Arizona Statewide Walkout

Victory to School Strike!

APRIL 30—A sea of red T-shirts filled the Arizona State Capitol Grounds in Phoenix on Thursday, April 26, the first day of a statewide walkout by teachers and school workers—including janitors, cafeteria workers and bus drivers—fed up with years of low pay and budget cuts. With Arizona’s ten largest school districts shut down, some 50,000 educators and their supporters turned out to demand of the state legislature a 20 percent pay hike and a restoration of education funding to pre-Great Recession levels. Inspired by the nine-day West Virginia school strike earlier this year, teachers in public schools starved of funds have been fighting back across the country, from Kentucky to Oklahoma and Colorado.

This statewide walkout is a first in viciously anti-union “right to work” Arizona. It is the culmination of a weeks-long campaign by Arizona Educators United (AEU)—a coalition of teachers and other school workers, administrators and community members—along with the two teachers unions, the Arizona Education Association (AEA) and much smaller American Federation of Teachers Arizona. The teachers voted by 78 percent to strike, rejecting an offer from Republican governor Doug Ducey to provide higher pay to them but not the rest of the school workforce. Nor was funding for the classrooms going to be increased. Teachers at the Phoenix rally told Workers Vanguard: “If it was just about our pay, we would have taken the governor’s deal.” This kind of unity between the teachers and other school workers is crucial to winning this battle.

Arizona classrooms are in an abysmal state. Teachers described old and tattered carpets; far too few computers, many of them held together with duct tape; novels assigned in the curriculum but not available to students; old or missing textbooks and more. The majority of Native American students go to decrepit schools on impoverished reservations; notably, one of the largest districts on the Navajo Reservation joined the strike.

Latinos, who make up nearly half the student enrollment and are heavily segregated, are consigned to some of the worst schools in the state system. In Arizona, which was seized from Mexico in the 19th century, nearly one-quarter of the Spanish-speaking population lives below the official poverty line, and Latinos are incarcerated at more than double the rate of whites. Several teachers and support staff spoke with anger and passion about the lack of bilingual education. One teacher told WV that following the passage of the racist “English only” Proposition 203 in 2000, teachers and instruction assistants were banned from speaking Spanish in the classroom to their students, who are now forced to learn a new language at the same time they are expected to learn the curriculum. The fight for bilingual education must be part of the struggle for free, quality, integrated education for the working class and Latino, black and Native American poor.

Teachers also spoke to the impact of Arizona’s racist pass law SB1070. Enacted in 2010, the bill allows the cops to stop and question anyone they think might be an “illegal” immigrant, making it open season on the Latino population. Those who fail to immediately produce documentation proving their “right” to be in the U.S. can be arrested and thrown behind bars (see WV No. 958, 7 May 2010). One Latina teacher observed that after the passage of SB1070, half her class disappeared overnight, with students too afraid to come to school. Today, her students fear an end to the DACA program providing them a temporary reprieve from deportation. We say: Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! No deportations!

Republican legislators and other reactionaries have engaged in vitriolic redbaiting against this highly popular strike. Foaming at the mouth, they have accused the strike leadership—especially the AEU’s Noah Karvelis and Derek Harris, who are charged with being “Bernie Sanders political operatives”—of using “teachers and our children to carry out their socialist movement.” The far-right loonies at Breitbart are accusing Karvelis of brainwashing Arizona students with Marxist propaganda, based on his tweet encouraging educators to discuss gender, race, feminism and gun violence with their students.

Such brazen efforts to sow division must be repulsed. And in the case of Bernie Sanders and his supporters in the Democratic Socialists of America, the labels “Marxist” and “socialist” are quite undeserved. Sanders made his rallying cry the populist appeal for a “political revolution against the billionaire class.” However, he has long served the interests of that class, particularly with his support for the bloody wars, occupations and other military adventures of U.S. imperialism that have devastated countries around the globe.

As a U.S. Senator, Sanders has voted in lockstep with the Democrats, who no less than the Republicans represent the interests of the ruling capitalist class. Take the matter of the public schools. From the Great Recession on, the Obama administration mounted a massive assault on public education nationally under the guise of “school reform” that featured brass-knuckle attacks on teachers unions.

Some Arizona school superintendents claim to support the strike. The gutting of education funding has, of course, impacted their budgets. But make no mistake: superintendents and principals are no friends of educators and school staff. They have the authority to fire teachers, impose discipline and are the agents of the capitalist class in the schools, including by enforcing the Anglo-chauvinist ban on bilingual education.

Strong unions are necessary for the protection of teachers and school workers. The AEA, the larger union with a membership of about 20,000, represents only a fraction of instruction staff statewide. Many non-union teachers support the AEU and #RedForEd movement. The unions must seize this golden opportunity to organize them into their ranks.

Significantly, teachers at charter schools also joined the strike. Charter schools have become entrenched in Arizona, which has the highest number of these schools per capita in the country. It is vital for the labor movement to oppose the expansion of charter schools, which are set up to siphon funds from the public education system and to break teachers unions. At the same time, there must be a fight to unionize teachers and other workers in the existing charter school system.

What is starkly posed for the revitalization of the labor movement is forging a class-struggle leadership based on the understanding that the interests of labor are counterposed to those of the bosses, their parties and their state. The money and resources exist for massive construction of schools, hospitals and other infrastructure gutted by the profit-bloated capitalists. To seize that wealth, though, requires breaking the power of the bourgeoisie through socialist revolution. It is necessary to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party whose purpose is not only to defend the working class against the menace of its own devastation but also to rid the planet of the source of that devastation, capitalism itself.