The Teachers’ Revolt [Full Transcript]

In the famously musical state of Oklahoma, these were public-school music teachers in a victory march around their state capital this week:

How impossible, you ask, were the teachers’ walkout wins in those two tax-cutting / Trump / red states? West Virginia, where teachers got a 5 percent raise, and in Oklahoma, where they want more. Teacher salaries in Oklahoma start at $32,000, lowest anywhere but Mississippi. Over a decade, spending on schools has been reduced more than a quarter. It takes a super-majority (three quarters of the Legislature) to raise taxes. But this week, strange to tell, masses of Oklahoma teachers went to the State House instead of their schools and won $6000 raises for themselves. And a very substantial tax increase passed the Legislature, under the very personal glare of Harold Hamm, Oklahoma’s richest oil man, who almost became Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary. The next tests of the teachers’ turn to payroll politics will come in Kentucky, then Arizona. And several impressions of a changing political order will be tested: first, that teachers could be the model of an emerging activist white-collar working class; also that the glory days almost a century ago — of striking miners and dissident labor — are not forgotten or gone. The teachers we got to talk with were making the most of missing their classrooms:

Teacher I: Yes they are. They’re here also here, lobbying for their self. We are here in the thousands.

Teacher II: We just had this breaking point and you know I think it could have occurred a year ago it could have occurred a year from now just somebody said Let’s walk out and people jumped on board.

Teacher III: unfortunately our claim to fame here in Oklahoma is that we’re leaning in the US an education cuts. We have to have supplies. We have to have technology. We have to havemore teacher allocations. A lot of our smaller districts in Oklahoma have gone to a four day school week because they can’t, they don’t have the funding. Yeah, It’s heartbreaking.

Teacher II: I don’t want to have to be rationed paper. I want to have the maps I need to teach European history and teach world history. I don’t have to worry about whether I can supply my students with colored pencils to do projects or just regular pencils to write there notes.

Teacher III: I don’t have enough books for kids, they are falling apart. Kids can’t check out textbooks. We just don’t have enough of them.

Teacher II: Teachers will stand up for themselves,if other state legislatures continue to defund public add the teachers or are going to get angry they’re going to showup and they’re going to demand that their children their kids are taking care of.

CL: Regan Killackey teaches high school English in Edmond outside Oklahoma City. He said the zeal of the teacher gets tested in Oklahoma.

CL: Regan Killackey teaches high school English in Edmond outside Oklahoma City. He said the zeal of the teacher gets tested in Oklahoma.

CL: They gave you six on a demand for ten thousand a year. What’s next ?

RK: Yes sir. Next is to actually fully fund the budget and we have basically three different things that we’re wanting, a cost of living adjustment for retirees. and increase in size and with our support staff which is not nearly enough. And the third is public employees. Additionally have not received a raise as well. But the problem is that our House of Representatives passed a bill out of committee and actually have to vote on it debate it and vote on it here in the next few days it will be down here every single day. And then what’s interesting about this movement is it started with a 24 year old kid teaching history in Stillwater Oklahoma and he starts a Facebook page after West Virginia. And now here we are.

Every teacher in the state like is the of group now Oklahoma teacher walked out now to the group.

So what’s inspiring about this is that it is a grassroots movement and it’s getting stronger every single day. This is the biggest day so far. And we have to keep the pressure on our legislature to actually do their job and they’re going to be scare tactics. There’s going to be different things they’re going to do to try and keep us from coming up here. Parents are going to be angry. Our snow days are going to be used up once the snow days are used up. You have to make up those days at the end of the year. And so we’re going to see parents upset,we are gonna see their vacation plans go through. We’re going to see a variety of different public backlash. We can anticipate that. But in the face of a backlash we’re still have to have to stay strong we’re still have to stay United and we’re going to have to do what’s best for the kids.

