It’s been a week since over 20,000 professional educators flooded the streets of Raleigh to visit the NC legislature on its opening session, which lasted a whopping 15 minutes before shutting down for the day.
respect
Many of those educators, who had taken the day off to do so, at times under the vilification of those same elected officials, were perturbed by what seemed to be a disrespectful slap in the face.  To be fair, I suppose if people were going to chant in the gallery, not much was going to be done on the floor that day.
Many teachers immediately began to propose and discuss the idea of continuing a shut down of schools, forced by mass absenteeism.  After all, the logic went, isn’t this how West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona got the attention of their elected officials.
That gambit went nowhere.  The jury is still out on what good that would have done, especially since NCAE, the body ostensibly behind the “Rally for Respect”, stood outside the buildings as teachers streamed to the front side of the building at 3:00 reminding them to “Remember in November.”
For most of the teachers to whom I’ve spoken, this seems a milquetoast response at best.  Are elections important?  Sure.  But if all we did last week was to energize ourselves for an election six months away, many teachers will feel our goals were small, our momentum wasted.
As such, to be brief, I’ve come up with three main takeaways from last week.  I hope that they will spur dialogue amongst the professional education community as we decide where we are going from here.
Platitudes are nice, Resistance isn’t futile, but dialogue is necessary.
One of my frustrations based on my current residence is that my elected reps at both the State at Federal level are in uncontested Democratic seats.  “But Mark,” the Devil advocates, “wouldn’t you claim that Democrats are the friends of teachers, and voting for Republicans is against your professional interests?”
In many cases, I probably would, but this comes with two worrisome points.
Because my elected representatives are uncontested Democrats, it would be easy for them to provide lip service to the teachers without actually doing something.  Given that both NC Houses have a veto-proof SuperMajorities, they might even claim that there is nothing they can do.  This is not acceptable.  Last week, this article claimed how education funding was stripped from poor NE counties.  The Republicans schemed; The Dems held a dance party.  I love that my Democratic reps have my back.  I want to know what they are doing, and we need them to be doing something.
On Tuesday, the Reps on the first floor were extremely cordial.  Some put out donuts and cheese trays.  They thanked us for our effort.  But of the Dems to whom I spoke, Rep. Cunningham was the only one with whom I was able to discuss nuts and bolts of reforms we were looking for in the budget.  Just because you have a Democratic Rep or Senator, you can’t let them slide with empty compliments and “thank you for your service.”  We need to be in conversation with them about our needs so that they know the importance and details of our demands, so that they can help craft real solutions to actual problems.
As for Republicans, I teach in a school in a Republican district, and had one of my most productive discussions with Sen. Dan Bishop.  “Productive” may seem a strange word, as we didn’t produce anything.  But I appreciate the candor with which Sen. Bishop spoke and I appreciate the intellectual challenges he laid before me.  As a person who argued in good faith, I have a clearer idea what ideas he supports, what theories support those beliefs.
Many will see working with the Republicans as a futile road, turning to outright resistance as the only tactic.  I’m not going to claim that I changed Sen. Bishop’s mind on anything, but after speaking with him, I gained a clearer understanding of the Republican Party’s philosophy for funding education in the state.  Too often as teachers, we think we can post pictures of moldy classrooms, stories of coffee-addled late nights grading papers, or bemoan that we work second and third jobs and the opposition will kowtow under the weight of our righteousness, forgetting that they have an entire system of thought and philosophy that undergirds their beliefs. It is a frequent fault of democratic voters to believe that outrage is enough to win the day.  It’s not.  We need to engage our reps not just to convince them, but also to know where they stand.  Dialogue isn’t always about compromise.  Dialogue is also how we learn who can be an ally to better education and who will be an impediment, to refine our political goals, which leads to…
Refine and Articulate what you want
For all the selflessness many teachers display, teachers often get a reputation as being a whiny profession.  In my estimation, it’s not altogether unearned.  While conditions are often desperate, we often neglect that the needs of schools are funded in conjunction with many other needs the government funds.  In order to get what we want, we need to be able to articulate our goals, seem them in the context of other budgetary choices, analyze them in the context of political motivations, and craft winning arguments for the public.
