Teachers

The West Virginia Teachers’ Strike Takes Aim At Coal And Gas

March 3, 2018 Sarah Jones, Newrepublic.com Resist! Coal, Gas, Strikes, Teachers

Earlier in the week, Republican Governor Jim Justice and the unions’ state leads had come up with a compromise bill, HB 4145, that raised teacher pay by 5 percent. But it did not create a permanent fix for the Public Employee Insurance Agency, which is meant to provide all public employees with affordable health insurance but has effectively been cutting funding every year. As I previously reported, some teachers distrusted the deal when it was first announced on Wednesday. A letter that day from Justice to state employees announcing the formation of a PEIA task force did not mollify many of them. On Wednesday night, the bill passed the state House. On Thursday, Senate Republicans voted against taking it up. Shortly afterwards, news of further teacher walkouts began rolling across social media.

West Virginia Teachers Occupy Streets In Statewide Strike

March 3, 2018 Staff, Rt.com Resist! Strikes, Teachers, West Virginia

Every single public school in West Virginia is closed. Teachers across the state staged a walkout in protest against one of the lowest salaries in the country and the rising cost of healthcare. It is the first statewide teachers’ strike in almost 30 years in West Virginia. Over 270,000 students have been affected, according to the latest enrolment figures from the state Education Department. “I never dreamed 19 years ago when I started teaching that I would have to work a second job to provide for my kids. I knew teaching wouldn’t make [me] billions, but I thought it would be enough,” second grade teacher Rebecca Diamond told the Huffington Post. On Thursday, teachers and their supporters demonstrated outside the state Capitol and in other cities.

West Virginia Strike Continues As Teachers Reject Unions’ Back-To-Work Order

March 2, 2018 Joseph Kishore, Wsws.org Resist! Class Struggle, Labor, Strikes, Teachers, Unions, West Virginia

The statewide strike by more than 30,000 West Virginia teachers and school employees is continuing today, with workers rejecting an agreement announced Tuesday by the trade unions and the state’s billionaire governor, Jim Justice. Thousands of teachers descended on the state capitol Wednesday—a day designated by the unions as a “cooling off” period—chanting “We got sold out,” “It’s not over,” “Where’s the union?” and “We’re not leaving.” Signs carried by teachers included, “I just won a chicken on Let’s Make a Deal” and “Cool down day is heating us up.” The continuation of the strike is a devastating repudiation of the American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), which hailed the agreement with Justice as a major victory for teachers.

In West Virginia, Historic Statewide Teacher Walkouts To Head Into Fourth Day

February 27, 2018 Andrea Germanos, Alternet.org Resist! Protests, Teachers, West Virginia, Workers Rights and Jobs

Thousands of teachers and other school personnel rallied outside in the West Virginia Capitol on Monday, where union officials announced that the first-ever statewide walkout underway would continue for a fourth day. "Our teachers and our public employees are getting less in pay per year every year, and people are fed up and fired up about it," said Morgantown High School art teacher Sam Brunett at a candlelight vigil Sunday outside the Capitol. The strike, which began Thursday, is indeed historic. (A nearly statewide strike took place in 1990.) The current action is taking place throughout the state's 55 counties, which means roughly 20,000 teachers are taking part.

West Virginia Teachers Take A Stand

February 25, 2018 Joseph Kishore, World Socialist Website. Resist! Education, Strike, Teachers, Worker Rights

More than 20,000 teachers and public school employees in West Virginia are taking a courageous stand in defense of their interests and those of the entire working class. On Friday, teachers completed the second day of a strike that has shut down schools in all 55 counties in the state. The teachers have defied threats of injunctions, fines and even imprisonment from government officials, who have declared any strike action illegal. The American Federation of Teachers-West Virginia (AFT-WV) and the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) announced on Friday that what was originally announced as a two-day strike will be extended by at least one day, to Monday.