CL: Dana Goldstein wrote a solid 100 year history of the teacher wars and our most embattled profession before she got the education assignment at the New York Times. She reported the Oklahoma story this week under the Times headline.” It really is a wildfire”

DG: I think what we’re seeing now is significant in a new way because after West Virginia teachers last month did a really daring Wildcat type strike from the grassroots up surprising their union leaders with the strength of their fury rally. You know they did win a race from their legislature and all these other red states Oklahoma perhaps Kentucky perhaps Arizona look at West Virginia and said hey we’re also living in this austerity climate. Our school budgets have been cut to the bone our salaries sometimes qualify for food stamps.Our children for Medicaid and Headstart. Something has got to give here and they were so inspired by the example in West Virginia that they have taken to the streets around these state capitals and that’s what we’re beginning to see

CL: In overrunning a legislature that we think of as being owned and operated by the oil industry with Harold Hamm of all people in the gallery, glaring at the legislators.They forced a tax increase through that legislature.

DG: They did and I think it really is extraordinary and I was on the phone with a representative of that oil and gas Association there in Oklahoma. And what happened is that the production taxes on the wells was raised and this is an industry that’s used to getting its way in this state. They are really surprised. So teachers really did make this happen with this protest movement. It would not have happened otherwise.

CL:So many things are changing here including just the general picture that the teachers are the good guys. Suddenly! They were not entirely in Chicago or in New York back in the 60s.

DG: Right I think that’s right. I mean if you look back at the Obama era for education reform it was really about a sort of technocratic education reform agenda which entailed giving kids more standardized tests so that those test scores could then be used to evaluate teachers potentially to fire ineffective teachers and teachers were not huge fans of this agenda. Theirunions resisted this agenda but the public wasn’t quite sure what to make of that dispute. It was a bit technical and complicated to get to and so we didn’t see a real mass movement.

CL:Let’s get back to basics, spelled money, is the fascinating thing to me. There’s been so much talk about charter reforms or curriculum reforms— testing for success, excellence by individual kids or school compose it scores that sort of thing and suddenly it’s very basic—no, we’re pretending to do magic cutting budgets and playing with the system: how about just paying people more? Making it a much more attractive, happier profession.

DG: You’re right, and teachers are saying, “ you know I can’t be expected to raise student achievement to close gaps between low income kids and middle class.” They can’t be expected to do any of that when I have to go home at the end of the day and work a second job as an Uber driver. You know, I don’t have the time to commit to my vocation, my true passion—teaching—when I have to work overtime just to make ends meet. What’s been really interesting to me, talking to teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma the past couple weeks, is that they’re describing themselves as working class. Now in my book you know I go back to the 19th century and at that time teachers really did think of themselves as working class, but after teachers won collective bargaining in this country in the 60s, they really stopped thinking of themselves so much as working class. Their conditions improved a lot. They start thinking themselves really as a sort of unionized, white collar middle class, upper middle class professionals, especially as more and more teachers went out to earn graduate degrees. So, they’re really a highly educated group. So the fact that these folks are saying, “I am part of the working class and this is a working class movement,” that really is striking to me. I think it reflects the fact that teachers don’t necessarily feel treated as professionals. There’s so much that goes into that. Whether it’s state legislatures that are trying to make it so that it’s much easier to become a teacher so you don’t need specialized training… Teachers are angry sometimes that they don’t get a lot of breaks to use the bathroom during the day that their work. They feel infantilized by those types of roles. So there’s so much swirling around in this movement and I think it’s really interesting that so many of these young millennial teachers in their early 20s are driving less. They’re the ones who got on Facebook. They are the ones that started these Facebook groups to push for a walkout. And now though the unions are listening to them and saying you’ve asked to push further faster you’re angry.

We want to support you in that but it really is those young people who drove this.

CL: Write a 2018 epilogue to your 200 year survey of teachers wars in this country.

DG: A lot has changed. You know I think this is a wakeup call for education reformers those people who have been focused on stuff like charter schools and teacher evaluation and tenure for teachers depicting Tenure as the great evil that causes kids to do badly in school. You know I think this is a wake up call. You know how can we talk about those things until we first fix the basics which is teacher should have a living wage. You know they should be able to repay their college and graduate school loans and provide for their families and then need to have stuff like text books. You know it’s pretty basic in Oklahoma. There’s a number of districts in rural areas that have four day school weeks. So you can imagine just insanity that causes for parents trying to figure out what to do with young children on that fifth day. So it is a back to basics conversation in terms of education policy right now.

CL: That was Dana Goldstein of the New York Times. Coming up Bernie Sanders’ millennials and his mindset driving the news in Trump territory. This is open source.

CL: I’m Christopher Lydon, this is Open Source—we’re talking about the teacher strikes. Our guest Jennifer Berkshire makes her living almost as she says writing editing and causing trouble.

