THE TEACHERS’ REVOLT SPREADS TO ARIZONA
A historic walkout by teachers and the support staff recently 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 Colorado. As Jason Riley, a conservative writer, noted with disapproval in The Wall Street Journal: “It isn’t just college campuses. The nation’s K-12 schools are also turning into hotbeds of political activism.”
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 past 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 science teacher told me her classes have 30 to 36 students each.
The teacher used to have a second job waiting tables, but quit when she had kids. She loves her job, but told me, “As I get older, and had a family, it’s getting harder and harder to stay.” She was sad and anxious about the walkout, but had voted for it out of desperation. “We don’t have the resources,” she said. “I’m spending more and more money out of my own pocket, and I can’t have the impact that I want to have with the way things are now. Something needs to happen.”
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.
The impetus for the walkout in Arizona, like those in other states, didn’t come from a teachers’ union, though teachers’ unions have thrown their support behind the action. Instead, it 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. When teachers lack strong collective representation, scrappy new grass-roots organizations like Arizona Educators United can quickly build followings.
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.
Some teachers, though, fear that the public won’t understand why they turned down what looks, on the surface, like a reasonable offer. The rapid rise of the RedforEd movement means that much of the organizing is being done on the fly, and no one knows what the public response will look like.
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.”