Look, critical thinking skills are what we claim we provide for the public.  And it may be that some would rather we didn’t, as a populace that lacks critical thinking skills is so much more tractable, easily manipulated by simple arguments like “the average pay in NC has risen in the last five years.”  We must use those same skills to hone our arguments and our activism.
For instance, in talking with Sen. Bishop and hearing other Republicans, it would seem that we could both argue that we want well-paid teachers, competitive with other states so that the quality of education continues to allow North Carolina to flourish.  Where we often have a disagreement is how to execute that goal.  Over the course of the day, it became more and more clear that the GOP strategy for this goal is to encourage young teachers to stay a while but not incentivize a teacher to make a career.  After all, health retirement benefits are cut for employees hired after 2021 and the pay scale weighs toward the younger teachers.
At one level, you can’t deny the logic of this approach.  Salaries are expensive, but pensions and retirement benefits are even more so.  I was hired in the state in 1999 when all of this was on the table.  Younger teachers are not so fortunate.  Many will face the choice of leaving the state.  When asked directly about that possibility, Sen. Jeff Tarte (I think) shrugged and agreed: “That’s a choice you’ll have to make.”
It’s easy to demonize this response, but it is grounded in an economic reality that this is a cheaper choice.  What we have to convince our representatives and the populace as a whole is that just because it is the cheapest choice, it is not the best choice in the long run.  We need to run arguments that lay bare what educating on the cheap will do in the long term.
Ultimately we need these arguments ready and available.  We need them for our reps.  We need them for our neighbors.  When we talk to our friends, our families, our representatives, we are ambassadors for this cause.  We can’t be sloppy in engaging the potential votes in November, because our votes alone will not be enough to bring change.
Which brings us to the third observation…
Political Operatives, Great and Small, Classroom Teachers need them All…
It is no understatement that the GOP Supermajority is the largest impediment to progress on these issues for teachers.  To date, this blog has been intentionally apolitical, and I know that by making this statement I risk alienating anyone who considers themselves conservative or independent.  I am not saying this as a ringing endorsement of Democrats.  However, when one party holds a veto-proof majority in a state where the Governor has limited power to begin with, it limits the amount of horse-trading that can bring compromise in the political sphere.
To that end, teachers must be aware of how politics work and how education policy is made.  Teachers who believe that they can simply march to Raleigh with a red shirt and yell for a morning, go to Chuck’s for a burger, and go home—mischief managed—are deluding themselves.  The best possible outcome for last week is that professional educators become more engaged political on levels large and small.  This means becoming educated about issues and engaging in difficult discussions.
I was somewhat disheartened when I stood in line for an Italian Ice around 3:45, straining to hear someone garbling from the stage at the end of the street when a petitioner came up to ask us to sign off against gerrymandered districts and a teacher had to ask “What’s gerrymandering?”  Perhaps it was late in the day and I was tired and cranky, but I have to admit that this took the wind out of my sails.  But in reflection, there are political issues on which I am ignorant—such as which issues are local vs. state—on which I need to inform myself to improve my own advocacy.
rally #!
What makes political advocacy for education particularly challenging in this state is the Rural/Urban split.  Urban Districts like CMS, Wake, Guilford, Chapel Hill-Carrboro…we are all likely to have more local support from our districts.  More rural districts were not.  As evidenced by the school systems cancelled last week, political advocacy is more likely to come from large Urban centers.  Where Guilford had a chanting mob vowing to vote one rep out and CMS had at least 50-100 on the green in the afternoon, many smaller districts labored with one lone representative if that.  And yet, the reps from these districts wield as much power.
With a dynamic such as this, it may seem easy for a guy like Rep. Brody to simply disdain the protests as “outsiders.”  We laughed and mocked and make cute memes with #thuglife, but in the end, we still have to convince voters in more rural counties that the cause of teachers is the cause of the future of education, not just in the large urban districts, but in the smaller, cash strapped districts as well.