In her blog coverage and her podcasting about education in general. Check her work. on her blog “Have You Heard?”. Jennifer, nobody wrote about the teachers uprising in West Virginia with a keener sense of something big breaking in Oklahoma—what is happening big picture here?

Jennifer Berkshire: Well, I think it is such an amazing story and I would really encourage people to look at what’s happening in Arizona as well where you have these two different trends. You have the teachers rising up in just the way that Dana described; you have young teachers in driving this “red for ed” movement saying no, we will not tolerate this. Bottom of the barrel funding level for our schools and we deserve to be paid more. But then you have this other movement from the right which is to really to go towards a sort of radical education system—that’s essentially liberated from brick and mortar schools. What I think the edudebit cards. And so you see these two movements now sort of clashing. So I would really encourage people to watch. I think that Arizona hasn’t gotten enough attention and that there is a grassroots movement there that’s going to show us that this isn’t just about teachers per say it’s about the future of of public education or whether it’s what states are obligated to provide.

CL: Even the negotiators are saying that there’s a wake up call here for the reformers in the Obama manner. There’s a wake up call for austerity I think. There’s a wakeup call on a variety of kinds about the union movement. What are you betting.

JB: Well the wake up calls on austerity is so you’re so right about that if these guys come into office, and they pledge that we will never going to raise taxes that is all that’s a recipe for underfunded schools right. And so the other thing you’re seeing is that I think people are missing this part of the story that these uprisings are happening in states where there’s really been an erosion of democracy, right. That one of the little tidbits from West Virginia that I thought was so telling was that people commented that in the days prior to the strike by the teachers no one had seen the governor around the state house. There is really no need for these guys to even show up because the policies are all being dictated by the corporate lobby. So, in Oklahoma it’s oil and gas, in West Virginia, it’s coal, it’s the Koch brothers, and Oklahoma’s inability to raise taxes without a supermajority majority as an example of that.

CL: That’s exactly the thing I wanted to run past you. You’re an independent writer Jennifer with an admitted tilt in favor of public schools and an Obama suspicion of market driven alternatives in this whole all news this week what jumped out to my ear is the un declared bias in the so-called authority figures are saying about the teachers. The governor of Oklahoma Mary Fallin for example about teachers wanting salary raises she said it’s kind of like having a teenage kid that wants a better car. So much teachers is grown ups with real bills to pay but listen to this a promotional video for a government of Folan made for the Heritage Foundation and it sounds to me like a full catalogue of both words and put down saimed at the schools.

Marry Fallen: We’ve always known and we all know that children learn differently that you can’t have a one size fits all education system for every particular child to me. But having an education savings account gives parents and students an opportunity to look at what’s the best.Education for them and where to go. I don’t think it’s radical for any parent or any student to want to get the very best education. Where ever that best fits the students needs. If you’re in avery. Poor area and you don’t have the best school. And there’s challenges within the school system and whatever state you live in or whatever city you live in. This is especially away for people that may not be able to send their kids to a private school to be able to send them to a different school. It wouldn’t get at the door. And be able to give our students and their parents not to have choices. And to

Get quality education to our children and whatever forms best for them. I think that’s a good step forward.

CL:Jennifer Rooker who wrote that script. It’s all about getting rid of brick and mortar schools and sending the money back to rich people.

JB: You know there was such a flap earlier this week about Arnor town at the Sinclair network reading the same script about fake news and threats to democracy and you could do something very similar with the statement that she just made. like I could line up commission ersand advocates for this approach and you would be really creeped out at how they use this.You know these identical talking points that sound so innocuous right but then when you really start to poke and pry what she’s talking about is basically a prepaid debit card where a percentage of a states people funding could then be accessed by the parent in Arizona.Bank

of America has the contract and then the parent gets to decide like oh it could go to a school and it could go be a down payment for a private school tuition. It could be for homeschooling supplies it could be for tutoring and it would be this Radical tilt away from schools especially schools and their democratic oversight from the teachers who working those schools and they’re awful awful unions that represent. And instead you would have the sort of unbundled system sort of like the way that we were unbundling are viewing choices from the cable company.

