Countless Charter Schools Hire Many Uncertified Teachers

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools[1] run by unelected officials are legal in 45 states, Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam. About 7,400 charter schools currently enroll roughly 3.3 million students.

According to a 2018 state-by-state information chart from the Education Commission of the States, more than 25 states (including Washington, DC) either do not require charter school teachers to be certified or allow charter schools to hire a large portion of teachers with no teaching certification.[2]

It should also be noted that, on average, charter school teachers have fewer years of teaching experience and fewer credentials than their public school counterparts. They also tend to work longer days and years than public school teachers while generally being paid less than them. Further, many charter school teachers are not part of an employee retirement plan and are treated as “at-will” employees, which is linked to why 88% of charter school teachers are not part of any organization that defends their collective interests.

A few examples of charter schools with uncertified teachers are worth noting. A May 30, 2019 article in The Palm Beach Post titled, “Underpaid, undertrained, unlicensed: In PBC’s largest charter school chain, 1 in 5 teachers weren’t certified to teach,” points out that the Renaissance Charter School chain in Florida routinely employed large numbers of substitute teachers and operated many schools where a quarter to a third of the teachers were not certified to teach.

Several years ago, one of the main charter school authorizers in New York State unilaterally further lowered teaching qualifications for teachers in charter schools. It willfully ignored numerous public demands to not further dilute teaching standards, prompting a lawsuit against its arbitrary actions. An October 18, 2019 press release from New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) titled, “Court rejects fake certification scheme for charter school teachers,” reads in part:

After the union fought back against “fake” certification for some charter school teachers, a midlevel appeals court this week ruled the SUNY Charter Schools Committee does not have the authority to set its own standards for certifying teachers. NYSUT President Andy Pallotta said the court ruling is a big win for the union and the profession. “This is about preserving what it means to be a teacher in New York State,” Pallotta said. “This would have created a two-tiered certification system and allowed unqualified educators to practice in some charter schools.”

While public school teachers in North Carolina have to be trained and certified to teach in public schools, charter schools are exempt from such requirements and can hire uncertified non-educators to teach. And while they enroll a significant percentage of youth, in Arizona “Teachers at charter schools are not required to have any certification.” Importantly, privately-operated charter schools are notorious for relying heavily on the infamous Teach for America (TFA) program which has come under fire for many reasons over the years. Much of this criticism comes from formers TFA’ers themselves. Many other examples from across the nation could be given.

Taken together, these facts help explain why there is such persistently high teacher turnover rates in the crisis-prone charter school sector—a situation that increases instability and does not serve students and families well. Given the broad disempowerment and marginalization of charter school teachers, it is no accident that there has been an uptick in recent years in the number of charter school teachers striving to unionize. The most recent example comes from Chicago.

It is not possible to build a modern society and nation by creating more corporatized schools that are segregated, non-transparent, deregulated, created by private citizens, run by unelected officials, and staffed with a large number of uncertified teachers. Who thinks this is a great idea? Such neoliberal arrangements lower the level of education and are a slap in the face of thousands of teacher education students across the country who spend years and thousands of dollars training to become effective certified teachers.

Notes

[1] The “non-profit” versus “for-profit” distinction is generally a distinction without a difference: both types of entities engage in profit maximization. Charter school promoters always downplay the fact that there are many charter schools, including “non-profit” charter schools, run by for-profit entities.

[2] Public schools sometimes hire uncertified teachers as well, but what makes the corporatized charter school sector different is that many charter school laws are intentionally and explicitly set up to evade certified teachers. This usually has to do with the neoliberal goal of “cost-cutting” and profit maximizing. Such a set-up lowers the level of education.

Reopening Schools: We Do Not Have To Descend Into COVID Hell

By Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee and E.B. Shaw

With Corona virus cases spiking across the country, America is on the verge of forcing millions of people into extreme danger. Suddenly, everyone from CEOs, the President, state governors, and the corporate media are calling for schools to open “to save the economy”.

No country has tried to open schools with the virus spreading like here in the US. We are currently in a massive wave of surging cases in 40 states. There are not enough tests or testing. How do you open schools if you can’t test and trace? There’s no way that you can keep a school safe from coronavirus if the virus is raging out of control in the community where the school is located.

Before schools physically re-open, certain principles of public health must be established:

• No re-opening without full scientific best practices. So far, this is seriously lacking.

• No re-opening without dealing with the vast practical hurdles. These steps require more funding, not less. So far, the funding to address these problems does not exist.

• No re-opening without total and complete public transparency. So far, decisions are made behind closed doors. Planning is slapdash and haphazard at best. Teachers, unions and communities must be fully involved as co-equals with politicians in establishing policies.

