The historic strikes and protests by teachers across the country aren’t over
They aren't over.
The unprecedented stretch of strikes and protests by teachers across the country that started last year is continuing.
In February 2018, West Virginia teachers began the “Red for Ed” movement, in which teachers in mostly Republican-led states -- including Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and Kentucky -- went on strike.
This year, West Virginia teachers went out again, and there have been strikes in Los Angeles, Denver and Oakland. Only the one in Denver was directly about pay, with the others addressing broader issues confronting public schools, such as the spread of charter schools.
Last month, teachers in some Kentucky districts called in sick for a day to protest an issue involving pensions.
In Sacramento, teachers demanding smaller class sizes, pay raises and other things are planning a one-day strike Thursday. And North Carolina’s teachers are planning a one-day job action May 1.
A March 2019 report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that the 2018 teacher protests helped lead to boosts in education funding in four states — West Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma and North Carolina — but not enough to make up for earlier cuts.
In North Carolina, teachers say they are hoping to build on successes from a walkout they staged last May, when more than 1 million students in the state were forced to stay home because so many schools had to close. This post talks about some of the successes and why teachers are walking off the job again.
It was written by Justin Parmenter, who teaches seventh-grade language arts at Waddell Language Academy in Charlotte and who has helped in organizing the protest. He was a finalist for Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools teacher of the year in 2016, and you can find him on Twitter here.
By Justin Parmenter
Energized by the boldness of our colleagues in West Virginia and Arizona and other states, thousands of North Carolina educators marched through the streets of Raleigh to the state legislature last May to let lawmakers know that we’d had enough of their indefensible lack of support for public education.
The outpouring of teacher outrage — which forced the closure of many schools, giving most students the day off — was the culmination of nearly a decade of GOP supermajority control of both chambers of North CONTINUE READING: The historic strikes and protests by teachers across the country aren’t over - The Washington Post