CL: Wait stand by for John Chelton John Geoghan middle school kids in Boston before he go this doctorate and then a judge teaching Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin Green Bay teacher strike was his book last year a hundred years of such things.John Shelton what feels different about 2018 the teachers union.

JS:Thanks for having me.

Well you know I think what’s been happening in West Virginia and Oklahoma and Jennifer isspot on I you should be paying more to what’s happening in Arizona too. What’s different about what’s happening is that really the fruit of long simmering tensions. So in these red states you know a lot of there’s been systematic disinvestment in public education. And you know what investment there has been you know has been has been pushed towards school choice initiatives as you alluded to.

And I think in general really in the last 30 years or so since the growing sense that education is really so vital for economic opportunity and I have some problems with thatnotion. But we can come back to that. There’s been this consensus that teachers needed to be sort of have their feet held to the fire and and you know be disciplined and ensure that they were keeping students accountable and through standardized tests. And I think there has been these simmering tensions and you know as a historian I’m always really attuned to contingency. And so there’s been some great reporting about the early organizing in West Virginia by Sarah Jaffe and Michelle Chan and the believer podcast where they point out that it actually started in these three school districts three counties that really had this this long standing sense of labor history going back to the Cold War and the cold wars in the1920s. And then it spread from there across the state. And I don’t think we would be talking about this right now. If those teachers in West Virginia hadn’t won. It’s really important. And in one it was against the law when they went on strike but they won and that should all the teachers who are in other similar situations like in Oklahoma and Arizona that it really showed them the power that they had if they if they did something on the scale that happened in West Virginia.

CL: John you wrote in the washington post yesterday that teachers in general are in a much stronger position looking forward maybe even when they realized they cannot be outsourced. There is no trade deal that can take them out of the game nor digital technology can render them obsolete. Is this fundamentally different you think from many famous teachers strikes Chicago New York Boston over many many years. What’s new here.

JS: Yeah. So there are a couple things that are new. I mean so I wrote about what I called the area of teacher strikes in the 1960s 70s and 80s and these were you know these were conflicts that were largely centralized in school districts many of them urban not all of them urban but they were they were centralized in very specific metropolitan areas for the most part. And the fact that we’re seeing something on this scale across an entire state is really really unique and I think in part you know millennials are playing a big part of this as we’ve already heard.

But but stuff like Facebook and really new organizing opportunities have played some partin this. But it is I think accurate to say that this is really the grassroots that are out in front of this and I don’t want to I don’t want to intimate that rank and file teachers in the 60s 70s and 80s didn’t support the actions that were being taken by unions. But by and large those were led by union leaders with you know in dialogue with rank and file teachers I mean these are really coming up from below. They’re coming up in places where you know it’s quite possible that in West Virginia Oklahoma many of the teachers that are leading this they may not actually even be union members or they may be now but they might not have been one When the strike started. And so it really is coming up from below and that to me has been really the most interesting part about this. I mean you played the Oklahoma band the band playing The Twisted Sister song. I mean if you can’t be moved by that when you hear that your heart isn’t beating it that may be the most important music to come from Oklahoma since you know what he got three or something.

I mean it’s it’s really moving stuff.

CL:I wanna ask you Jeniffer you John. Why didn’t we know until now that the the underfunding the slashing of education budget has persisted so long after the “08” recession deficits were were restored. I mean the government is not hurting for tax income anymore and yet the cuts in the educational budget are still striking.

JB: I’ll answer the first part of that and then John can jump and Dina Goldstein told you that this was really a wake up call for education reformers. And part of their argument was that money really didn’t matter. It was what you did with the money and that you know you didn’t really need these teachers who hung around forever in open and snapped up the salaries schedule you needed fresh new teachers and that was really you know you were going to bring in Teach for America and the idea was that you would get a teacher from Yale and they would believe in their student and that’s what was going to do it and the thing that I think where the irony Duncan’s and the democratic reformers really did so much damage was that the they started bandying around the idea of adult interests vs. kids interests. meaning that it was inappropriate for teachers to talk about their working conditions and that demanding money.
That you were you know you’re as a teacher you were really it was ah ah ah kind of a missionary job. Right. And so whenever a teacher would start talking about their working conditions they would be dismissed for putting adult interests first. And what you’re seeing so vividly in states like West Virginia and and now Oklahoma and then on to these others is that you can’t separate you know when you’ve got 40 kids in a class with 30 chairs. It’s preposterous to dismiss the teacher who is advocating for more money as somehow being driven by selfishness and not being single mindedly focused on achievement.

