West Virginia House Kills Education Bill After Teachers Strike to Block School Privatization

Yesterday, Tuesday, West Virginia’s teachers walked out to protest an omnibus education bill moving through the state legislature. The bill, known as Senate Bill 451, included another pay raise for teachers, but the Republican dominated West Virginia Senate had also inserted poison pills—authorization for seven charter schools and a statewide education savings account neo-voucher program for 1000 eligible students with special needs.

At noon yesterday, as schools were shut down in 54 of the state’s 55 counties and teachers from across the state had gathered at the statehouse, the West Virginia House of Delegates voted to table Senate Bill 451 indefinitely—killing the bill.

Teachers announced last night, however, that their strike will continue through today, Wednesday, because of fears that some members of the legislature will try to resurrect the bill.  All of the state’s public schools have been closed today.

Yesterday’s statewide walkout was almost exactly a year after the state’s teachers struck for decent pay.  At the end of last year’s strike, teachers won a 5 percent raise.  In October, Governor Jim Justice promised teachers an additional raise this year.

West Virginia is among the states that has, until now, not pursued marketplace school choice through the creation of charter schools or any kind of voucher program. The Network for Public Education and the Schott Foundation for Public Education recently graded West Virginia A+ for its commitment to public education and its avoidance of these schemes to privatize the public schools.

This week’s sudden teachers’ strike broke an impasse in an all-Red state, with a Republican governor, and Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature.  The Senate had, however, shown itself to be more ideological, filling the omnibus Senate Bill 451 with ideas straight out of the playbook of the American Legislative Exchange Council, which offers model legislation for the very programs that seemed to be priorities of key Republicans in the West Virginia Senate—charter schools and education savings account neo-vouchers.

When the original Senate Bill 451 moved to the West Virginia House of Delegates over a week ago modifications ensued. By examining how the House altered the Senate version, it is easy to see why teachers understood the original bill as the Senate’s retaliation against their strike a year ago. The House amended the bill by slashing out the education savings account vouchers and paring down the charter school pilot program to two new schools.  For West Virginia Metro News, Brad McElhinny explains the amendments added last week by the House: “The bill changed in several key ways during almost two weeks of consideration in the House.  A non-severability clause was removed right away.  That would have meant the whole bill, including the teacher pay raise would have been struck down if any element were successfully challenged in court.  A ‘paycheck protection’ provision was removed too.  That would nave mandated annual approval for teachers union members to have their dues withheld from paychecks.  Unions viewed it as an anti-organized labor provision.  The Senate’s version allowed charter schools. That’s still in the bill, but barely. House Education at first capped the charters at six. Now there’s a pilot program for two…  A provision establishing educational savings accounts was removed by delegates in decisive votes… The House Education committee also voted to remove an entire section detailing the consequences of a work stoppage. Originally, the bill specified withholding pay if a work stoppage closed schools… The Education Committee altered a section that would have removed seniority as the main factor in job retention.”

The strike this week was announced late on Monday after the House version of the bill was sent back to await Senate action.  McElhinny reported Monday night: “The House of Delegates, which also has a Republican majority, made significant changes to the bill last week, scaling back many of its original provisions.  But Monday afternoon, when the Senate got the bill again, leadership introduced one big amendment that would include 1,000 education savings accounts and up to seven charter schools… Union leaders said those changes, plus the perception that elected officials have not listened to educators, left no choice but to strike.”

Yesterday morning, after teachers walked out statewide, Governor Jim Justice declared in a radio interview that he would veto the bill if the version that reached his desk included the Senate’s amendment from Monday. Justice had previously asked for a clean bill to increase teachers’ pay, and now that SB 451 appears dead, the House of Delegates has added such a bill to its agenda today.

The NY Times‘ Dana Goldstein commented yesterday on the meaning of this year’s strikes by schoolteachers: “American teachers in the past year have mounted the most sustained educator protest movement in decades. Their relentless string of mass walkouts continues this week in West Virginia, where education unions abruptly called a statewide strike on Monday evening, and in California, which is bracing for a districtwide strike on Thursday.  The movement started with cries for better pay and benefits for educators, and more funding for schools and classrooms. But it has evolved into a protest against the argument that has driven the… education reform agenda… that traditional public schools and the people who work in them are failing, and that they must be challenged by charter schools, private school vouchers, test-driven accountability and other forms of pressure to improve.”

This week West Virginia teachers are on strike to prevent an experiment with privatization—a scheme like the one that has for two decades been undermining the public schools in states like Arizona and California.  West Virginia’s teachers acted to protect their state from the kind of conditions privatization has wrought in Oakland, where teachers will strike tomorrow to stanch the flow of funds out of the public schools and into an ever-expanding charter school sector.