West Virginia’s Public Schools Closed Due To Teacher Walk-Out Over Pay

February 23, 2018 Staff, Wtvr.com Resist! Labor, Protests, Schools, Teachers, West Virginia, Workers Rights and Jobs

Public schools across West Virginia are closed Thursday as teachers and other school employees hit the picket lines, demanding higher wages and better benefits. According to Dale Lee, president of the West Virginia Education Association, teachers in all of the state’s 55 counties are participating in the planned two-day walk-out, and a group will march Thursday morning to the capitol building in Charleston. Organizers expect thousands of teachers to participate. The work stoppage comes after Gov. Jim Justice signed legislation late Wednesday night granting teachers a 2% pay increase starting in July, followed by 1% pay increases over the next two years. But union officials have said that’s not a sufficient fix. Teachers are also requesting better healthcare and benefits packages. “We need to keep our kids and teachers in the classroom,” Justice said in a statement after signing the pay raise bill.

Myths About Teachers: We Need More Police In Our Public Schools

February 16, 2018 By Bill Ayers, Crystal Laura, and Rick Ayers, Kzoo.edu Educate! Police, Public schools, Teachers

Public schools are plagued by gangs and ﬁghting, assault and battery, drug dealing, and other criminal behavior, including, in extreme instances, actual shoot-outs between students. All of these hard realities demand an active and alert police presence to maintain safety, order, and discipline. Schools must be safe havens for all kids, as well as for all school personnel. The good kids who want to learn and feel secure must be shielded from the actions of a minority of bad kids who get no discipline at home and have no respect for their classmates, the teacher, or learning itself. Suspending kids for bad behavior and sending them home may have made sense decades ago, but it’s no longer an adequate control: too often parents don’t believe in strong management and probably aren’t home anyway because the mother may be working two jobs, and in many cases the father isn’t home because he has left or is in prison.

St. Paul Companies Spend Tax Breaks On Super Bowl Sponsorships

January 30, 2018 By Rachel M. Cohen, Theintercept.com Resist! Super Bowl, Taxes, Teachers

WITH MORE THAN a million people headed to the Twin Cities over the next 10 days for the Super Bowl, local corporations, St. Paul school district officials, and civic leaders are bracing for what may be a public relations nightmare: the first teachers strike in St. Paul in over 70 years. The St. Paul Federation of Teachers, nine months into its contract negotiation, authorized a strike vote for January 31. The move comes amid the union’s unconventional strategy of linking declining school funding to corporate tax cuts and narrowing in on local companies on the Super Bowl Host Committee as a potential source of funding for the cash-strapped school system. The argument the teachers are making in their contract negotiations is straightforward. Cuts, they say, are not the answer.

Baltimore’s Teachers Fight to Democratize City’s Schools

January 14, 2018 Ryan Harvey, In These Times. Resist! Baltimore, Education, Teachers, Unions

When a photograph of bundled-up students in a frigid Baltimore classroom recently spread on social media—with temperatures in schools as low as the mid-30s—the city became a focal point of public attention. But two organizations of Baltimore teachers say such situations, far from isolated, are the latest examples of why educators are pushing to radically democratize the city’s school system “It wasn’t until we started sharing pictures in our classrooms showing 30 and 40-degree temperatures and speaking out together in a unified way that it got anyone’s attention.”

Teacher Handcuffed For Questioning Superintendent’s Raise

January 11, 2018 Nina Golgowski, Huffingtonpost.com Resist! Education, Louisiana, Teachers

Disturbing video taken at a Louisiana school board meeting on Monday shows a teacher being forcefully removed in handcuffs after she questioned a superintendent’s pay raise during a public comment portion. The teacher, who was identified as Deyshia Hargrave in a YouTube video and by a colleague to HuffPost, was called on to speak by a member of the Vermilion Parish School Board on Monday as it voted on the superintendent’s contract — one that would reportedly give him a five-digit pay bump. Hargrave, who is an English language arts teacher at Rene Rost Middle School, according to the school’s website, voiced her concern about superintendent Jerome Puyau’s pay increase, calling it a “slap in the face” to teachers who “work very hard with very little” as their class sizes grow.

Christmas Angels

December 24, 2017 Michelle Gunderson, livingindialogue.com Resist! Education, Public schools, Teachers

Ten years ago I was teaching music in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago. Many of our children were impoverished and over 30 languages were spoken in our school. I had 847 students. I did not round the number to 850 for a purpose – it is the moral of the story. The day before our winter break I produced a performance that included every student. We had to give our concert three times that day because only 350 people could fit in the auditorium. There was a choir with 60 students, a bell choir, recorder consort, and a guitar ensemble. All of the instruments had been donated by the Chicago Bar Association Young Lawyers.