CL: Can I just say: there are a lot of good ideas around school reform and even in charter schools I would say. But overall in the long term it’s seems to me Arne Duncan and all of those bright ideas are going to look like a fig leaf on just plain defunding public education.

JB:Well I think it was really strange that even at the beginning of this week Arnie Duncan had an op-ed in the Washington Post read basically argued now people are like people are saying now that I think he’s doing better than ever. But education reform didn’t work. That’s not true. And I thought well what a missed opportunity why wouldn’t you as the kind of Democratic spokesman for education why wouldn’t you take this opportunity to go out and really make a ringing cry on behalf of public school funding and investment as people you know , everyone’s tuned in watching what’s happening in Oklahoma. That is a big missed opportunity and a sign of how what a small vision there still attached to.

CL: Jon Shelton is there a wake up call here before about defunding the best diverse program.

JS: Yeah I think there absolutely is and I think to answer the question about you know did why didn’t we know about this. I think we did know about this particularly in red states. You know there’s been an ideology frankly of you know for for 30- 40 years now that the way that political economy should work in this country is by cutting taxes and ensuring that corporations the so-called job creators can’t accumulate profits. And I don’t think frankly that’s ever been up something that has appealed to the majority of Americans. I think Americans have generally accepted it. Because they’ve been told really you know if you want to look for any sort of bipartisan consensus in the last 30 or 40 years it’s been largely around this idea that we have to basically kind of further corporate interests in order to ensure that people have jobs. And and so I think the majority of Americans and many places have accepted this because they felt like it would bring economic prosperity. But the last 10 years have really given the lie to that notion. I mean we supposedly have full employment right now average workers have not seen their salaries keep up or that they’re not getting wage increases even though they should be if we’ve got a really tight job market. Look corporate profits are through the roof. And you know you combine that with the fact that we have these education systems in red states that frankly are crumbling.

CL: The question is whether people have caught up with the news. John you’re in Wisconsin where Governor Scott Walker made his reputation busting the teachers union and other public unions.Is he going to pay for that?

JS: Well it’s interesting I mean we have some very specific electoral politics here. He is running for a third term this November. There are some concerning things where you have a huge field of Democratic contenders and a very late primary. So I’m not sure but I will say that Scott Walker and the Republican held legislature and my home state have quite a tremendous amount of money both from the K12 and the higher ed system and it’s kind of telling that in Walker’s last budget he actually did provide a small per pupil wage increase across the state in addition to a pittance of increased funding for the university system. AndI think it shows that people in Wisconsin are starting to pay attention to that and it’s not an accident that his probably his biggest challenger the candidate who is more than likely the front runner for the candidate is our elected state superb Superintendent of education named Tony Evert’s is a very popular politician and I think it shows that that Wisconsin it’s value education and are concerned about what’s happened to the state through disinvestment.

CL: Jennifer Ritchie you know that only Duncan didn’t live up to to promote the public system.Neither did it all by Barack Obama exactly. Is there a Democrat out there who is ready to make this a cause you think.

JB:I think the candidates who have their fingers in the wind are starting to make a shift. Every time one of these surprise election victories happens where a Democrat wins a special election I rush to their websites to see if they made public education an issue. And inevitably it’s up near the very top because this is such an issue you know if you’re in a state where where are deep cuts have been made. You’ve got Republicans and Democrats in in those schools. Education is really a purple issue.

What are you know a place to pick off Trump voters

CL: who would you see who would be a candidate to your to to carry this banner.

JB: Well I was really interested to see that one of the candidates for governor in Colorado who I thought of as a real sort of a reform guy I went and looked at what he was saying and he’s really running now on public school funding and on Preki and he doesn’t mention charter schools in his mission statement once. And that’s Gerard Paullus. But I think we are we are really waiting right now the big problem is that there is a huge gap between the Democratic Party donors and influencers and the base. And we need the politicians to come around and side with the base on this.

CL: We haven’t even talked yet about the working class issue the iconography of teachers sometimes in their professional role. Now in sort of fading street political role. But we’ll get to it.We are talking about the teachers stiks. . Coming up the message in the teacher’s red bandanas that’s part of the story. This is Open Source.

