Education Week - May 9, 2018 - 10

Legalities and Politics Collide
In Teacher Work Stoppages
By Mark Walsh
Teachers have walked off their jobs in five states in
recent weeks and months to protest the impact of low
state education budgets on the classroom, including on
their paychecks.
Have they been engaged in strikes? Aren't strikes by
public employees typically illegal?
The answers to those questions have been obscured
by differing opinions, fast-moving events, and the raw
political power exhibited by the teachers.
"The emphasis of what teachers have been working toward is the condition of the schools, and the
conditions of the classrooms in which they teach,"
said Dale Templeton, the director of collective bargaining and member advocacy for the National
Education Association, whose state affiliates have
been at the center of the recent walkouts in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and West
Virginia.
"In these states, the advocacy is directed at the legislature," she said.
The teachers' unions' fundamental view is that the
recent job actions do not violate state prohibitions (in
states that have them) against strikes by public employees because the teachers are engaged in political speech and action directed at lawmakers, not the

teachers' direct employers. These public-sector labor
matters are all generally questions of state instead of
federal law.
"The educators are arguing that the legislatures,
over many years, are the ones who created these conditions," said Alice O'Brien, the general counsel of the
NEA. "So it's not a strike as defined in many labor
laws as a dispute between the employees and the local
school district."
In legal briefs filed with the U.S. Supreme Court in
the labor law case Janus v. American Federation of
State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31, in
which a ruling is pending, the National Right to Work
Foundation says 27 states have right to work laws "for
the private and/or public sector," while AFSCME says
"26 states prohibit fair-share fees or public-sector collective bargaining completely."

Conflicting Views
Of course, there are some differing views on the
issue. In West Virginia, where teachers won a $2,000
raise after their statewide walkout in February and
March, state schools Superintendent Steve Paine had
warned teachers against the job action.
"Work stoppages by public employees are not lawful in West Virginia and will have a negative im-

Wave of Teacher Strikes Shows Collective Power of the Profession
an upcoming U.S. Supreme Court
decision.
With Arizona teachers seemingly
inking another win-Gov. Doug
Ducey signed a 20 percent pay raise
into law alongside an education
funding increase last week-eyes
are turning toward North Carolina,
where teachers are preparing for a
May 16 walkout.
Here are summaries of some of the
strikes' implications for policy, salaries, and the teachers' unions.

Effects on Salaries and Funding
More than anything else, the
strikes have brought widespread
attention to the fact that teachers
in Arizona, Oklahoma, and West
Virginia had among the lowest takehome pay in the country.
That the strikes have occurred in
states with histories of tax cuts is no
surprise. The bulk of school spending
goes to personnel, and so over a time,
a smaller spending pie translates
into diminishing pay. (Some economists have also noted the tendency of
districts to hire more aides and nonclassroom staff as a factor in low pay.)
One of the striking teachers' innovations, particularly in Arizona and
Oklahoma, has been to make the
link between teacher pay and overall
school funding explicit, policy experts
note.
"Your run-of-the-mill teacher strike
revolves almost squarely around
salaries," said Michael Hansen, the
director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. "In
Oklahoma, where they got half of

what they were asking for on salaries, but kept striking [for education
funding]-to me, that feels qualitatively different."
What's not clear is whether the
shorter-term salary hikes they've
won in the states will help shake
down solutions to long-term, structural budget issues.
Anti-tax fervor is so prevalent in
Arizona, Colorado, and Oklahoma
that each state makes passing legislation to raise taxes a political odyssey. And while national polls show
that a majority of Americans support
the teachers' efforts in theory, that's
a far cry from favoring higher taxes
in practice.
Largely lost in the debate about
teacher pay, meanwhile, is that state
education budgets are increasingly
being allocated to the rising costs of

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | May 9, 2018 | www.edweek.org

health care and pensions, putting
downward pressure on salaries, said
Martin West, an associate professor
of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Balancing those competing priorities poses no easy solutions, but as
the Kentucky walkouts proved, attempts to alter things like pensions
without consulting with teachers
first are likely to be met with consequences.
"It's fair to say that if you're a competent or especially a good teacher
and looked at your paycheck, you feel
massively underpaid, and I've got no
quarrel with that," said Frederick
Hess, the director of education policy
studies at the American Enterprise
Institute, a right-leaning think tank.
"It's also true that these teachers cost
a boatload more than they realize to
GENESIS OF A STRIKE
Texts from West Virginia
activist Ryan
Frankenberry, in green,
to another organizer
show the development of
the Facebook page that
helped fuel a successful
strike in the state.

Courtesy of Ryan Frankenberry

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

taxpayers" when benefits are taken
into account.
Policy experts have struggled to
explain why most of the strikes have
occurred in states where unions are
weaker. It could be a function of pay
decisions being more local in stronger
union states, higher salaries overall,
or possibly because states such as
California, New York, and Oregon
tend to lean Democratic and thus
unions there enjoy better relationships with lawmakers.

Narrow Policy Focus
One of the most conspicuous elements of the walkouts is their comparatively narrow focus on school
spending, not on other education
policies.
It is a strong contrast to the 2012
Chicago strike, in which issues of
teacher seniority and evaluation
were front and center, and a sharp
turn away from the dominant focus
of the past decade.
Evaluation of teachers, in part
based on test scores, was unquestionably a central concern of the
Obama administration. And as the
issue gained momentum in states,
it was paired with the not-so-subtle
implication, fueled by the mainstream media, that too many teachers weren't up to the job.
The new federal law, the Every
Student Succeeds Act, undid requirements related to evaluations,
leaving those decisions up to states.
And by focusing on the much more
traditional issue of wages, the recent
wave of teacher activism could fuel
retrenchment.
Notably, the Oklahoma and West
Virginia lawmakers who have cut

deals with striking teachers haven't
tried to attach any performance-related strings to them.
"Even supporters [of teacher-performance policies] want to keep those
efforts under the radar screen, and
that's why you're not seeing people
connecting the issue of teacher compensation and performance in this
outbreak of labor unrest," West said.
The tenor of media coverage has
changed, too. If it hasn't entirely
avoided the temptation to sentimentalize teachers, it has nevertheless
succeeded in illustrating the hard
realities that teachers in the states
with strikes have faced: disintegrating classrooms, decades-old textbooks, and the necessity of holding
second jobs.
The political implications of the
activism, meanwhile, are still unfolding. Democrats are hoping to
capitalize on the momentum among
teachers in the midterm elections,
but teacher activism doesn't always
fall along traditional political lines.
Take Oklahoma teachers, who lean
Republican but clearly don't hold to
the state party's anti-tax orthodoxy.
In a sense, the striking teachers are
displaying their own distinct and independent breed of populism: Automation and trade may not be taking
their jobs, but they feel equally left
out of the post-2008 economic recovery.
"We've spent 18 months talking
about working-class and middleclass Americans who have been overlooked. If you're thinking about those
folks, teachers are sort of exhibits
1-A," Hess said.
It's a question few have bothered to
ask yet: Are the strikes the beginning
of a long-awaited and long-promised

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