Teachers Emerge As Strong Political Force for the Public Good in States with Austerity Budgeting

In an extraordinary NY Times piece, Dana Goldstein profiles the plight of public school teachers in Oklahoma, where salaries are third-lowest in the United States. Only in Mississippi and South Dakota are salaries lower for teachers. Oklahoma teachers are preparing to strike as their West Virginia peers did earlier this month.

“When teachers… (in Oklahoma) last went on strike, in 1990 for four days, they won a raise and limitations on class sizes. But that was the last time the Oklahoma Legislature raised taxes. In 1992, anti-tax activists successfully organized a ballot referendum to require a three-quarters majority in both the state House and Senate to raise new revenue and today, Oklahoma is one of 13 states that require a supermajority to impose new taxes… (E)ver since the referendum passed, it has become an insurmountable barrier for attempts to increase school spending.  The 1990 class size reductions were scrapped for lack of funds. Since 2008, Oklahoma has cut its per-pupil instructional funding by 28 percent—the largest cut in the nation, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities….” Goldstein reports that Oklahoma teachers have not had even a modest raise for ten years.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report that Goldstein cites, Oklahoma is among seven states that have cut income taxes since 2008, further undermining these states’ capacity to recover from the Great Recession—Arizona, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Oklahoma.

Many of the teachers Goldstein describes are working second jobs. She profiles one Oklahoma teacher, a mother whose three children qualify for the Children’s Health Insurance Program and for federally subsidized Head Start preschool. For them, the state’s fiscal straitjacket is daunting: “In 2016, voters rejected a ballot measure that would have increased education funding through an additional one percent sales tax.  More recently, a legislative proposal called Step Up Oklahoma would have funded $5,000 raises by increasing gas and tobacco taxes and modestly raising production taxes on the energy industry. It was supported by Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, the teachers union and a coalition of business leaders.”  But “63 members of the state House of Representatives voted for it, and 3 against, short of the required 75 percent supermajority. A quarter of Republicans and more than two-thirds of Democrats opposed the bill. The Platform Caucus, a group of Republican opponents, issued a statement saying the tax increases would have undone the benefits of President Trump’s tax cuts… Democratic opponents said the plan was too easy on oil and gas, while raising taxes too high on the wind industry. They also asked for an increase in income taxes on high earners.”  In Oklahoma, neither party prioritized paying teachers.

The Oklahoma legislature has valued school facilities over the teachers who work with children: “Local districts can use property taxes and bonds to pay for facilities, and many of the school buildings themselves are beautiful… But most instructional costs are covered by the state, where laws and politics make it difficult to raise taxes.  And it is inside the classroom that students and parents have noticed the impact of depressed state budgets.”  Twenty percent of school districts in Oklahoma have moved to a four day week.

Arizona’s public school teachers are also underpaid, although on top of austerity budgeting in Arizona, another primary cause is the growing diversion of tax dollars to massive privatized voucher schemes.  In Arizona, a grassroots coalition of parents, teachers and community members, Save Our Schools Arizona, secured enough signatures to let voters decide Proposition 305 by referendum in  November. Proposition 305 challenges a new law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor to expand Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Education Savings Accounts—a type of vouchers—to make all 1.1 million public school students across the state eligible (although the program would initially be capped at 30,000 students).  On Wednesday of this week, the Arizona Supreme Court upheld a lower court decision—permitting Save Our Schools Arizona’s Proposition 305 to appear on the November ballot.

Goldstein considers three states, Oklahoma, West Virginia and Arizona, where organized teachers are rising up not only to increase  their salaries but also to improve the conditions for children in the schools where they work: “All three states are paragons of austerity budgeting, guided by a belief that taxes should be as low as possible to encourage people to spend more and companies to move there and grow.” West Virginia’s successful strike for a long-overdue 5 percent raise has bolstered the resolve of teachers themselves to protest austerity budgeting in Oklahoma and Arizona. And in Arizona, teachers are a central part of the grassroots uprising against Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Accounts.

Rutgers University school finance expert, Bruce Baker suggests we reconsider the role of taxation, something many of us forget about as we grumble that our own taxes are too high: “Let’s step back for a moment and consider broadly the provision of public goods and services through a system of taxpayer support…  Investment in public schooling is investment in ‘human capital,’ and the collective returns to that investment are greater than the sum of the returns reaped by each individual who furthers her education. We invest public resources into the education of the public, for the benefit of the public.”