CL: I am Christopher Lydon, this is Open Source. We’re talking with the teacher strikes. The last time we spoke with the Labour historian Steve Fraser about his book three years ago on the age of acquiescence how American workers gave up their century of resistance to the power of organized money. Today Stelfreeze is shocked and relieved to say that the acquiescence may be history. His new book is titled class matters.

Steve Fraser: WhenI teach I tell my students there are at least two great mysteries in history. One is why people put up with what they put up with for as long as they put up with it. The other question is why do they ever rebel against it. Because it’s so dangerous to do so. Andrebelling on behalf of their fellow workers well in West Virginia there’s no question that part of the answer is that they identify with a long tradition rooted in the coalfields of West Virginia.

CL:These red bandanas tell you something right.

SF: Yes they absolutely do. There’s a long noble heroic tradition of fighting against the coal barons in coal mining country in places like West Virginia and Kentucky and you know what Oklahoma this would not be known by many of you listeners also has a long history of militant labor movement organizing around the turn of the 20th century again in the 1930s. It had actually a vigorous Industrial Workers of the world were sometimes known as the Wobblies movement. Also in Oklahoma even before it became astate in 1891 there was a strong populist current in Oklahoma politics. So people think of these states as dyed in the wool conservative acquiescent and so on. Look Arizona Barry Goldwater country is one of the first right to work was state I think was passed in 1947 making it very difficult to unionize. Even Arizona has a long tradition of very militant labor movement action in the metalworking industry in the hard metals in copper mining and silver mining. One of the most notorious events in all of American labor history happened in 1917 in Bisbee Arizona when the copper miners went on strike and the local constabulary incahoots with Phelps Daj deported, trucked them out in threaded kale cars out into the desert to the strikers. This is vigilante justice and deposited them in the middle of the desert to break the strike in Bisbee Arizona. Even as late as the eighties there were no mine strikes in places like Arizona. People don’t entirely forget this in West Virginia. The strikers the teachers were very conscious that they came from families that had lived through those labor wars in earlier periods of time. So that’s part of the explanation. The other explanation is that a certain point people say enough is enough. Why that point happens when it does not entirely clear. Start somewhere and then it spreads like wildfire which is what used to happen quite commonly in American labor relations for a long century or more beginning in the late nineteenth century continuing through the through the New Deal the Great Depression was very common.

CL: Let’s scrutinize this shift in the language to teachers are suddenly good guys again and good people. They have regained moral authority in this argument that they didn’t in Chicago for example So how does this happen and how do we be aware of the sort of I don’t know propaganda in our media. Suddenly the teachers are being cast and we like it as emergent heroes not just your doormat not me.

SF:Maybe partly the reason is that working people for the last decades now have been the invisibles in America looked past the kind of unfashionable. I think one of the reasons these things may be happening in unlikely states is that this is in some way that white pardon the expression working class voicing resentment about being overlooked for a long time by the partisan elites that have been running the country for a very long time. Whether that’s Clinton or the Bushes or our good friend the Donald.

CL: can I try another theory on you?

SF: Yes go ahead.

CL: part of the new sympathy for these teachers turns on a general middle class anxiety about a shaky post industrial digital economy in which all knowledge workers are appearing a lot more nervous than they did even a year ago much less five years ago.

SF: I think you’re exactly right. In my book The Age of s they talk a great deal about the emergence and development of precarious labor of all kinds not just shape ups out of landscape workers who are undocumented immigrants from Mexico but how it infects all kinds. All regions of the economy so that the kinds of things normal middle class working class people used to take for granted like job security pension, like health care a living wage. went by the boards the labor movement and working people generally have standards of living. Even while there has been this enormous growth in wealth in the upper reaches of the American economy working class America has basically stagnated or done worse than that is downwardly mobile. The industrialization added a whole vast element of insecurity to the lives of people who had once enjoyed good paying union jobs with a lot of protections on the job guarantees they would be treated like human like dirt. All kinds of fringe benefits those days are gone from millions of people who live in the ghost town opioid ridden remains of those places today.So there is a lot of symphaty but then people feel that the teachers are another element of our society that is eating that kind of struggle to survive.

