’s victory. Overcome by a need to do something in response, they’d turned to local politics, which had gradually come to consume their lives.

Save Our Schools, a prominent grass-roots organization supporting the walkout, is an outgrowth of an Arizona group called Stronger Together, which itself is a spinoff of the pro-Hillary Clinton Facebook group Pantsuit Nation. . . . .  before the election, Republicans had more than 3,000 precinct committeemen in the county, and Democrats only 600. Since 2016, he said, the Democrats’ total has grown to 1,700.

Even with this new infrastructure, local activists realize that winning on Tuesday is a long shot. Unlike the pro-Trump district that the Democrat Conor Lamb won in Pennsylvania, Arizona’s Eighth has no Democratic roots. It’s both very white and, because of a high concentration of retirees, very old.

But whatever happens this week, politics in Arizona, which Trump won by a mere 3.5 percentage points and which is key to the Democratic dream of retaking the Senate, is changing fast. Though our national politics remains a horror show, here, among so many indefatigable women, it’s easy to be hopeful.

Even if she [Tipirneni] comes up short, the work she’s done to build up the Democratic Party in her district will have a lasting impact, she said: “It’s going to be incredible to see what Arizona looks like after November.”

I will keep my fingers crossed and hope for a Democrat upset. 

The Changing Face of Protests in the Trump Era

For years now Republicans have used slim electoral wins to claim a mandate and had proceeded to inflict on a majority of citizens agendas that harm the majority or which are not consistent with the views of the majority.  They have been able to do this in no small part because far too many Americans have been too lazy to get to the polls and vote.  Indeed, in the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, lost the popular vote and only garnered the vote of less than 28% of registered voters.  Only in the GOP bubble or Trump's ego driven world would that  be counted as a mandate.  The result, based on protests that we have been witnessing and the Democratic victories in many special elections, may be that the majority is learning that sit home and lazily say "I don't like politics" is leading their communities and the country to ruin.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at the protest since Trump entered the White House and how they increasingly target GOP policies and what they may portend.  Here are highlights:

In the past month, teachers in three conservative and comparatively poor states have gone on strike, and, in that short time, certain patterns have developed. . . . . the strikes have been organized on Facebook rather than called by union leaders, and, in West Virginia and Oklahoma, the teachers have rejected lawmakers’ initial offers of pay raises; they have said that they also want to change the systematic underfunding of education. “The real midterms are happening right now, in Kentucky, West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona,” the left-wing political theorist Corey Robin tweeted on Sunday.

The tenor of liberal mass protest has changed in the fifteen months since Donald Trump became President. The early demonstrations (the counterprotests at the Inauguration; the vast and furious crowds at the Women’s March, a day later; the more anxious ones that gathered at airports, calling for the release of sequestered Iranian graduate students and Iraqi grandmothers, after the President issued his first travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim nations) had a feeling of holding the country back from a precipice. There was talk of creeping fascism, and a sense that the Trump Administration was a bad dream from which the country might awake if people pinched themselves hard enough.

The protests in the second year of the Trump Administration have taken on a different character. For one thing, they have been somewhat less about Trump. As a gun-control movement coalesced in the aftermath of the massacre of seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, its villain was not Trump but the National Rifle Association and the influence it exerts in Washington and state legislatures around the country. The student activists from Parkland have been careful to argue that their call for gun control is in the reasonable mainstream, in contrast to the inflexible, extreme positions taken by politicians loyal to the N.R.A.

The Parkland protests were sophisticated not just in their messaging but in their sense of how local political power can be. In Sacramento, California, during the past two weeks, there have been demonstrations in response to the police killing of Stephon Clark, a young, unarmed African-American man who was shot after allegedly running away from officers who had confronted him in the yard of his grandmother’s house. The protests have aimed to shut down civic life in the city . . . A few days before the shooting, a leader of the local Black Lives Matter chapter, Tanya Faison, had called for volunteers to follow police officers around Sacramento, recording what they did, as a method of citizen surveillance.

