Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Teachers win framing strikes as constructive
Los Angeles deal giving other efforts momentum
Los Angeles teachers who declared a victory after a six-day strike have added momentum to a successful wave of activism by educators framing their cause as a push to improve public education, not just get pay raises.
Teachers in Denver, Oakland, Virginia, Texas, Washington and Illinois are planning rallies, marches and, in some cases, strikes of their own — actions that have fed off one another since the movement began last spring in West Virginia.
“Some of this action breeds more action,” said Daniel Montgomery, president of the teachers union in Illinois, where the nation’s first strike against a charter school network ended last month in Chicago. “People look around and say, ‘It is possible to do this. The teachers walked out in West Virginia, and the walls didn’t cave in.’ ”
In several states, governors and lawmakers are moving pre-emptively to address teachers’ grievances through proposals to increase money for education.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and new House Speaker Dennis Bonnen, both Republicans, emphasized more spending on schools as they were sworn in this month. Elected officials in New Mexico, Georgia, Indiana, Mississippi and Arkansas are among others who have proposed increases in teacher pay early in the new year.
In Los Angeles, 30,000 teachers returned to work Wednesday. They settled for the same 6 percent raise offered early on by the nation’s second-largest school district, but they also secured promises for smaller class sizes and more nurses and counselors to benefit students.
Labor historian Joseph McCartin, a professor at Georgetown University, said the recent actions have been more popular politically than a series of teacher strikes in the 1970s because of how they are framed.
“What you’re seeing in each of these cases is when teachers did engage in militancy, they did so not just to win raises for themselves, and sometimes not even primarily to win raises for themselves,” he said, “but to push back against the austerity regime that was undermining public education.”