Arizona teachers prepare for
statewide strike
By
Jerry White
23 April 2018
Thousands of Arizona teachers, parents and students are holding
the first of three days of “walk-in” protests before school today in the
lead-up to a scheduled statewide strike on Thursday. The planned walkout by
nearly 60,000 educators in the southwestern US state is part of a rebellion of
educators that is national and international in scope.
Last week, the Facebook group “Arizona Educators United,”
announced that 78 percent of the 57,000 teachers polled had voted for strike
action. Teachers are demanding a 20 percent pay raise, substantial wage
improvements for support staff and the restoration of funding cuts, which have
slashed $1 billion from the public schools over the last decade.
“The mood of the teachers is one of determination,” a teacher from
Tucson told the World Socialist Web Site.
“We feel the need to fight for the rights of our students and education as a
whole. We believe in our students and their futures and know education needs to
be able to provide for those futures. We are in buildings with leaky roofs,
25-year-old textbooks with duct tape and broken desks. We need to fight for our
fellow workers: bus drivers, cafeteria workers, custodians and other support
staff.
“Governor [Doug] Ducey has refused to meet with teachers and has
presented a half-baked plan of taking desperately needed funding from
hospitals, the arts, universities and the programs that help the
developmentally disabled. This is not how we want our schools to be funded, by
taking away from other social programs. Since the announcement of a statewide
strike, teachers and parents are preparing for a battle that need not have
casualties, such as those whose programs he wants to take from. This state
deserves better and so do its citizens.
“We are being told we will have to make up the time we are on
strike for our students. At this point, we are not sure if that is true or just
a tactic to scare teachers. We are planning to walk out anyway. Some schools
will have walk-ins until Thursday and then will walk out on Thursday. We support
our fellow teachers in every state, and some hope that a nationwide strike is
forthcoming. We need to fight for education before it is too late.”
As in West Virginia and Oklahoma, the struggle in Arizona has been
initiated by rank-and-file teachers, not the unions, which have colluded with
state and federal authorities in the systematic defunding of public education
and the funneling of resources to charter schools and other for-profit
educational schemes.
Teachers in Arizona have been holding “#RedForEd” protests,
sickouts and demonstrations at schools, neighborhoods and at the state capitol
in Phoenix for a month. The Facebook group, Arizona Educators United, however,
has no independence from the Arizona Education Association and it is promoting
the same fatal illusions that teachers’ demands can be won through lobbying and
appealing to the governor and the state legislature.
But the experience of the West Virginia and Oklahoma teachers has
proven the futility of such a perspective. “We were told to just go into the
legislators’ office and tell our story, but they didn’t care,” Jane, a teacher
in Oklahoma City, told the WSWS. “I was looking for hope, that the state
government would fund education. But they said, ‘We’ve got prisons to fund.’ We
said the better educated we are, the fewer kids will be in prison. But they are
renting to own two to three new prisons, which are a business here in Oklahoma.
“We’re supposed to live in a democracy with checks and balances,
where the government is supposed to rule by the consent of the people. But if
you’re part of the ruling class, you don’t do what the people want but what the
gas and oil companies want. The legislators are cutting the session short, so
they can go out and fundraise for the elections.
“It was rank-and-file teachers that started this. We didn’t listen
to the OEA [Oklahoma Education Association]. A lot of people were educated in
this strike, including teachers, about state politics. We need the bills better
than the legislators did. But they weren’t listening, and now a state
representative wants to push a referendum to veto our wage increases. While the
governor promised us a pay raise, we are constantly reminded that it is not
funded next year.”
Referring to the need to unite teachers across the country, Jane
concluded, “I want this to go nationwide. If we all go together, and go to
Washington, they can’t all run away.”
As Arizona teachers prepare to walk out, teachers in Kentucky,
Colorado, Florida and many other states are pressing for statewide strike
action. Teachers in Puebla, Colorado have voted to strike, rejecting a two
percent pay proposal from the local school board, which is also proposing a
four-day school week next year due to budget cuts.
