Six thou­sand teach­ers and sup­port­ers from Seat­tle Pub­lic Schools and the near­by dis­tricts of Mer­cer Island and Issaquah shut down inter­sec­tions for blocks in the largest coor­di­nat­ed action since the rolling walk­out began on April 22. In total, at least 30,000 teach­ers in 65 strik­ing school dis­tricts have par­tic­i­pat­ed in one-day strikes.

On Tues­day, May 19, thou­sands of demon­stra­tors marched through down­town Seat­tle to sup­port a rolling strike by pub­lic school teach­ers across Wash­ing­ton state. The teach­ers are protest­ing what they say are unac­cept­ably high class sizes and low pay, stem­ming from their state legislature’s fail­ure to ful­ly fund pub­lic education.

Wash­ing­ton Edu­ca­tors Asso­ci­a­tion (WEA), the statewide teach­ers union (a Nation­al Edu­ca­tion Asso­ci­a­tion affil­i­ate), has point­ed out that the state has the sixth-high­est stu­dent-teacher ratio of any state, at 19.4, accord­ing to NEA data from 2013. The union cal­cu­lates that an addi­tion­al 11,960 teach­ers would be need­ed to reduce the stu­dent-teacher ratio to the nation­al aver­age of 15.9. Class sizes are typ­i­cal­ly about nine or 10 stu­dents larg­er than the stu­dent-teacher ratio. Teach­ers say that big class sizes in Wash­ing­ton state result in poor work­ing and learn­ing conditions.

The strike is unusu­al in that the teach­ers are not pres­sur­ing their respec­tive school dis­tricts, but rather tar­get­ing the state leg­is­la­ture for its unwill­ing­ness to fund edu­ca­tion enough to decrease class sizes and increase teacher com­pen­sa­tion. Pop­u­lar signs at ral­lies across the state have read ​“Edu­ca­tors care for our kids every day — It’s time the leg­is­la­ture cared” and ​“On strike against leg­is­la­ture — stop blam­ing teach­ers — start fund­ing schools.”

On the class size and fund­ing issue, union mem­bers say they have both the courts and the vot­ers on their side. In 2012, the state Supreme Court ruled in McCleary vs. Wash­ing­ton that the leg­is­la­ture had failed in its con­sti­tu­tion­al duty to ​“amply pro­vide for the edu­ca­tion of all chil­dren with­in its bor­ders” and ordered it to imple­ment ade­quate fund­ing increas­es by 2018. Last Sep­tem­ber, the Wash­ing­ton Supreme Court found the leg­is­la­ture in con­tempt of court for fail­ing ​“to pro­vide the court a com­plete plan for ful­ly imple­ment­ing its pro­gram of basic edu­ca­tion,” warn­ing law­mak­ers that the leg­is­la­ture would be ​“ sanc­tioned ” if it did not devel­op a plan by the end of the leg­isla­tive cycle.

Com­pound­ing this legal pres­sure is the bind­ing ini­tia­tive 1351 approved by vot­ers in Novem­ber 2014, which calls for a 20 per­cent reduc­tion in class size and the hir­ing of 15,000 teach­ers over the next four years, accord­ing to advo­cates of the initiative.

While both leg­is­la­tures have put for­ward pro­pos­als to fund class size decreas­es up to the third grade, none have pro­posed ful­ly fund­ing ini­tia­tive 1351. Gov. Jay Inslee has called for two con­sec­u­tive spe­cial ses­sions to address the fund­ing issue and oth­er bud­getary mat­ters before a July 1 dead­line. If they don’t resolve the bud­get, leg­is­la­tors risk a gov­ern­ment shut­down .

Jesse Hagopi­an, a his­to­ry teacher at Garfield High, says that teach­ers’ ​“backs are to the wall,” neces­si­tat­ing col­lec­tive action.

“The old strat­e­gy of sup­port­ing politi­cians and hop­ing that they will enact pro-edu­ca­tion poli­cies has not worked for so long that it has actu­al­ly caused a state of cri­sis for our union as a whole,” he says. ​“It’s reached a lev­el of absur­di­ty. I think [lack of sup­port from the leg­is­la­ture] made [WEA] lead­er­ship more will­ing to back some of our small­er locals that began this one-day strike wave in the state.”