• Schools should continue to be food centers for the communities, but they should reinstate and expand what government has cut — access to nurses, vision services, mental health and cultural support. Communities need these services now more than ever.

• We cannot fail to hold government accountable for securing public health and public safety. Governments must do what it takes to guarantee childcare in safe ways.. We have no choice here. Public schools are still controlled locally. We must exert our power to protect our children.

We’ve already seen what happens when we use shortcuts and go against public health guidance in reopening. Other countries have been successful in suppressing the level of COVID-19, they have one thing in common — a national coordinated strategy.

The US response to the virus has been fractured, reckless, and incompetent. Rather than the federal government organizing a national coordinated response, it has put corporations in total control.

The government refuses to provide adequate unemployment or health care, thus making families desperate to work.  Many European countries cover 60% to 90% of workers’ wages when they can not work. So do we really have to risk our children and our families so corporations benefit? It really does not have to be this way.

Corporations are demanding their workers return to work so they can make a profit from their investments, but they refuse to provide childcare. So children, teachers and school staff, families and communities, must risk their lives to open schools that could not even guarantee toilet paper before the virus. The only people to benefit from a premature physical opening will be billionaires and politicians of both parties. This is why they tout political reasons to re-open, while ignoring scientific precaution.

These same people, who previously had no trouble closing schools throughout neighborhoods and subjecting children to hours of high-stakes testing at computer screens, now state that keeping children out of school denies them the “emotional, social, and knowledge growth they desperately need.” Suddenly, also, the teachers who were degraded as the worst problem with public schools are now heroic essential fron-tline workers!

Schools are set to open district-by-district across the country while many nail shops, gyms, and bars remain closed. Many schools only use easily contaminated recycled air throughout whole buildings instead of widows that can be opened to bring in fresh air. Taking steps as minimal as social distancing will cost vast amounts. Little things become big problems. Before, a Kindergarten teacher could take the whole class to the bathroom at once. Now a class of 15, that requires 6 feet of spacing, forms a line 90 feet long! And how exactly are bathrooms going to be sanitized?

There are no clear guidelines; planning is confused and hidden from the public; PPE’s are in short supply; school budgets are being slashed even as the costs of adequately dealing with the virus skyrocket. School nurses were virtually eliminated before the virus hit. Now, what exactly is going to happen if a child feels sick?

The gap between school finances, destroyed by the virus, and the greatly increased costs, also caused by the virus, runs into billions. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has estimated the funding required to reopen public schools safely is at least $116.5 billion.

Trey Hollingsworth, Indiana Congressman, stated that people dying from the virus is the lesser of two evils to the economy not opening up. CNN reported that Hollingsworth said: “it is always the American government’s position to say, in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life, of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.” Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, announced that old people should welcome re-opening, even if that means they would die.

This corporate class also touts the murderous notion of “herd immunity”, meaning that after 3 million people or so die, the virus cannot spread any more. We have watched health care workers sicken, live in their cars so not to infect their families, and wear plastic bags instead of PPEs. What will happen to school staff?

When policies and political choices set up people to die at “acceptable levels”, it is fair to conclude that this is not an accident. Even before the virus, digital technology has been turning jobs into temp work or no work at all. Corporations are simply not going to spend money to support people they cannot use. In this context, physical re-opening is designed to accept a specific amount of death, to establish toleration of death as a new normal.

Can schools physically re-open now? If so, how?

Hawaii has announced that schools will re-open when no one in the state has tested positive for one month. The Florida Education Commissioner, Richard Corcoran, is the former Speaker of the Florida House and a charter school owner. He demands that Florida open its schools 5 days a week even as Florida COVID cases reach record high levels. Precaution is scrapped for pragmatism.

America’s schools do not meet even the most lenient advice for physical re-opening, which are found on the White House website. Teachers advocate no physical re-opening until no new cases arise in the past 14 days, the time for symptoms to appear. Some districts are beginning to scrap immediate physical re-opening.

Once again, as with the George Floyd rebellion, our character as a people will be tested. Will we stand together, or will our passivity make us complicit in sanctioning unnecessary public death?

Yes, the mental, physical and emotional health of children is critical. No, this cannot be achieved by physical re-opening schools like before. That is impossible. We can find ways to bring young people back together again, but it means letting go of the idea that schools can return to normal. This step requires the imagination and agency of the communities schools serve.

The virus proves that no one is safe unless everyone is safe. The same is true for our schools. For a country founded on genocide, slavery and inequality, the challenge once again is to stand up for the right of quality public education for all.