Haitian Police Massacre Teachers & Students Fighting For Education

November 23, 2017 Staff, sfbayview.com Educate! Education, Haiti, police brutality, Repression, Strikes, Students, Teachers

By Staff of San Francisco Bay View - Oct. 17 – The Moise regime attacked demonstrations throughout the country marking the anniversary of Haiti’s first coup d’etat in 1806 and the assassination of its first head of state and founder, General, later Emperor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines. He is revered as a personification of Haiti’s independence and for his relentless campaign to distribute land to the formerly enslaved African majority, the chief reason for the coup against him. Oct. 12 – Members of BOID, the militarized unit of the Haitian National Police (PNH), trained and supervised by the U.N.-U.S. occupation with U.S. taxpayer dollars, rampaged through the Port-au-Prince community of Lilavois, burning down houses and terrorizing the population in yet another case of repression and collective punishment. The short video posted on “HaitiInfoProj” on Oct. 25 was filmed in the dark during the police terror and is accompanied by a plea: “BOID terrorists set fire indiscriminately to cars, homes and businesses of people struggling to make ends meet …, shooting tear gas that is greatly harmful to children with asthma … How can we blame people for leaving Haiti …?” Radio and witnesses reported that one person is known to have been executed, others have disappeared, and many others severely beaten.

Seattle Educators Ready For DeVos

October 13, 2017 Staff, www.dianeravitch.net Resist! Betsy DeVos, Education, Seattle, Teachers

By Staff of Diane Ravitch - My name is Jesse Hagopian and I teach ethnic studies at Seattle’s Garfield High School. I hope you didn’t just stop reading this letter after you heard the subject I am teaching—I urge you to keep reading. I am writing in regards to the Washington Policy Center’s $350-a-person fundraising dinner you will be addressing on October 13 at the Hyatt Regency in the nearby city of Bellevue. Thousands of my colleagues and I will surround the building to make sure the world knows your message of division is not welcome here. Given the recent protests of your speeches at Harvard, at historically black Bethune-Cookman University, and many other places, you must be getting used to this by now. But just so there are no surprises, let me tell you what to expect. There will be bull horns, signs, speeches, and I bet some of the more creative teachers—perhaps the few art teachers your proposed budget hasn’t cut yet—will show up in grizzly bear costumes, referencing the asinine comment you made defending the use of guns in schools to “protect from potential grizzlies.” There will be students there questioning your qualifications to serve as Secretary of Education, given that they have more experience with the public schools than you. They might point out that you never attended public schools and neither did any of your four children.

Small Class Size – Reform We’re Too Cheap To Try

October 1, 2017 Steven Singer, www.gadflyonthewallblog.com Create! Education, Poverty, Teachers, Youth

By Steven Singer for Gadfly on the Wall. We’re one of the richest countries in the world, yet we treat our own children – especially if they’re poor and brown – as if they were refugees from the third world. Well, perhaps marginally better. To my knowledge no one is suggesting we send the unwashed masses back to Africa, Europe or wherever else they originally came from – at least those who can prove they were born here. But we certainly aren’t bothering ourselves too much about taking care of them. What would that look like? Nothing all that radical. Imagine a classroom where students have the space to be individuals and not nameless cogs in the system.

Teachers At A Crossroads: Time To Heed Dr. King’s Call

August 10, 2017 Craig Gordon, www.livingindialogue.com Organize! History, Martin Luther King Jr, Teachers, US history

By Craig Gordon for Living In Dialogue - Promoters of so-called school reform frequently exhort educators to “teach with urgency.” This slogan trumpets their supposed determination to immediately achieve educational equity without funding equitable teaching and learning conditions. Two presidential mandates—Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top—proclaimed this righteous resolve while severely damaging public education. Now President Trump and Education Secretary DeVos plan to accelerate the destruction with more charters and vouchers or tax credits to pay for private schools. The real urgency we face today is to finally address the systemic causes of inequality—in and beyond schools–and other interconnected threats to human survival, as Martin Luther King Jr. implored fifty years ago. With the scientific consensus on climate change and a renewed and growing threat of nuclear war, the urgency is far more evident today. Here is a key question for those of us focused on finally achieving educational justice: What would it take to provide all students with high quality education?

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