Jeff Bryant: Striking Teachers Are Fighting For Much More Than Paychecks | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Striking Teachers Are Fighting For Much More Than Paychecks | OurFuture.org by People's Action

Striking Teachers Are Fighting For Much More Than Paychecks

While national news outlets hail the conclusion of a historic teacher strike in Chicago, another important story often overlooked by national reporters is the ongoing struggle to defend public education in the months that follow successful strikes. In Oakland, California, where teachers won important concessions from the district as a result of their strike earlier this year, the community is nevertheless still seeing their students’ education undermined by lack of resources and disrupted by school closures and further privatization from charter schools.

Recently, when Oakland teachers, joined by contingencies of parents and students, showed up at a school board meeting to voice their opposition to a decision to close a beloved elementary school, they were met with barricades and a phalanx of police officers who roughed up peaceful protesters.

The ongoing struggle that continues in Oakland after teachers held a successful strike illustrates why advocacy for public education can no longer settle for labor-friendly contracts that make life better for teachers and students, but has to challenge more widespread political and societal conditions that undermine schools, as Chicago teachers just did. Calling for these deeper structural changes means taking on an economic and political agenda and a hierarchy of policy leaders that choose to give public funds and tax breaks to an array of beneficiaries other than public schools.

Advocating for this more ambitious goal can result in real change not only in local communities, as teachers have been proving in CONTINUE READING: Striking Teachers Are Fighting For Much More Than Paychecks | OurFuture.org by People's Action