Everyone now can see the critical and vital importance of public schools to our communities. Even before the virus, schools have been the anchor of the community. Closing public schools is a method of gentrification and community dispossession. Now we see once again that healthy schools create healthy communities and healthy communities create healthy schools.

Teacher unions and parents are advocating that public schools, in these times of COVID, should anchor the communities by expanding the public services they offer.

Immediate and Future Challenges

Whether schools physically open or not, the nature of public education has dramatically changed. Through the Spring, public schools offered online distance learning. As students graduated in June, Zoom Video Communications, Inc announced that it was being used by 100,000 schools globally.

Education has gone from being supported by technology to being dependent on technology and from being corporate-supported to becoming corporate-dependent.

Corporations like Pearson and Google tout online education as a way of saving money in tough times, but this just leads to private profits for corporations.

The latest vampire is Turnitin.com. Students turn in their essays. The website checks for plagiarism; then it sends it back to you, marked in red where you copied something out of the encyclopedia. But they also offer school districts more advanced options like: grading every paper… or maybe even student surveillance.

Under corporate control, online learning, distance learning and virtual charter schools are a dismal failure. The California Attorney General is investigating the entire virtual charter industry for putting private profit ahead of quality education. The largest virtual charter corporation, K12 Inc, “educates” 120,000 students, making $900 million in revenue, all from taxpayer money earmarked for public education. Only half of online high school students graduate within four years, compared to 84% nationally. The Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that students in virtual charters do so poorly in math and English that it’s as if they didn’t attend school at all.

Most teachers estimate that only about 25% of their students do well in online education. The education model is the same drill & kill, test & fail regime that students could not succeed in even before the virus. Most students have trouble learning through screens since the other vital ways that humans learn are eliminated or reduced. And, of course, how does a family provide enough laptops for every child, much less the expense of connecting through Wi-fi?

Government at every level has invited billionaires, tech corporations, and CEOs to determine what public education will look like as the virus rolls on. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo invited Bill Gates and Google into the state to “re-imagine public education.” In other words, government is systematically replacing elected officials, who are (theoretically) accountable to the people, with private, unaccountable capitalists in a campaign to defund and privatize public schools and debase the purpose of education.

The ethical and moral implications of this corporate effort to terminate the education our children and communities need are highly disturbing. There is little public discussion about this even as government proclaims online learning as the miracle of the age.

US schools at every level are facing a crisis of unprecedented proportions. By the time the 2020-2021 school year is over, corporations and governments – if unopposed – will establish a degraded model that works only for the elite and very few others.

When government can bailout billionaires with trillions of dollars, we see that the money exists to build a system of public education that can build the leaders we need to transform the world.

Teaching today must unleash the marvelous powers and creativity of our collective humanity. Students are the people the world needs today to overcome the challenges of a desperately sick population, a sick society and a sick planet.

Unlike most of the world, where the needs of society were put first, in the US every problem is presented as an individual problem and every solution is presented as an individual solution.

It is the same with public education. Ronald Reagan proclaimed that there was no such thing as “society”, meaning no problems result from society, so you’re on your own. This has been America’s mantra ever since, unless of course it relates to corporate governance.

But now we see, scientifically, that the only solutions that can work must be organized at the national level by government to benefit everyone. Social problems are not individual; the emanate from how society is organized. Social problems require social solutions.

Just as COVID-19 demands a national coordinated strategy, the problems of safely re-opening public schools demand national solutions. Not piecemeal, local, short-term quick fixes. Instead, upgrade our schools by combining a public health approach with a public schools approach.

Steve Miller, Rosemary Lee, and E.B. Shaw are members of the National Public Education Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America

West Virginia's Ongoing, Anti-Capitalist Struggle

By Michael Mochaidean

One year ago, teachers and school service personnel in West Virginia rocked the nation with their historic nine-day statewide walkout. The movement was sparked in part due to declining state revenue for state employees' insurance plan - PEIA - and a persistent lack of wage growth compared to contiguous states. In the wake of the Mountain State's first statewide walkout in twenty-eight years, a rupture began to emerge between education workers and their states. Soon thereafter, Oklahoma, Kentucky, and Arizona witnessed their own statewide actions, ranging from a few days of actions to weeklong walkouts.

State legislatures were forced to compromise by these strike actions. In Oklahoma, teachers won an additional $6,000 raise and an increase in school funding by over one hundred million dollars. In Arizona, teachers won a twenty percent raise and increase in support staff salaries to entice teacher retention. West Virginia's victory was smaller by comparison, but no less impactful. There, state workers won a five percent pay raise (equivalent to $2,000 for teachers), a one-year hiatus on PEIA premium increases, and the promise of a PEIA Taskforce whose sole purpose was to find a long-term revenue source for the state's ballooning health care costs. The year had ended with an empowered, engaged, and militant rank-and-file, who were at the forefront of these battles.

