{"id":15460,"date":"2019-02-21T02:08:26","date_gmt":"2019-02-21T02:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=15460"},"modified":"2019-02-23T00:53:48","modified_gmt":"2019-02-23T00:53:48","slug":"whats-behind-the-teacher-strikes-unions-focus-on-social-justice-not-just-salaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/whats-behind-the-teacher-strikes-unions-focus-on-social-justice-not-just-salaries\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s behind the teacher strikes: Unions focus on social justice, not just salaries"},"content":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Tarlau<\/a>, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

For the past few years I\u2019ve been studying teacher unions and teachers strikes throughout the Americas. My research has taken me from the Mexican state of Oaxaca \u2013 where teacher protests in 2006<\/a> led to both violent repression<\/a> and a broad-based social movement<\/a> for direct democracy \u2013 to the streets of S\u00e3o Paulo, Brazil, to coal-mining towns in West Virginia.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned that certain conditions prompt teacher unions to adopt new forms of activism and take up broader issues of social justice that go beyond how much teachers are paid.<\/p>\n

Now is such a time in the United States.<\/p>\n

Factors driving the strikes<\/h2>\n

The teacher strike that began Feb. 21 in Oakland, California, is just the latest example in a wave of teacher strikes that have swept the country over the past year.<\/p>\n

In my view as a researcher who deals with issues of education and labor<\/a>, the current teacher strike wave in the United States is the result of three factors.<\/p>\n

First is the acceleration of market-based education reforms, including the expansion of charter schools.<\/p>\n

Second is networks of teacher activists organizing and transforming their unions to focus on broader social issues.<\/p>\n

Third is the framing of teacher union action as part of the struggle for racial justice.<\/p>\n

These factors have led teacher unions to form alliances with community organizations<\/a>, enlist students<\/a> and parents<\/a> to join the activism, and speak out against<\/a> efforts to expand charter schools and privatization.<\/p>\n

Inspired by Occupy<\/h2>\n

Let\u2019s look at how these three factors played out in Oakland, starting several years ago.<\/p>\n

As I learned through interviews, teacher activists in Oakland drew inspiration from the Occupy movement<\/a> in 2011. They helped occupy a local elementary school to protest its closing<\/a>, and eventually created a union caucus called Classroom Struggle with a couple dozen teachers to promote more social justice issues. Then, last spring, these teacher activists<\/a> created a slate, in alliance with African-American teacher and organizer Keith Brown<\/a>, and won the leadership of the Oakland Education Association. Since taking office on July 1, 2018, this new union leadership \u2013 inspired by the successful strikes in West Virgina, Arizona and Los Angeles \u2013 have been preparing for a strike.<\/p>\n

The conditions that led to the Oakland strike are similar to those that led to strikes in other cities earlier this year, such as Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

For instance, public education in Oakland has been defunded<\/a> and the city, much like Los Angeles, is experiencing charter school expansion<\/a> that teachers say is taking money away from public schools. One recent report found that charter schools take US$57.3 million<\/a> a year from public schools in Oakland.<\/p>\n

Teacher union actions in Oakland also mirror tactics and strategies that unions have used in other cities. For instance, Oakland teacher union leaders have enlisted the help of student<\/a> and community groups<\/a> and focused on racial justice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Teacher unions are enlisting students to help support their strikes.<\/span>
\nDavid Zalubowski\/AP<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All these actions have transformed the Oakland Education Association \u2013 and many other teachers\u2019 unions across the country \u2013 into leaders of a social movement that has the potential of redefining public education, the labor movement and American politics.<\/p>\n

Much of the media attention on teacher strikes has focused on the economic reasons for the strikes, such as low teacher salaries<\/a>, rising health care costs<\/a> and aging textbooks<\/a>. But there are important historical factors at play.<\/p>\n

Historically, teachers\u2019 unions have not led social, racial and economic justice movements. But there are some exceptions. Those exceptions include teacher unionists\u2019 critique of authoritarianism<\/a> in Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s; teachers\u2019 participation in the movement for a return to democracy in Brazil in the late 1970s; and, in the United States, the participation of many teacher union leaders in the civil rights activism<\/a> of the 1950s and 1960s.<\/p>\n

However, it is also important to note that during the 1960s, many teachers in the United States also found themselves at odds with communities of color. Perhaps this is best exemplified by the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville Strike<\/a>, when the United Federation of Teachers rallied against black community control of schools.<\/p>\n

New alliances<\/h2>\n

Today\u2019s teacher activists have bridged the divide between teacher unions and communities of color. For instance, between 2010 and 2012, teacher activists from Chicago\u2019s Caucus of Rank and File Educators, or CORE, aligned with other community groups to organize against school closings in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. CORE also supported parents and students occupying an elementary school<\/a> to prevent its closure. Their rallying call \u2013 \u201cSchools that Chicago Students Deserve<\/a>\u201d \u2013 included demands for reduced class size and other things related to classroom conditions.<\/p>\n

In Los Angeles, activists embraced this social movement approach to union activism, fighting for the \u201cSchools that LA Students Deserve<\/a>.\u201d In 2014, the Los Angeles activists created a new caucus, Union Power<\/a>, winning the elections and immediately hiring dozens of new organizers to help build towards a strike. They worked in alliance with dozens of community organizations<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Black Lives Matter movement fueled energy into a new student movement, called Students Deserve<\/a>, directly supported by the union leadership. The six-day LA strike in early 2019 represented, more than anything else, an explicit racial justice struggle<\/a>. The LA strike also called into question claims<\/a> by the charter and voucher<\/a> movements that school choice policies represent the best path to social mobility for children from poor communities of color.<\/p>\n

Teacher unions are not always \u2013 and not often \u2013 the leaders of broader social justice movements. Now that\u2019s changing due to a new generation of union activists who see their struggle as part of the fight for equitable resources for the communities in which they teach.\"The<\/p>\n

Rebecca Tarlau<\/a>, Assistant Professor of Education and of Labor and Employment Relations, Pennsylvania State University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rebecca Tarlau, Pennsylvania State University For the past few years I\u2019ve been studying teacher unions and teachers strikes throughout the Americas. My research has taken me from the Mexican state of Oaxaca \u2013 where teacher protests in 2006 led to both violent repression and a broad-based social movement for direct democracy \u2013 to the streets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":15456,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[292],"tags":[207,2763,1737,384,4691,4137,5904,5903,4849,2437],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15460"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15460"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15462,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15460\/revisions\/15462"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}