MA Wildcatters Earn Big Dividends After 3 Day Strike

 From Jacobin:

A wildly successful, illegal three-day strike by the Andover Education Association (AEA) in November has reverberated statewide for educators in Massachusetts.

The lowest-paid instructional assistants got a 60 percent wage jump immediately. Classroom aides on the higher end of the scale got a 37 percent increase.

Members won paid family medical leave, an extra personal day, fewer staff meetings, and the extension of lunch and recess times for elementary students.

Andover is twenty miles north of Boston, and the strike involved ten schools.

For ten months and twenty-seven bargaining sessions, the Andover School Committee had insisted that none of these demands were possible. But by the end of the first day of the strike, they had ceded many items. By day three, they agreed to almost all of the union’s demands.

Public-school workers can’t legally strike in Massachusetts — but Andover’s is just one of a series of school unions that have struck over the last four years, defying the ban, and in some cases paying heavy fines as a result.

The Massachusetts Teachers Association is pushing for legislation that would legalize public sector strikes after six months of bargaining. . . .

Portland Settles Teacher Strike with Big Gains

After 3 weeks of walking picket lines with parents and children, Portland's public school teachers have reached a tentative agreement that brings them much needed resources.  A clip below from The Guardian: 

“This contract is a watershed moment for Portland students, families and educators,” said Angela Bonilla, the president of the Portland Teachers Association. “Educators have secured improvements on all our key issues … Educators walked picket lines alongside families, students and allies – and because of that, our schools are getting the added investment they need.”

The deal would provide educators with a 13.8% cumulative cost-of-living increase over the next three years and about half of all educators would earn an extra 10.6% from yearly step increases, PPS said. The agreement would also add classroom time for elementary and middle grades starting next year and increase teacher planning time by 90 minutes each week for elementary and middle-aged classrooms.

The district would also triple the number of team members dedicated to supporting students’ mental and emotional health.

Thousands of Teachers March on Raleigh, NC

by Tamika Walker Kelly

Yesterday was huge.

Thousands of public school educators, bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria workers, social workers, counselors, coaches and other support staff – along with their supporters – flooded the streets of Raleigh. Again.

But we didn't just show up today. We organized. We held our legislators accountable and put them on record about their stance on public education. We met together with our neighbors in county conversations and made concrete plans to continue this work until we win the schools our communities deserve.

And we are already winning.

Tuesday, before so many of us descended on the state capital, Republican leadership in the NCGA announced a plan to give lopsided pay raises to public school employees. But what they don’t know is that we're in this together. We won't accept a proposal intended to divide us.

We are united on the 5 Priorities the North Carolina Association of Educators adopted at our convention in March:

• Provide enough school librarians, psychologists, social workers, counselors, nurses, and other health professionals to meet national professional-to-student standards;
• Provide $15 minimum wage for all school personnel, 5% raise for all ESPs (non-certified staff), teachers, administrators, and a 5% cost of living adjustment for retirees;
• Expand Medicaid to improve the health of our students and families;
• Reinstate state retiree health benefits eliminated by the General Assembly in 2017;
• Restore advanced degree compensation stripped by the General Assembly in 2013.

So, what’s next after yesterday’s #AllOutMay1 action?

First – Please fill out our brief survey to tell us about your #AllOutMay1 day.What did you do? Who did you meet? What was one powerful, meaningful moment that you’ll take back to your school district?

Second – If you are not a member of the North Carolina Association of Educators, we need you to join right now. We know from two years of mass mobilization actions that we have strength in numbers. NCAE is our organization and it’s our voice. We need you with us.

Third – NCAE’s Organize 2020 Racial & Social Justice Caucus is working hard in every school district to bring people into NCAE and orient us toward the fight for public schools. You already signed up for this struggle – we need you to bring your co-workers, your friends and your family. Send your folks to organize2020.org and encourage them to join our communications list so they can get in the loop on our work.

Fourth – This work takes time and resources y’all. Over the past month dozens of Organize 2020 volunteers have worked hard with NCAE leadership to pull this event together. Please consider donating to our work as NCAE’s Racial & Social Justice Caucus.