Statewide W. VA Teachers’ Strike Should Remind Us to Appreciate What Teachers Do

On February 22, school teachers across all 55 county school districts in West Virginia shut down the state’s schools by going on strike. West Virginia’s teachers say they cannot afford to support their families. The strike involves about 20,000 teachers and over 250,000 students.

Here is Sarah Jaffe in the NY Times: Strikes as broad as the one in West Virginia are vanishingly rare. But when they do happen, the prove that our labor history is not that deeply buried… West Virginia’s teachers, along with the rest of the state’s government workers, never got the legal right to collective bargaining, yet even without that right, teachers and school service workers have united across a largely rural state… By rising up against austerity, they have set an example for the rest of the labor movement and made it clear that they fight for the rights of all workers rather than special treatment for a few.  The teachers were on strike as the oral arguments began last week in Janus v. AFSCME at the Supreme Court, a case that seems likely to push public workers across the country closer to the lack of protections West Virginians have.”

Jaffe believes that despite Janus, what is happening in West Virginia is a sign of hope: “(I)n West Virginia, where… the teachers are near the bottom of the national pay scale, teachers have no special privileges, no agency fees, no bargaining tables at all. Their unions are ‘associations’ that mostly aside from one other major strike in 1990, lobby for laws to win what other unions bargain over….” And yet West Virginia’s teachers have maintained solidarity for what today is the ninth day the strike has kept schools closed.

On Tuesday, February 27, Governor James C. Justice met with teachers and promised a 5 percent pay increase and a task force to explore ways to address rapidly rising health care premiums for teachers. The West Virginia House agreed to the 5 percent raise, but the deal fell apart on Saturday March 3, when the West Virginia Senate cut the House’s proposed raise to 4 percent. Intense negotiations continued last night all through the evening, but school remains closed today.

A year ago, when Education Week compared teachers’ salaries, ranking the top ten states and the bottom. West Virginia’s teachers were sixth from the bottom, beating out only Arizona, North Carolina, South Dakota, Oklahoma, and lowest of all, Mississippi.  Education Week adds that cost of living measured in things like housing expenses is much higher in the states like New York, where average teacher pay at $76,593 is the near the top.  But there is another important concern for places like West Virginia, where average teachers’ pay is $45,477 and Alaska—the highest paying state for teachers, where the average salary is $77,843.  Apparently Alaska’s school districts realize they must pay a premium to draw teachers to a distant and pretty lonely setting for many teachers. While West Virginia isn’t quite so remote, many of its small Appalachian communities remain unattractive just because they are so isolated. In places like West Virginia and Oklahoma—whose average teacher’s salary at $42,647 is below West Virginia’s—a teachers’ shortage looms.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), West Virginia is among the states where state formula per student  funding has dropped below pre-recession levels—down 11.4 percent since 2008.  CBPP reports: “Oklahoma, Texas and West Virginia… have been hurt by declines in prices for oil and other natural resources.” Unlike several other states whose per-pupil general funding has dropped since 2008, at least West Virginia has abstained from further slashing state taxes.

I think the West Virginia teachers’ strike, a desperate action by the teachers across an entire state to call attention to the undervaluing of their work, ought to make us consider the daily work of teachers. No Child Left Behind and other test-and-punish school reforms over two decades have unfairly demanded that teachers raise students’ test scores without considering a mass of outside of school factors that affect scores.  The result has been widespread scapegoating of school teachers.

In the mid 1990s, Mike Rose, a UCLA professor of education, spent four years traveling across the United States visiting classrooms in public schools.  Possible Lives, the story of Rose’s journey, remains a timely book of hope.  In the book’s conclusion, Rose reflects on the teachers whose classrooms he observed: “To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning, and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal. But, of course, good teachers not only know things, but are also adept at conveying what they know: presenting it, clarifying it, sparking interest in it, using it to generate thought and action. Part of the pleasure of this journey for me was being guided through books I hadn’t read before, working, with a fresh take, calculations I had long since forgotten, considering a historical or current event in an unexpected context… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity.  As studies of teacher cognition have shown, and as we saw in the classrooms we visited, teaching well means knowing one’s students well and being able to read them quickly….  There is another dimension to the ability to make judgments about instruction. The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual student’s lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms.” (Possible Lives, pp. 418-422)

I worry that after nearly two decades of accountability-based, test-and-punish school reform, we’ve forgotten how to think about what teachers do.  Fair and adequate salaries for teachers are important as a way to honor the work teachers undertake day after day.  Do we care any longer about the human relationships that make our children feel valued at school and that enable them to learn? As Rose helps us see in his description of school visits all across the United States, the adults who shape our children’s education at school are as important in West Virginia as in New York or Illinois or Oregon or Alaska or Alabama.