CL: That was Steve Fraser whose new book is Class Matters subtitled The Strange Career of an American delusion. John Shelton at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay are speaking about the suggestion that we’re casting teachers going forward as the as the forward edge of a workers movement.

JF:Yeah I think that’s a really interesting idea. I’m a big admirer of Steve Frazier stuff. Youknow we’re we’ve talked about teachers as part of this you know movement to protect and save public education but I think it is an interesting question to ask whether or not there might be the kind of front lines of a new workers movement and you know I can agree with.
I couldn’t agree with Steve more of that. You know we have this middle class anxiety and you know to me what I think has been missing really from the politics of both parties has been a push to really make a different argument about how political economy works in this country. So you mentioned Harold Hamm who can kind of stand in for the coal barons in West Virginia back back in the 1920s and you know to me what’s so powerful about what the teachers in Oklahoma are doing now they’ve gotten a raise it may not have been exactly what they wanted but now they’re saying we need to tax things specifically that are really things that the wealthy benefit from right there. They’re proposing and get to capital gains tax. They want to. They want to. They want to make things more go back to something Jennifer was saying earlier and I think very smartly to go back to a more democratic notion of a political economy right. And as we’ve seen there’s growing anxiety.You can imagine why there would be that push for it and I think it’s quite possible that teachers could be on the front lines of that.

CL:I like Geraldo praties line about his own native West Virginia that the teachers are reclaiming the identity of the working class in coal country as he says the old carbon capital of the industrial age those teachers are making is a microcosm of the coming fights over who owns and profits from the finer cleaner capital of mechanized production and digital platforms. It’s a fight for all of us.

JB: Well to me one of the great ironies of this whole situation is that the reason that teachers came to be so demonized during the Obama era is that education was even more at the center of their economic platform than it had been under Clinton. This was basically all they had. And so when you think about what happened after Obama came into office you know there are any idea of making it easier for workers to unionize that died a painful death, Wall Street basically got off the hook but they managed to work through state after Steve these incredibly complex policy changes where teachers were held accountable to student test scores and the whole reason they did that you know this really started talking about it in terms of global economic competitiveness and the idea that one that would sort of fall by the wayside as a talking point but to that teachers with than you know who been sort of mocked and demonized were then sort of emerge as being as tapping into the anxiety that so many of us feel about the gig future just to me you know exposes how what a dumb policy platform that was all along.

CL:That’s your point John I think that the global economy requires more education than the manufacturing economy did.

JS:It certainly does. And I think there’s there’s a important sort of rhetorical advantage there for teachers to you know to capitalize on that and say that if you’re going to say that education is so important for economic opportunity then you need to pay a decent wage and basically stop treating ourselves you know an extractive resource which I think is really not an over statment that’s how teachers feel they’ve been treated in places like Oklahoma and West Virginia. But I think the bigger point is that you know the Democratic Party the left in this country has for too long basically crafted their entire notion as Jennifer was saying of economic opportunity around education and that’s not enough. I mean clearly that is not leading to more economic security for most Americans and I think that the Democratic Party has made a huge mistake in everything that not taking more affirmative steps to ensure that all working people in this country have access to well paying jobs. And that’s what that’s what’s going to need to happen in order to defeat the politics of Trump ison long term.

CL:Where are the Democrats. Jennifer what would Hillary Clinton be doing as president here.

JB: Well it was interesting because one of the one of the documents that was that came out in the WikiLeaks dump was this policy booklet where you got to see who the people were coming in in the early days of her campaign trying to influence her or her own education.. And that you know big wealthy people people who ran the Broad Foundation and are Laurene Powell Jobs who’s the head of the now owns the Atlantic again and as the head of something called the Emmerson collective and you could see just one after another you know they’re making the same the same case. New Orleans is great rate. Wouldn’t it be greed of we could have a all charter model like they got to have in New Orleans after Katrina. And you could really you’ve sensed that they thought that teachers were just such dimwits and that if you could just change the way that you know make it easier to get rid of the teachers that we have and bring in fancy new work teachers that that was going to be the thing that put us on a platform my concern is that we’re seeing all this great stuff on the ground. Maybe some politicians are starting to move. But the real the funder is the opinion piece of the New York Times the people who are writing the big checks they’re still all in for this narrow agenda. And what John just described like they really believe that the only the only political economy we need in this country is something that puts kids on a path to college.