The strikes have been pri­mar­i­ly orga­nized by teach­ers union locals, rather than by the statewide union. On the eve of the first strikes in late April, a WEA spokesper­son told Washington’s News Tri­bune that it was up to locals to ​“decide how big the protest gets this year.” What began with eight dis­tricts has now swelled to 65.

The legislature’s unwill­ing­ness to go ful­ly fund I‑1351 and adhere to McCleary has gal­va­nized teacher in a way that Susan DuFresne, a kinder­garten teacher at Maple­wood Heights Ele­men­tary, describes as ​“tru­ly grassroots.”

“I place this strike wave at the tip­ping point in the strug­gle between pro­gres­sive edu­ca­tion reform and cor­po­rate edu­ca­tion reform,” DuFresne says. ​“This strug­gle has a long way to go to edu­cate and acti­vate stu­dents, par­ents, teach­ers and com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers — but this strike wave is final­ly bring­ing atten­tion to this strug­gle in are­nas we call the ​‘non-choir.’ ”

Hagopi­an, who is part of the social jus­tice-based reform cau­cus Social Equal­i­ty Edu­ca­tors and last year came 45 votes shy of being elect­ed Seat­tle teach­ers’ union pres­i­dent, says the polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion in Wash­ing­ton is ​“Robin Hood in reverse.”

“Low­er­ing class sizes costs mon­ey, and to raise that mon­ey you would have to actu­al­ly tax the rich,” he told In These Times. ​“We’re one of sev­en states in the nation that don’t have an income tax and one of only nine states in the coun­try that don’t have a cap­i­tal gains tax.”

Indeed, Wash­ing­ton has the nation’s most regres­sive tax struc­ture , accord­ing to a study pub­lished in Jan­u­ary by the Insti­tute on Tax­a­tion and Eco­nom­ic Pol­i­cy. The study found that the state’s top 1% con­tributes 2.4 per­cent of fam­i­ly income in state and local tax­es while the poor­est 20 per­cent con­tribute 16.8 per­cent, mak­ing Wash­ing­ton the ​“high­est-tax state in the coun­try for poor people.”

Mean­while, the state’s largest cor­po­ra­tions have received eye-pop­ping tax breaks in recent years: In 2014, Boe­ing was award­ed the sin­gle largest tax break a state has ever giv­en a com­pa­ny: an $8.7 bil­lion cut. Microsoft report­ed­ly avoid­ed $528 mil­lion in state tax­es between 1997 and 2008 due to lax leg­isla­tive over­sight con­cern­ing the com­pa­ny report­ing its rev­enue through its licens­ing office in Neva­da, despite bas­ing its soft­ware pro­duc­tion in Washington.

At the same time, law­mak­ers have sus­pend­ed vot­er-approved cost-of-liv­ing increas­es for edu­ca­tors every year since 2008. Washington’s teacher pay now ranks 42nd in the nation. Teach­ers also say that leg­is­la­tures are under­min­ing their job secu­ri­ty by intro­duc­ing leg­is­la­tion that would tie state stan­dard­ized tests to teacher eval­u­a­tions. This has helped push hun­dreds of edu­ca­tors and stu­dents across Seat­tle high schools to boy­cott the tests, plac­ing the city at the van­guard of a larg­er emerg­ing wave of test boy­cotts across the coun­try .

WEA mem­bers say that if leg­is­la­tors don’t resolve fund­ing issues by the end of the sec­ond spe­cial leg­isla­tive ses­sion, rolling strike waves will begin again when school begins in Sep­tem­ber. Hagopi­an expects even wider sup­port from teach­ers at that time.

“I can’t imag­ine that after feel­ing the col­lec­tive pow­er that we found in the streets on Tues­day when we walked out, that teach­ers would just go qui­et­ly back into the class­room and sub­mit to the humil­i­a­tion of being in one of the rich­est regions the world has ever known and see­ing kids come to school with­out basic sup­plies and bal­loon­ing class sizes,” he says.