We are so proud of you all, and ourselves, today. We will not be intimidated into silence by politicians and special interests focused on undermining our public schools.

We are together. We are united. We are organized.

Tamika Walker Kelly, NCAE Region 6 Director
Bryan Proffitt, Durham Association of Educators President

10,000 Teachers, Parents, Students March on Columbia,SC

Yes, it's a school day.  No, teachers and students are not in school.

Kentucky Teachers Strike as Union Leaders Sit on Hands

The continuing waves of job actions across the country demonstrate the irrelevance of AFT and NEA top-heavy and top-down misleadership.  As Kentucky teachers and parents plan an execute sick-outs to shut down schools in protest of a toxic package of state legislation to rob schools and crush teacher voices, the union misleaders continue to urge teachers to go to work and, instead of striking, to send a delegation of beggars to the state capital to "lobby" corporate legislators.   Teachers are not having it.

From Nation of Change:

Don’t call what Kentucky teachers just did a “wildcat” labor action, at least not when you’re speaking with Tim Hall. Hall, a classroom teacher at Shawnee High School in Louisville, answered my phone call as he was driving to the state capitol in Frankfort to protest the latest slate of education-related bills being considered in the legislature. He and hundreds of other teachers in Jefferson County Public Schools, the state’s largest school district that includes Louisville, called in sick, prompting the district to close schools for over 100,000 students. 

Hundreds of those teachers joined Hall at the state capitol. It was the third time in a week and the second day in a row that enough JCPS teachers called out sick to trigger a full district shutdown. The sick-out spread to four other districts that also had to close. But neither the state teachers’ union nor the local union for Jefferson County had anything to do with organizing the action. In fact, union leaders urged teachers to show up for work, preferring instead to have districts send small teams of teachers to lobby state lawmakers. 

Yet Hall bristled at using “wildcat” to describe what JCPS teachers were doing. “I don’t like that word,” he said. “I think our concerns are reflective of teachers not only in JCPS but also across the state.” 

The Kentucky teachers’ actions are the latest in what has become a wave of teachers using their collective power to influence legislation in state governments, but the sick-out in Kentucky is also a sign of how teacher protests are evolving. 

Teachers who once saw labor actions as effective tactical responses to attacks on their financial well-being are now understanding that their labor power is part of a broader strategy to even the playing field in a political landscape that is increasingly unequal. And there’s strong evidence they’re having an impact. 

Teacher strikes are evolving 

The teachers, joined by parents and other public education activists, organized the sick-out action on social media sites including the Facebook page for JCPS Leads, which Hall helps facilitate. Teachers went back to work at one point, but then extended their protest to a fourth, fifth, and then a sixth day to ensure controversial bills were killed in the legislature. 

The roots of this year’s labor action are in last year’s statewide strike when teachers closed schools across the Bluegrass State to protest a new pension bill that would have put retirement earnings for new teachers at greater risk and shortchanged retirees and senior teachers. This year’s sick-out is different. 

First, teachers have a much broader array of targets for their protests. “We want a whole package of bills voted down,” Hall explained. 

Once again, a threat to teachers’ pensions, House Bill 525, has stirred the teachers’ ire because it would reduce the participation of educators on the state employee pension board. But two other bills go beyond wage-and-benefits grievances: House Bill 205 that would establish a statewide school voucher program giving tax breaks to those who donate to private school scholarships for special-needs and low-income students, and Senate Bill 250 that would take school principal hiring decisions away from local, site-based committees, which include teachers, and give the district superintendent sole responsibility for the hiring process – the bill applies to JCPS only. 

Hall sees all three bills as attacks on democracy. “They’re about taking away our ability to collaborate on how our schools operate,” he said. By removing educators from the pension board, ramping up a statewide voucher program, and undermining teachers’ influence on principal hiring, teachers are being pushed further out to the periphery of decision making, he explained, and in turn, are less able to make their voices heard as advocates for their schools and their students.

Also, there’s a good reason why Jefferson County teachers are taking it upon themselves to lead the labor action and go it alone in speaking out for their colleagues elsewhere in the state. Not only is JCPS the only district affected by the bill to change principal hiring; JCPS is also the only district currently under threat of state takeover. Proponents of charter schools and vouchers are generally seen as the most ardent backers of the takeover effort. 

