Students need to stay away from school to win gun fight
How did West Virginia teachers win a 5 percent salary increase earlier this month?
It’s not simply that they walked out of school. They resolved to stay out of school, until the state met their demands.
And that contains some important lessons for Wednesday’s scheduled national student walkout to protest gun violence. Students are planning to leave their schools at 10 a.m. on March 14 for 17 minutes, in honor of the 17 people murdered on Feb. 14 at a Florida high school.
But if the students want to do something that really reduces the gun carnage in this country, they’ll need to remain out of school for a lot longer than that. And the rest of us will have to rally behind them.
That’s what happened during the nine-day teacher strike in West Virginia, where parents opened their doors to kids whose own parents had to go to work. Churches and community centers provided meals. And thousands of citizens went to the state Capitol to support the teachers, whose average salary — around $45,000 — ranked 48th among the 50 states.
And guess what? They got a raise. And they did so in a Republican-dominated state, where teachers don’t have a right to strike or even to bargain collectively. Defying their own union leaders, they used an enormous Facebook group to sustain the walkout until they won.
They also drew on West Virginia’s proud history of labor strikes, especially in the coal industry. “We come from an area that is known for standing up for what they believe in,” one teacher explained. “We’re just reviving the movement that was started years ago.”
That’s exactly what our students need to do. There’s a rich history of student strikes in this country, too, dating to the Great Depression. And it reminds us how much power kids can wield, if they resolve to stay together — and, most of all, to stay out of school.
In 1936, students in Alameda walked out to protest the firing of a popular school superintendent. They picketed City Hall, while a local hotel sponsored a dance to help them raise funds for gasoline and other “strike supplies.” Three days later, the superintendent was reinstated — and the students returned to school.
The Alameda strike made national news, inspiring other walkouts around the country. In St. Helens, Ore., students struck to protest the dismissal of their own superintendent. “Alameda students won, why can’t we?” they chanted.
The next great round of student strikes occurred in the 1960s, echoing nationwide protests surrounding civil rights and the Vietnam War. In 1962, 200,000 African American students walked out in support of school desegregation; two years later, half a million students in New York City did the same.
As the decade continued, strikes focused more on schools’ curricula and rules than on their racial composition. In 1967, African American students in Philadelphia marched out to demand instruction in black history and the right to wear Afro-style clothing; the following year, 20,000 Chicano students in East Los Angeles walked out to demand Mexican American history. They also insisted on the right to speak Spanish, which was prohibited everywhere except in Spanish class.
By 1969, 59 percent of American high schools — and, more remarkably, 56 percent of junior high schools — reported some form of political “unrest.” Not all of these actions involved strikes, and not all of them succeeded. But they were more likely to succeed if they involved strikes, which forced the hand of officials like nothing else.
Take heed, #NeverAgain students! True, the Florida Legislature recently passed a bill requiring a three-day waiting period for gun buyers and raising the minimum age for gun purchases from 18 to 21. But the same measure rejected a proposed ban on assault weapons, like the one used in the Parkland massacre.
And in Congress? Nothing doing. Despite prodding from President Trump, who surprised everyone by demanding stricter gun measures, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced that his chamber would focus on a banking bill instead of on guns. Students staged a sit-in outside his office Wednesday, when eight were arrested. “Enough is enough!” they chanted. “Not one more!”
Now imagine hundreds of thousands of students doing the same thing, all across our battered and broken land. If they refused to return to school until Congress acted, Congress would act. Not everyone would get what they wanted, of course. But surely they’d get more than they have now.
As Frederick Douglass wrote on the eve of the Civil War, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” And our gun powers won’t concede either, until our students demand that they do. Enough is enough. But 17 minutes won’t be enough to change anything.