Arizona Lawmakers Cut Education Budgets. Then Teachers Got Angry. - The New York Times

Arizona Lawmakers Cut Education Budgets. Then Teachers Got Angry. - The New York Times

THE TEACHERS'

MOVEMENT

ARIZONA LAWMAKERS CUT

EDUCATION BUDGETS.

THEN TEACHERS GOT

ANGRY 

Early on the morning of March 14, Kelly Berg went to her closet and picked out a bright red blouse. Until recently, she had rarely worn red, but she was heading to the Arizona State Capitol in Phoenix, and a red top would tell everyone exactly who she was: a teacher.


Red shirts and blouses had emerged as the official uniform of teacher uprisings against low pay that were spreading from West Virginia to Oklahoma and Kentucky under the rallying cry “Red for Ed.” Just one week earlier, a Facebook post by Noah Karvelis, a 23-year-old teacher in Phoenix, lit the spark in Arizona, asking teachers to wear red on March 7 to demand more money for the state’s chronically underfunded public schools. Within days, 6,000 people clicked that they were on board. Berg, a high school math teacher for 23 years with a master’s degree who was taking home $1,620 a month, was one of them. On the designated day, a Wednesday, thousands of Arizona teachers turned campuses red from the New Mexico line to California. Karvelis and other young teachers then took it upon themselves to keep the activism going, declaring every Wednesday Red for Ed day — but Berg decided to wear it daily. “I wanted people to come up and say: ‘Kelly, today isn’t Wednesday. Why are you wearing red?’ ” she said. “It was so I could tell them, This is how important it is. We need to make our voices heard.”

In the past, the idea of participating in anything that resembled a political movement had repelled Berg. “I would say, ‘Don’t talk to me about politics,’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I think it’s a waste of time.’ ” A 46-year-old lifelong Republican, she called herself a “sleepy voter,” as if she sleepwalked through the voting booth every four years. “I was just voting for the person with an R by their name or not voting.”


This was true even though the Legislature and governor — unified under Republican control since 2009 — cut education spending more than any other state in the wake of the Great Recession. Berg suffered doubly because her husband, a web developer, lost his state job, and now the entire family of six — they have four sons, ages 7 to 13 — was on her health plan, with the premiums cutting her previous take-home pay almost in half. She was working three extra jobs to keep the family afloat, arriving home most nights barely in time to check her kids’ homework and kiss them good night. Across the state, teachers were taking in roommates, working second and third jobs and leaving the profession in such waves that substitutes without standard certifications were leading more than 3,400 classrooms statewide. Two thousand more couldn’t be staffed at all.


In December 2016, the day before Christmas break, Berg heard that her son Mark’s sixth-grade teacher had quit to take a private-sector job for more money, and suddenly she felt that she couldn’t take it anymore. She needed to understand why Arizona’s schools were so poorly funded and who was responsible. She turned for help to her best friend, Tiffany Bunstein, who followed state politics closely and, like Berg, had been teaching for more than 20 years at Dobson High School in Mesa, a sprawling, demographically diverse suburb east of Phoenix. “I went to Tiffany and said, ‘I want to know what you know,’ ” Berg said.


Bunstein, 47, an active member of the teachers’ union and a Democrat, told her friend that she had once been uninformed, too. “Then when you start paying attention and you see what’s been happening,” she said, “it’s like clearing your glasses: Damn, this is what’s been going on all along?” With Continue reading: Arizona Lawmakers Cut Education Budgets. Then Teachers Got Angry. - The New York Times

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