And Hall and other teachers see all three bills as efforts to further undermine their participation in governance of their schools and usher in more state control and privatization of schools. 

A movement about democracy 

In taking their demands beyond economic grievances to include issues of governance and local community voice, the Kentucky teachers are joining a strong new trend in the teacher movement. 

When West Virginia teachers walked off the job last year and started what’s become known as RedForEd, they generally made wages and benefits the core of their grievances. But in their labor action this year, West Virginia teachers expanded their protests to include issues with privatization, specifically, to fight new legislation that would take public money from traditional districts and use it for charter schools and for private and religious school tuition. 

Also this year, teachers in Los Angeles and Oakland, California, made opposition to the unchecked growth of charter schools and their lack of transparency and accountability a centerpiece of the unions’ demands. 

Education journalists and “experts” have noticed this trend and described it as mostly a battle over funding for public schools vs. charter schools, voucher programs, and other forms of privatization. But that misses the broader argument teachers make that all education mandates that stem from top-down authority and big money interests are meant to rob teachers of having a voice in how schools are governed. 

Teachers are making RedForEd a fight not just for funding but also for political power. 

Teacher strikes work 

There’s evidence that the teachers’ change in strategy will work. 

Last year’s RedForEd protests clearly affected state legislation where the protests occurred. According to a new analysis, in four states where teachers walked off the job, state legislatures responded by increasing baseline state funding for schools by 3-19 percent. 

This year, teacher strikes in Los Angeles and Oakland led to calls from local governments for moratoriums on new charters and increased regulation of the industry. In response, California state lawmakers acted with “lightning speed” to enact new laws that require more transparency in charter school operations. 

How successful were the Kentucky teachers? As of this writing, on the final day of the legislative session, two of the three bills teachers targeted in their protests appear to be dead – the bill restructuring the state pension board and the bill creating a statewide school voucher program. The bill targeting the principal hiring process in JCPS appears to have passed in both chambers and will likely be signed by Governor Matt Bevin. 

Two out of three is not a bad batting average in a “red state” where Republicans hold a trifecta of strong majorities in both branches of the state legislature and the governor’s seat. And should the dead bills come back to life, Hall assures me, or similar bills spring up, teachers will return to the capitol. 

“We’re tired of being unsupported and messed with,” he said. “Teachers want to have fair ways for us to ensure the public education system continues to provide access to well-supported schools for all kids.”

Oakland Teachers Prevail

From Jacobin:

Though educators did not achieve all their demands, Oakland’s teachers strike transformed the city, won important gains, and empowered educators to take on the billionaire education privatizers. 

Under the inspiration of the national teachers’ revolt, and with the blessing of a newly elected militant leadership, a torrent of working-class creativity and self-activity was unleashed during Oakland’s strike. In many ways, Oakland resembled the bottom-up, effervescent upsurge of West Virginia much more than the systematically and meticulously prepared Los Angeles strike. . . .

It's About Time, And Resources: 30,000 Teachers Strike in Los Angeles

You may now say that the movement among teachers to save public education from the corporate predators and their politicians has now swept across the entire nation--from West Virginia to California:

The union’s demand for reduced class sizes (some classes have more than 40 students) and more support staff [including nurses, librarians, counselors] are at the heart of the negotiations. The union also seeks a 6.5-percent raise, but union leaders say salary is only one piece of a puzzle. They also point to such shortfalls as elementary schools only having a school nurse one or two days a week, which the union says risks children’s safety.

Watch This Republican Teacher in Red State OK

Enough!

Tens of Thousands March in Support of Brazilian Teachers

Well-supported: People pack the Cinelandia square during the march in Rio de Janeiro

Brazil faces a challenging security situation as it gears up to host the World Cup in eight months’ time.

In June thousands of demonstrators, angered by the billions spent in preparations for the event, clashed with riot police near the Mineirao Stadium in Belo Horizonte.

