Supporters of public schools from all over the country gathered in Indianapolis for the annual Network for Public Education summit October 20-21, energized by a wave of teacher walkouts and massive protests over the last year.
The “education spring” protests, in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Colorado and North Carolina, won increases in teacher pay and education budgets, launched hundreds of teachers into campaigns for political office, and showed massive support for public schools this year. In Wisconsin and other states, education is a key issue in the 2018 governor’s race. Public opinion has turned against budget cuts, school vouchers, and the whole “test and punish” regime.
“The corporate education reform movement is dying,” Diane Ravitch, the Network’s founder declared. “We are the resistance, and we are winning!”
As the Save Our Schools movement swept the nation this year, blaming “bad teachers” for struggling schools also appears to have gone out of style.
A Time Magazine cover story on teachers who are underpaid, overworked, and have to donate their plasma to pay the bills painted a sympathetic portrait.
“As states tightened the reins on teacher benefits, many also enacted new benchmarks for student achievement, with corresponding standardized tests, curricula changes and evaluations of teacher performance,” Time reported. “The loss of control over their classrooms combined with the direct hit to their pocketbooks was too much for many teachers to bear.”
That’s a very different message from Time’s December 2008 cover featuring Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, standing in a classroom and holding a broom: “her battle against bad teachers has earned her admirers and enemies—and could transform public education,” Time declared.
The idea that bad teachers were ruining schools, and that their pay, benefits, and job security should be reduced or revoked, spread across the country over the last decade. Doing away with teachers’ collective bargaining rights propelled Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker to political prominence in 2011. In October 2014, Time’s “Rotten Apples,” cover declared “It’s nearly impossible to fire a bad teacher. Some tech millionaires have found a way to change that.”
But today, demoralized teachers, overtested students, and the lack of improvement from these draconian policies have pushed public opinion in the opposite direction.
Charter schools, it turns out, perform no better than regular public schools. School-voucher schemes that drain money from public education to cover private-school students tuition yield even worse results—and are unpopular with voters. And testing kids a lot has not made them any smarter.
“Reformers can no longer boast they know how to fix American education,” says Diane Ravitch. “There is no reform movement—just a lot of very rich people who don’t want to admit they were wrong.”
The backlash against the attacks on teachers and public schools is changing the political landscape, particularly in red states.
Meanwhile, the backlash against the attacks on teachers and public schools is changing the political landscape, particularly in red states.
As Progressive Education Fellow John Thompson points out, “In Oklahoma, the governor’s race would ordinarily result in a solid victory for an enthusiastic Trump supporter like Kevin Stint, who brandishes a 100 percent pro-life score and an ‘A’ rating from the NRA.” But the education issue has changed the dynamic, and could propel Democrat Drew Edmondson to victory.
Small wonder. Oklahomans are fed up with a state government that has passed massive tax breaks for the oil industry while slashing the state education budget by 28 percent, leaving teachers with the second-worst pay in the nation, and provoking a teacher exodus so dire one-fifth of the state’s schools are operating on a four-day week.
In Arizona, the state with the lowest teacher pay in the nation, and second-lowest per-pupil spending, Sharon Kirsch and Beth Lewis started a state Save Our Schools organization—SOS Arizona—in the summer of 2017.
At the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis they shared the story of how their group of determined citizens overcame the Koch brothers and the power of dark money.
Kirsh and Lewis were galvanized by a statewide voucher expansion that passed the legislature by one vote. “Hundreds of people testified against it,” said Kirsch. “Seven lobbyists testified for it.”
Under the voucher program, Arizona parents can get a Bank of America cash card loaded with tax money and use it to pay for private-school tuition.
Under the voucher program, Arizona parents can get a Bank of America cash card loaded with tax money and use it to pay for private-school tuition.
Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, tweeted at Arizona Governor Doug Ducey, congratulating him on taking the school-voucher plan statewide.
The Koch brothers-funded Goldwater Institute sent an email to donors, in which Goldwater CEO Darcy Olsen wrote: “Fifty years in the making, and tonight we closed the deal! Universal education savings accounts. There is a cap at 5,000 new kids per year; we will get it lifted.”
Under Arizona law, citizens have the right to “refer” a new law to the ballot, turning it into a referendum. “As soon as the law passed, we were all Googling what that meant,” Lewis said.
The group had ninety days to collect 75,000 signatures—during May, June and July, in the heat of an Arizona summer, when school was out and everyone was getting out of town, she said.