The red-state teacher revolts have been especially precise in their tactics. They have focussed on the long-running matter of how conservative states, some of which require legislative supermajorities to raise any tax at all, pay for their schools. A common refrain in Oklahoma, where school funding has been so aggressively cut that about a fifth of schools now open for only four days each week, has been that many teachers have taken home about the same pay for a decade or more. The images that have circulated are of textbooks so old that they must be held together by duct tape. Schools are in bad shape all over, not just in states run by conservative politicians; . . . Hillary Clinton won nineteen of the twenty states where teachers are paid the most in the 2016 election, and Trump won nineteen of the twenty where teachers are paid the least.

The world of American politics right now is bracing for two events: the outcome of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation and the midterm elections.

[T]he midterms are beginning to take shape—or, at least, the stakes of the elections are. Since the ascendance of the Tea Party, in 2010 (and, in some places, since long before then), politics in many parts of the country have been arranged around a program of cutting taxes and radically limiting governmental services. In November, we will know quite a bit more about whether that approach will continue to be a major part of our politics, or whether it will prove to be an ideological fad that took over for a while, and then dissipated. . . .  the confidence of teachers in red states has grown: in Oklahoma, they rejected an offered fifteen-per-cent pay raise; in Arizona, they are demanding a twenty-per-cent hike. Those are not the bargaining positions of people who assume that the public will abandon them. It is the posture of those who assume, like the student activists from Parkland, that they are taking the common-sense position, that, even in red states, they have behind them a critical mass of support.

[T]he demonstrations of the past few months have suggested not a split country but a broken political system: in a less toxically partisan time, a slightly more restrictive gun-control regimen or a steadier rate of funding for the schools could be resolved by subcommittees, instead of through marches. The increasingly extreme Republican regimes of this decade—Scott Walker’s in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback’s in Kansas, Mary Fallin’s in Oklahoma, and Paul Ryan’s and Donald Trump’s in Washington—have tended to act as if narrow electoral majorities were a mandate for vast political change, and as if those groups who supported their opponents should have no voice at all.

For the past decade, these politics have redesigned actual towns and cities, leaving them with books with rotting bindings and schools that close on Fridays because they can’t afford anything more. But people live and teach in those towns, and they take notice of changes like these. Eventually, a bill comes due.

Let's hope the bill for Republicans at all levels is very, very high come November, 2018.

Teacher Strikes: Exposing the GOP’s Achilles Heel

Oklahoma Gov. Fallin trashes teachers.

For many years now the Republican Party has pushed an agenda of huge tax cuts for the wealthy and large corporations best illustrated by the $1.5 trillion give away last December under the GOP/Trump tax bill.  Typically, Republican voters are induced to support this agenda by falling for the GOP's appeals to racism and/or right wing Christian religious extremism.  But constant tax cuts can go on for only so long before the larger public wakes up to the reality that this tax cut agenda is wreaking havoc on public education, state infrastructures, and other social services that average Americans want and support.  Paul Ryan may blame the federal budget debt on "entitlement spending" but even the dumbest soccer mom can grasp the reality that it was the GOP tax cuts that are the real root of the problem.  Now, teacher strikes in red states are helping to expose the GOP's Achilles heel: voters do not want public schools and necessary government programs gutted. The big question is whether Democrats can play on this growing realization that the GOP agenda does nothing for average voters.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

On the surface, the wave of teacher strikes that has rippled through red America over the past month looks like a labor story; an object lesson in the power of solidarity, and the hazards of underpaying workers and then leaving them no source of leverage save walking off the job. And it certainly is that kind of story — but it is also a political one. After all, public workers can only gain leverage through a strike if a significant portion of the public rallies behind their picket line. It took the fortitude of West Virginia teachers to get this strike wave started — but it required the political weakness of the GOP’s prevailing ideology to keep it rolling.

Teachers scored improbable victories in West Virginia and Oklahoma by exploiting the biggest open secret in American politics today: The Republican Party and its voters have radically different political views.