Hundreds of Colorado teachers are planning to walk out and march
on the state capitol Friday to demand higher pay and defend their pensions in
the state run by Democrats. State Republicans have introduced a bill to
authorize school districts to obtain injunctions against striking teachers, who
would then face not only fines but up to six months in county jail if they
defied a court order to return to work.
The National Education Association (NEA) and the American
Federation of Teachers (AFT) betrayed the West Virginia and Oklahoma strikes,
and are seeking to prevent walkouts from occurring in more than one state at a
time, fearing that this could rapidly spread into a nationwide strike. Instead,
the NEA and AFT are trying to limit the Arizona strike to one day and divert
the anger of teachers behind a campaign to elect Democrats in the 2018 midterm
elections.
However, the school crisis is the result of the deliberate
policies of both big-business parties, which have been aided and abetted by the
teacher unions. Over the last three decades, tax cuts for the corporations and
the wealthy, implemented by Ducey, his Republican predecessor Jan Brewer, and
former Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, have drained nearly $4 billion
from the Arizona state budget.
The same is true on the national level. By the early 1990s, the
Clintons had fully embraced the nostrums of “school choice,” which until then
had chiefly been advocated by the most right-wing enemies of public education
and free market advocates. This was accelerated under George Bush’s “No Child
Left Behind,” co-authored by liberal stalwart Senator Edward Kennedy, which
utilized high-stakes testing to scapegoat teachers for the educational problems
caused by decades of budget cutting and the growth of poverty.
The NEA and AFT then promoted Obama as the champion of public
education. While the Democratic president bailed out Wall Street and funneled
limitless resources to fund war, he deliberately starved states and school
districts of needed resources and used the resulting funding crisis to oversee
the destruction of the jobs and living standards of hundreds of thousands of
educators. Obama’s Race to the Top program gave cash-starved districts federal
money to close “failing” schools and vastly expand charter schools.
During the two terms of the Democratic president, the AFT and NEA
all but banned teachers strikes. When they did occur, as in Chicago in 2012,
the unions quickly sold them out. With the Janus case now pending in the
Supreme Court—which threatens to end “agency fees”—the unions are working
double time to prove that they can suppress the resistance of teachers to a new
wave of attacks on public education.
Led by wealthy business executives—AFT President Randi Weingarten
(salary $490,000) and NEA President Lily Garcia (salary $348,000)—the unions
want, as the AFT slogan says, “school reform with us, not without us.”
To take the struggle forward, teachers must sever all ties with
unions by electing rank-and-file committees in every school and community to
take the conduct of the struggle in their own hands. Instead of fruitless
“lobbying” of corporate-controlled politicians, educators should dispatch
delegations to the public and private sector work locations throughout the
state to mobilize the broadest support for this struggle.
At the same time, these committees should establish lines of
communication with educators and other workers across the US and
internationally and prepare for a general strike to defend public education and
other vital services.
The struggle to defend the right of all children to high-quality
public education is, above all, a political fight. This necessitates the
building of a powerful political movement of the working class, independent of
corporate parties, to take political power and redistribute society’s wealth to
fully fund public education, eradicate poverty and raise the cultural and
material conditions of the population as a whole.
AMERICAN
TRAITOR: JOHN McCAIN AND THE LA RAZA HEROIN CARTELS
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2018/02/an-american-traitor-senator-john-mccain.html
McCain
has spent his entire political career looking for World War III as he has
watched Mexico and their heroin cartels walk over and under the borders of his
state of ARIZONA.
ONLY OBAMA WORKED AS HARD AS McCAIN TO SABOTAGE OUR
BORDERS
Federal agents discovered an underground tunnel crossing
the border into Mexico from Naco, Arizona on Tuesday as part of an
investigation after a traffic stop that yielded over two tons of
marijuana, with a value of approximately $3 million.
MEXICO’S INVASION, OCCUPATION, LOOTING and EVER-
EXPANDING WELFARE STATE ON OUR BACKS:
Sen. John McCain looks for wars all over the globe and
fights for open borders with Mexico despite the invasion his own state of
Arizona has suffered!
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