“We asked some experts and lawyers what to do, and everyone told us don’t do it,” Lewis said. “You’ll burn out, you’ll demoralize your group, and you’ll lose.”
Undeterred, Lewis, Kirsch and their group of eight activists formed SOS Arizona, and hit the streets.
They gathered more than 111,000 signatures and turned them in at a state office by the deadline. They were met by people in suits with cameras and video recorders, who peered over their shoulders at the petitions, collecting information for a lawsuit.
Pro-voucher groups funded by the Koch brothers, including Americans for Prosperity, the Goldwater Institute, and the American Federation for Children, challenged 80,000 of the signatures in court.
“Here we were, eight moms and teachers, fighting to keep it on the ballot,” Lewis recalled.
The resulting lawsuit cost more than the signature-gathering campaign. But the citizens prevailed, and Prop 305 will be on the ballot on November 6.
“After we’d collected the signatures and gone through the court process, only then did we realize what we were up against,” said Kirsch. “We hadn’t just picked a fight with our state legislature. . . . the Koch brothers are number-six on the list of the world’s richest billionaires.”
As public schools struggle, taxpayers are reluctant to channel money to unaccountable private schools.
Across the country, voters have consistently rejected school vouchers when they are put to a vote. As public schools struggle, taxpayers are reluctant to channel money to unaccountable private schools.
And then there is the issue of corruption.
One of the most powerful men in Arizona, Republican state senate president Steve Yarborough, skimmed $72.9 million in state-funded tuition credits from education funds between 2010 and 2014, The New York Times reports. Under state law, nonprofit groups like Yarborough’s are allowed to skim 10 percent of publicly funded tuition money. Yarborough used those funds to pay himself a $125,000 salary. His group also funneled tax dollars into equipment purchased from a Yarborough-owned company, and rented office space in a Yarborough-owned building.
This straight-up racket has helped drain money from Arizona’s already-starving schools.
Even conservatives are not pleased.
Straight-up corruption has helped drain money from Arizona’s already-starving schools.
As they recruit Republican voters to their cause, Lewis says, SOS Arizona activists mostly talk about how their tax dollars are being spent, accountability, and transparency.
“Yes, it’s a social justice issue,” says Kirsch, “but I don’t get to use that language.”
“We hope to have a huge victory on November 6 against the Kochs and for Arizona,” she adds.
Other red-state activists are also making public schools a bipartisan issue. Some are careful not to use language that might turn off Republican voters.
Ann Hunter Purdle of Nebraska Stand for Schools is mindful about pitching her public-school advocacy to a red-state electorate.
Nebraska, with its nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, has a tradition of supporting high-quality public schools. But lately the political atmosphere has become more polarized, Purdle says, as Governor Pete Ricketts seeks to pack the legislature with more hardline conservatives.
Ricketts and his allies in the legislature have supported ALEC bills on charters, vouchers, and school report cards.
Purdle says she and her pro-public-school advocates have worked hard to build relationships with legislators.
“We don’t overly polarize the issue, because 85 percent of Nebraskans support public schools,” says Purdle. “It’s so tempting these days when there’s so much going on to say too much,” she adds, “even on personal social media.”
In Iowa, by contrast, Karen Nichols of Iowans for Public Education says her group decided to take an unapologetically progressive tone in a swing state that is increasingly red.
“Telling it like it is gives other people permission to speak up,” says Nichols, who works with Indivisible, the Women’s March, and other progressive groups.
She and her allies aim their message at voters. “We believe that where people go, legislators will follow,” she says.
Iowa recently became a right-to-work state (a fact that will turn the eastern half of the state blue in November, Nichols predicts). Many state legislators are Christian homeschoolers, and the political environment is heavily polarized.
Still, local control is prized and, despite a “firehose” of rightwing legislation over the last two years, the public has pressured legislators to resist school vouchers for two years in a row, and have held off a charter-school expansion.
Iowans for Public Education urges community members to go to legislators’ listening sessions and shares questions with other groups, so citizens can hold their representatives accountable. They also provide explanations of complex bills, and have been getting press to show up to school-board meetings, which, Nichols says, surprised board members and woke them up to the fact that the public expected them to take a stand on important issues.
“Every politician is having to defend their public education record this November,” Nichols says.
The same could be said around the country, as the public wakes up to the devastating effects of the attack on schools.