CL: Interesting. Can I just say under the general heading of what the hell is going on here.

I think you have to know that sort of Bernie Sanders’ politics is still hugely under respect in a certain style of plain talk about class interest and then getting out there and wearing out the the reality of class conflict and then militancy around basic Eisenhower era social democratic values that we grew up with after World War 2.

JS: If I can jump in a. I think that’s I think there’s absolutely an underestimation of that.

And you know I think look you look at Trump for example and sure it was a very sort of garbled version of this but you know you talk about the notion of draining the swamp.

I think there’s a sort of perverse element of of Trumpism that you can find and Sanders critique and I think many Americans are seeing now middle class America that point about middle class anxiety is so important and they and they know who to blame for it. The people to blame are the as Bernie Sanders said many times the millionaires and billionaires are the ones who are stifling at wide economic prosperity for everyone and that the Democratic Party has to has to take issue with that. And I don’t think it’s going to come from the top I mean to me what’s so exciting about these teachers is they’re taking actionjust like those students who are leading the walkouts and those people need to vote and those people need to run for office and they need to get involved at their local in their local Democratic county parties and basically take over those those parties and make the Democratic Party into the progressive force it once was in the past.

CL:So we should elect Jennifer Bircher.
Speaking of the political opportunity here Jennifer.

JB: So I read John Shelton’s fabulous book teacher strike explanation point and I can’t recommend it enough to your listeners but he talks about the teacher strikes of the 60s and70s. And those were really about what kind of country we’re going to have and how big the welfare state was going to be and what you could expect as a working class person and frankly you know they lost. Cities are too expensive to run and financiers needed a seat at table and the vision of what’s possible gets smaller and smaller. And now here we are 40 years later and we’re you know the strikes are over us stearate and we know that that original vision shrinks and shrinks and shrinks and even though we’re talking about the difference between you know New York City and now Oklahoma that the debate is basically the same. What can we expect and the the definition of what we can expect has gotten whittled down to now it’s basically to have the mail deliver it and public education and that’s not a surprise that both are so vulnerable and maybe not the mail any more.

CL:Did you read your book right John?
But I wonder if we’ve heard a the wake up call about austerity about cut cut cut. As far as your system of government.

JS: Boy you know I think that’s quite possible. I mean I think this could be the beginning of a movement but you know again as a historian it’s contingency I mean things that happened in the past happened because you know hundreds thousands millions of people make decisions and so you know again some of the early stuff I heard about West Virginia started in three counties. It was a cold day and so they canceled school, in lot of other places which led more teachers to demonstrate at the Capitol and it just kind of gathered this momentum. And I think if teachers continue to win in these places and students continue to walk out and we and we continue to teach young people about democracy and the literal saying this is what democracy looks like then we might actually see a grounds well against not just austerity but also the very low expectations that all we can do is facilitate private profit making opportunities for corporations. And so I think that there have been many Democratic waves in the US history in the 1930s of course andthen in the 1960s and something like that is very much possible and this very could very much could be the tip of the iceberg.I hope that it is.

CL:Let me ask you Jennifer. Betsy DeVos is generally said to be the least popular member of the Trump cabinet. is her time up?

JB:No I mean I mean there were lots of rumors about that earlier this year. I think that she is having a great time and actually making quite a lot of headway .you play that little clip of the governor of Oklahoma you know raving about education savings accounts devices the driving force behind the light of you know it’s thanks to her that in the tax code now you can get a hefty tax break by saving money to use towards private school tuition. She’s making progress. I think what the missed opportunity here is that her lack of popularity is really really crosses party line sand that a lot of those teachers will see that that the parents supporting them even though there’s hardship they often say Betsy device is their animating force.

CL:So hard to reason Trump logic. But will they know. Will he take note. Around the device of what’s happening and wonder.

JB: Well it depends of whether it’s on Fox and Friends.

CL: Thank you. Jennifer Brookshire and Jon Shelton. Thanks also to Steve Fraser Dennis Goldstein.Dina Clarkie and the other teachers who spoke with us from Oklahoma on our show this week was produced by honor all students all kind of Gilly’s that Goldhammer Homa Sarabi-Daunais and Susan quoin the artist Paul kalo is our engineer. McGrath is the headmistress of our school. I’m Christopher Laydon going to next time an open source.