If you want to know why teachers strikes are rippling across the nation, look no further than here.



In Colorado's five lowest paying districts, teachers on average make $26,761 per year. A school district in Pueblo County pays as low as $23,000 per year. That's less than $12 per hour. The minimum wage in Seattle is $15 per hour.

Colorado teachers are neither the lowest paid, nor out on strike at the moment.

Things have gotten so bad that qualified people are no longer going into the education field.



Illinois and Minnesota recently took steps to increase the number of teachers by reducing the teacher licensing requirements. Oklahoma staffed classrooms by issuing temporary, emergency teacher certifications.

And New York recently allowed charter schools to certify their own teachers, and they dropped literacy tests for teacher candidates. These are not good, long-term ingredients to solve this problem.

It's not just teacher pay and benefits. It's not just working conditions.

More than anything it is about respect, or lack of.

What we are looking at is a political system that is captured by a selfish minority that doesn't value other people or the next generation. That system is called neoliberalism.

If you don't know much about the teachers strikes sweeping the nation, it isn't your fault.

Back in the 60's, teachers strikes were a common occurrence.

But a generation-long right-wing attack on teachers unions have left teachers disempowered.



In West Virginia, collective bargaining is outright banned. In Arizona and Kentucky, there are no statutes allowing for teachers’ right to collectively bargain. Oklahoma teachers do have collective bargaining rights, but like the other states, their union lacks wide influence.

All four are “right-to-work” states, meaning employees aren't forced to pay union dues but can still reap the benefits of union-negotiated contracts.

Taking away their right to organize hasn't stopped teachers from organizing.

What it has done is pushed the teachers back to a pre-New Deal era, in which strikes still happened, but were illegal.



But the strikes in these Republican states point to a potentially counterintuitive reality: Weak labor laws don’t necessarily halt labor movements -- and may even help facilitate them.

In the states currently striking, strikes are technically illegal and can cost a teacher his or her job. But, Paglayan says, “teachers know that will never happen. They can’t fire every teacher in the state."

There are teacher shortages in almost every state in the country, but it is especially true in red states for obvious reasons.

There is no surplus of qualified teachers anywhere. All that is available is unqualified instructors, and that won't work for long.

Ironically, the right-wing hatred of unions and teachers actually increases the likelihood of strikes.



It's worth remembering that unions are stuck in the right-to-work paradox to begin with because labor law imposes requirements on them as well as on bosses. The point of labor law is to discipline both sides and prevent disputes between employees and employers from devolving into all-out war. But the nationwide assault on workers and unions is undoing that truce.

On one side you have a brutal and relentless system/ideology that only respects wealth and power.

On the other side you have educated and skilled people that are hard to replace, that have been pushed into a corner and given no other option than to fight back.

This is a formula for chronic labor strife that the nation hasn't witnessed in nearly a century.

By coincidence, if you cast a wider net you can see that this situation is actually not new.

These exact same forces and struggles have been playing in Mexico for the last five years.

The dissident National Coordinating Committee (CNTE) have been battling for living wages and to protect public education for two generations. Sometimes, such as in 2006, it was put down violently by police.

In many ways the struggle of the teachers in Mexico sounds very familiar.



The changes imposed by the conservative government bear a strong resemblance to the goals of education “reformers” in the U.S.—closing schools, creeping privatization, punitive evaluations of teachers in order to fire them, attacks on union rights. In Mexico, however, the campaign has been accompanied by arrests of dissident union officials and even, in one case, a mass police shooting that left at least eight people dead.

And also as in the U.S., Mexican teachers have put forward their own positive plan for changing the schools and their students' conditions of life—as an alternative to blaming teachers.

Some of the reforms that President Nieto pushed through are reasonable, but the authoritarian way it was done has prevented dialogue. Plus, police shooting teachers doesn't help, except to swing the public to support the teachers.



Oaxaca's teachers are in favor of evaluation, he said—one that would include a broad look at all the conditions students face. “They point at teachers as the source of the problems in the schools, but the state doesn't provide the resources we need,” Santiago said. Oaxaca is one of Mexico's poorest states.

Since the “reform” was passed by the Congress in December 2012, in a convention center surrounded by police to keep protesting teachers away, the national government has cut the education budget, closed schools, and refused to replace retiring teachers.

At the same time, the government is creating opportunities for private business to profit from the schools.

If Mexico is any indication, public schools will be the front line is the war against neoliberalism. It's a war that will be fought for many years to come.