The former has made cutting taxes on the wealthy and corporations its top economic priority on both the state and federal levels; the latter oppose such tax cuts by overwhelming margins. GOP office-holders have worked tirelessly (if unsuccessfully) to reduce federal spending on health care; most GOP voters would like to see such spending increased. Nearly all House Republicans have repeatedly affirmed their support for financing ever-lower taxes on the rich with draconian cuts to public investment in virtually everything but the military, including Medicare benefits; when pollsters referenced this reality to right-leaning voters in a 2012 focus group, the respondents found Paul Ryan’s agenda so absurdly offensive, they “simply refused to believe any politician would do such a thing.”

The GOP has not made support for tax cuts (no matter the economic conditions, geopolitical circumstances, or resulting consequences for social spending) the first principle of its domestic agenda because that is a popular and rational governing ideal — but because it is an excellent value proposition to offer to well-heeled reactionaries in search of a medium-risk, high-return investment opportunity.

To this point, the GOP has paid no great electoral price for the fact that there is no significant constituency for its economic agenda; over the past decade, Republicans have managed to grow more fanatically committed to fiscal policies that their voters find abhorrent — and more politically powerful. A variety of factors have abetted this odd achievement, not least the fact that most voters pay far less attention to the details of policy than to identity-based appeals. Through “culture war” rhetoric and legislation, the GOP has established itself as the party of rural Americans, cultural traditionalists, gun enthusiasts, and the (proudly) white and native-born. The broad appeal of this reactionary brand of identity politics (combined with copious Koch network cash, the right’s vast propaganda apparatus, and a touch of voter suppression) has allowed the Republican Party to have its fringe fiscal agenda, and its electoral majorities, too.

Donald Trump tried to pay for his supply-side tax cuts by decimating Obamacare — but once doing the latter proved untenable, he and his allies were content to put the former on the nation’s credit card, just as George W. Bush had done with his tax cuts, years earlier.

But Oklahoma can’t print its own currency. On the state level, budgets have to balance. Congressional Republicans can obscure (and/or defer) the trade-offs inherent to “starving the beast” — GOP governors have no such luxury. And eight years after the tea party wave lifted far-right Republicans to unprecedented power in states all across the country, those trade-offs have become unmistakeable — especially to anyone with an investment in a (typical) red state’s public-school system.

The idea that the government has a responsibility to provide a quality K–12 education to all of its young people is among the least controversial in our politics. And yet, it is a notion that is nearly impossible to reconcile with the contemporary GOP’s theological commitment to ever-lower taxes. Talented educators must be wooed with competitive pay and benefits; textbooks must be regularly updated; curricula, revised. The disparity between the actual fiscal cost of guaranteeing universal access to a public education — and what conservative Republicans are prepared to spend on schools — is currently fueling a constitutional crisis in Kansas: The Sunflower State’s founding document requires its legislature to make “suitable provision for finance of the educational interests of the state” — a requirement that Republican legislators have routinely failed to meet, in the estimation of the Kansas Supreme Court.

Between 2008 and 2015, per-student education spending in Kentucky fell by 11.4 percent; in Oklahoma, by 15.6; and in Arizona, by 17.5. In all of these states, Republican legislators paired such disinvestment from education with tax cuts for high-earners and business interests. Even in these “conservative” states, it is highly doubtful that voters would have ever directly endorsed supply-side tax cuts financed by reductions in school spending, were such a matter put to the ballot. But now that the former have failed to produce the miraculous growth that Republicans promised — while the latter have yielded decaying textbooks, four-day school weeks, and teacher shortages — support for a change in fiscal priorities is overwhelming in deep-red Oklahoma.

The fact that the unpopular consequences of right-wing governance are becoming increasingly visible in red states does not guarantee the conservative movement’s imminent collapse; but it does create an opportunity for opponents of conservatism to launch a few wrecking balls in its direction.

