In what is being described as a red state revolt, teachers in Kentucky and Oklahoma are following the example of colleagues in West Virginia and forcefully challenging cuts to school budgets, pay and benefits.
Teachers are marching out of schools and into statehouses to demand change, leading to statewide school closings today and Monday. Arizona teachers are mulling a strike.
On Monday, thousands of Oklahoma and Kentucky teachers descended on their state capitol buildings to demand raises and increased school funding. West Virginia teachers won a 5 percent raise for all state employees after a nine-day strike that shut down the schools.
This spreading revolt, while assisted by teacher unions, is also propelled by grassroot foot soldiers tapping into the social media savvy with which Parkland teens ignited a national movement for new gun laws.
Fired-up teachers are harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms to command the attention of lawmakers and energize their peers. Educators are launching Facebook pages including #RedforED, which references the red teachers wear to symbolize their support for public education in response to what they consider attacks from Washington.
Their concerns intensified after the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as U.S. secretary of education; DeVos is a champion of school choice and critical of what she calls a failing and antiquated public education system.
In the past, such troubling statements from an education secretary might have provoked grumbling in the teacher’s lounge. But no concrete action.
Now, social media is amplifying that grumbling into a deafening roar. Younger teachers are arriving in their classrooms with a greater fluency in and comfort with social media as a communications and unifying tool, and are wielding it as deftly as their students.
As 23-year-old Arizona teacher Noah Karvelis, a leader of the #RedforEd, told The New York Times, “Teachers for a long time have had a martyr mentality. This is new.”
Other state employees, parents and students are marching alongside teachers, angry over budgets cuts they say have eroded essential services and shortchanged schools. Oklahoma, Kentucky, West Virginia and Arizona are among 29 states still providing less total school funding per student in 2015 than they were in 2008. (Georgia was also on that list.)
To show the effects of that lagging funding in the classroom, Oklahoma teachers and parents are tweeting photos of ragged textbooks and broken chairs.
As The New York Times reported:
The walkouts and rallies in Republican-dominated states, mainly organized by ordinary teachers on Facebook, have caught lawmakers and sometimes the teachers' own labor unions flat-footed. And they are occurring in states and districts with important midterm races in November, suggesting that thousands of teachers, with their pent-up rage over years of pay freezes and budget cuts, are set to become a powerful political force this fall. The next red state to join the protest movement could be Arizona, where there is an open Senate seat and where thousands of teachers gathered in Phoenix last week to demand a 20 percent pay raise and more funding for schools.
The growing fervor suggests that labor activism has taken on a new, grass-roots form. "Our unions have been weakened so much that a lot of teachers don't have faith" in them, said Noah Karvelis, an elementary school music teacher in Tolleson, Ariz., outside Phoenix. Mr. Karvelis said that younger teachers had been primed for activism by their anger over the election of President Trump, his appointment of Betsy DeVos as education secretary and even their own students' participation in anti-gun protests after the school shooting in Parkland, Fla.
The Louisville Courier-Journal reported:
Monday's events began with a march that shut down Capitol Avenue as sign-waving teachers estimated in the thousands moved up the broad boulevard toward the statehouse. Side streets were jammed, and Frankfort's two exchanges off Interstate 64 were briefly clogged as people poured into town…While most school districts were on spring break, others closed for the day so teachers could join the protests.
The walkout of teachers, both union and nonunion, led to the closing of 200 Oklahoma school districts, nearly half of those in the state Monday.
The Oklahoman reports this morning;
Thousands of Oklahoma teachers are expected back at the state Capitol on Tuesday as a statewide walkout continues. "We will pack the inside of the Capitol," said Alicia Priest, president of the Oklahoma Education Association. "We need to make sure that they cannot ignore us."
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