'We don't need the World Cup,' said Leonardo Fabri, a 19-year-old protester, at the time. 'We need education, we need better health services, a more humane police.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2449400/Brazil-protests-teachers-strike-sees-bombs-thrown-police.html#ixzz2hFWvlWKG
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Trinational protest at Mexican Consulate in solidarity with CNTE

Protesting education neoliberalism across borders. En solidaridad con Los maestros de Mexico! #lausd pic.twitter.com/t8sunJeLP6

— Robert D. Skeels (@rdsathene) September 21, 2013

On Friday, September 20, 2013 the Trinational Coalition To Defend Public Education organized a demonstration in front of the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles in solidarity with our sisters and brothers in Mexico to protest the repression of the Mexican teachers and attempts to privatize public education in Mexico.

My tumblr photoset of the protest

Trinational posted some photos on their facebook page

Trinational Coalition To Defend Public Education-USA, Southern California Immigration Coalition (SCIC), Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicano de Aztlán (MEChA) de Maya Angelou HS, serveral members of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), and other groups were on hand. Some young women drove all the way from Oxnard California to voice their support.

Commuters passing by honked in support as we repeated various chants like "la lucha obrera, no tienes frontera," and "¡Maestros unidos, jamás serán vencidos!"

Some good English language articles discussing the struggle are Mexican teachers expand strike and Teachers take a stand in Mexico.

Australian Teachers Vote Unanimously to Boycott Test and Punish Plan

Here is a lesson in applied professional ethics that the prosti-suits who run the NEA and AFT need to learn from:

Teachers have voted unanimously for a national ban on national literacy and numeracy tests in public schools in protest against the federal government's My School website.

The Australian Education Union federal executive said today that teachers would not supervise the national tests scheduled for next month unless the federal government addressed teacher concerns about use of the data on the website.

The union's federal president, Angelo Gavrielatos, said teachers would not administer the tests until the federal government stopped the results being used to "publicly brand students and schools as failures in league tables".

"That is damaging for students and school communities," he said.

"No other test, student assessment or report will be affected by this decision.

"The primary concern of teachers is the fact that nothing has been done to stop test data being taken from the My School website to create damaging league tables in which schools are ranked on test results alone.

"We also have serious concerns that the NAPLAN results are being used on the My School website in a way that is misleading for parents."

The federal government has made it clear that it will not cave in to the union's demands.

The Federal Minister for Education, Julia Gillard, suggested parents help supervise the NAPLAN tests if teachers proceeded with their ban.

However, the parents and citizens association said it would not co-operate with that plan. . . . .

Courageous Aussie Teachers Plan Strike to Save Education

Australian teachers deserve the respect and support from educators the world over. Their courage should be inspiration to us all:

Australian schools are no strangers to industrial action by teachers. In fact, teacher strikes are commonly used bargaining tools, usually in the fight for better pay. But the Australian Education Union's planned boycott of NAPLAN testing represents a style of industrial action that's almost unheard of in the Australian education sector.

In an extremely rare move, the AEU have resolved that teachers take industrial action on a curriculum matter. This issue has little do with professional remuneration or working conditions (although it can be argued that the publication of league table data would affect these) and more to do with student learning. The move represents a huge shift in teacher unions' agendas as it makes them an active force to be reckoned with in the implementation of the Rudd government's education plans. . . .

What AFT and NEA Might Learn From Australian Teachers

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Tension between the national teacher union and Labor governments will escalate into industrial warfare as teachers prepare to boycott national literacy and numeracy testing this year.

The Australian Education Union, which represents more than 180,000 teachers in public schools around the country, will put the recommendation to delegates at its annual federal conference in Melbourne today.

The president of the union, Angelo Gavrielatos, said the looming threat of school league tables had ''united the profession in a way not seen before in Australia''.

He said despite their stated opposition to league tables and the simplistic ranking and comparison of schools, state and federal governments had failed to prevent them.

If the federal and state governments took no further action, teachers would prevent the national tests from taking place as scheduled on May 11, 12 and 13 for years 3, 5, 7 and 9, Mr Gavrielatos said.

Teachers have traditionally used the tests to identify and remedy any problem areas in learning.

''These tests were never designed for the purpose of school comparisons,'' he said.

''Teachers cannot sit by and watch damage inflicted upon students and school communities through the creation and publication of school league tables.'' . . . .