This is the lesson that the striking educators are teaching us. When a well-organized movement — with genuine roots in “conservative” communities (and no plausible ties to George Soros or Nancy Pelosi) forces the GOP’s fiscal agenda to the center of public debate, the political terrain shifts — and conservatives struggle to stand their ground. Suddenly, Oklahoma Republicans can vote to take money from oil companies and give it to teachers; and those teachers can meet their offer with protests instead of gratitude.

The Spreading Unrest of Red State Teachers

Red states have two main pillars of Republican Party governance: (i) slash taxes and governmental funding and (ii) prostitute yourself and the civil law to right wing Christian extremists. One area where these agendas merged was in slashing public school funding which satisfied the Christofascist party base's hatred of public education because - the horror! - it might educate students to the point where they might walk away from the brain dead, anti-knowledge worldview of the charlatans preaching from pulpits and/or television scamvagelists.  With the revolt that began in West Virginia - a state that is always the butt of jokes told by Virginians - seemingly now taking hold in other states, Republicans may find that they have awakened what may become a nightmare.  Just in time for the 2018 midterms and all of the state and local elections that piggy back with them.  The reality is that, if you value quality public schools - which are a key to maintaining property values and attracting new business and industry - you simply do not vote Republican. A piece in New York Magazine looks at the growing teacher unrest.  Here are highlights:

Eight Kentucky school districts — including those in Louisville and Lexington — are closed today as teachers stay home to protest the GOP legislature’s destructive “reforms” of their pension system. Oklahoma teachers are planning to strike on Monday despite winning a $6,100 pay raise. And Arizona teachers rallied at the state capital on Wednesday and are threatening to strike if their demands for major pay raises and restoration of education funding cuts are not met.

As this wave of unrest among teachers spreads nationally, it’s clear it has been inspired by the nine-day strike that won West Virginia teachers (and other state employees) a pay raise earlier this month. But there’s something more fundamental going on than copycat protests. We’re seeing a teacher-led backlash against years, and even decades, of Republican efforts at the state level to cut taxes and starve public investments. This is very clear in Oklahoma, where a quick pay raise the legislature passed this week is deemed by teachers to have missed the larger point: this investment alone will not undo a decade of neglect. There is still work to do to get this legislature to invest more in our classrooms. And that work will continue Monday, when educators descend on the capitol,” Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association, said in a Facebook video

The pay-raise bill signed by Governor Mary Fallin yesterday brought in $447 million in new revenues from higher taxes on cigarettes and oil-production facilities. But the teachers are demanding $3.3 billion “to restore millions of dollars in school funding that have been cut in the past decade. . . .

Similarly, in Arizona the teacher protests are not just about teacher pay, though they are among the lowest paid in the country. Their demands are much broader . . . . Teachers, who organized a grassroots campaign on social media, are demanding a 20 percent raise and restoration of school funding to 2008 levels, before the Great Recession struck, according to the Arizona Republic. They are also asking state lawmakers to stop cutting taxes until Arizona’s per-student spending reaches the national average.

[T]his collision is a reminder that GOP claims that tax cuts at the state as well as the federal level would pay for themselves by generating sustained economic growth have once again proved faulty, with public education being the primary victim of chronic budget shortfalls.

While Republican pols in Arizona and Oklahoma, like their counterparts in West Virginia, are backpedaling furiously and trying to prevent or resolve strikes, the conflict may go too deep for an easy resolution.

In Kentucky, teacher grievances are mostly focused on the pursuit by Republican governor Matt Bevin and the GOP legislature of another big conservative cause: public pension “reform,” which in this case meant serious reductions in benefits and a complete revocation of teacher pension security. That the “reform” was whipped through the legislature suddenly after being attached to a sewer regulation bill did not improve its aroma.

Perhaps the current wave of teacher protests and strikes will subside as the school year ends. But more likely, it will spill over into the election season this fall, when 36 governorships and most of the national state legislatures are up for grabs.

Come November, vote a straight Democrat ticket at every governmental level and send the GOP a strong message.