The present legislative session in West Virginia is reminiscent, in many ways, of last year's militant struggle. Before the session had even begun, Senate Majority Leader Mitch Carmichael had touted Senator Patricia Rucker's appointment to the Republican-controlled Senate Education Committee. Senator Rucker, a bourgeois reactionary Venezuelan who has spoken damningly about the Bolivarian Revolution, ended 2018 with an attack on socialism in her op-ed, "Socialist-style policies won't grow WV." Senator Rucker, who moved to West Virginia only a decade prior, founded a local Tea Party chapter in 2009 whose sole purpose it was to recruit "liberty-minded" candidates to run for office. Rucker even claimed that she and her family had moved to West Virginia "as refugees from socialist Montgomery County [Maryland]," and thus her desire to implement right-wing libertarian fringe elements into the state's political discourse could be better accomplished in more conservative-leaning West Virginia.

Yet despite her consistent redbaiting, which became an all too common feature during last year's legislative session, Senator Rucker's most troubling pieces of her background are her ties to the far-right in both the religious and education realms. Rucker is a self-described member of the Traditionalist Roman Catholic strand of Catholicism, a right-wing segment of the Roman Catholic Church that believes Vatican II was an illegitimate liberal reform effort. Rucker is also a homeschool advocate who has no experience teaching in public schools. Though Rucker had initially claimed to be a public-school teacher, a freedom of information request with the Maryland State Department of Education found that Rucker never held a teaching certificate with the state board of education, but was only a substitute teacher between 1993 and 2002, before she began homeschooling her children full-time.

In conjunction with her role in the reactionary right's religious and education fields, Rucker is also one of a handful of West Virginia legislators affiliated with ALEC - the American Legislative Exchange Council. ALEC is a front group for corporate lobbyists and state legislators who help funnel resources from large corporate donors into crafting legislation beneficial to the ruling elite. Corporate backers of ALEC help to draft "model" bills that are then used by ALEC-sponsored legislators in a hastily-fashioned copy-and-paste procedure, whereby tax breaks and deregulation maneuvers are inserted into legislation on a state by state basis. Ninety-eight percent of ALEC's revenue, according to ALEC Exposed, comes from "sources other than legislative dues, such as corporations, corporate trade groups, and corporate foundations." Some of the largest donors to ALEC include the Koch Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation, the Allegheny Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, all backed by some of the wealthiest Americans - the Koch, Coors, and Scaife families.

Rucker was highlighted as ALEC's "State Legislator of the Week" last year as a model for right-wing libertarian deregulation and privatization efforts in state legislatures. Her down-home charm as a candidate, running for "limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom" obscures her larger role as an austerity-minded politician whose proudest achievement at the time was the repeal of Common Core. The ability to receive taxpayer funds to provide religious indoctrination - either at home or in private school settings - appears to be one of Rucker's larger goals now as Chair of the Senate Education Committee. Intersecting her relationship to ALEC with the reactionary religious right makes it evident that Rucker's initial goal to help modernize West Virginia's education system is a ruse, obfuscated by her larger desire to implement neo-liberal "reforms" within the state's public education system.

Once this legislative session began, Rucker's Senate Education Committee wasted no time in pushing their privatization, austerity-ridden omnibus bill - SB 451.

The omnibus bill would impact education in the following ways:

- Unlimited charter school development throughout the state.

- The creation of educational savings accounts (ESA's) that provide families with a percent of district funds should they choose not to send their children to public schools.

- Payroll protection clauses, which force unions to individually sign up members rather than having members sign up and have their paychecks automatically deduct their dues.

- Eliminate seniority as a factor in transfers and layoffs when consolidations occur, potentially eliminating higher scale workers in favor of lower scale state employees.

- Increase student cap sizes in elementary schools.

The bill itself passed quickly through the Education Committee - spending less than a week in committee - before it was debated for only two hours, passing in the State Senate on an 18-16 vote. Senator Mitch Carmichael stated at the time that, "It's a historic, great day for the state of West Virginia," at a press conference soon after. "We are so thrilled about the vote today and the aspect of finally, comprehensively, reforming the education system in West Virginia." Senator Rucker likewise claimed that she and her committee were "determined to do the right thing no matter the political pressure."

Education workers, however, were prepared for the worst retaliation from the Senate in advance. On the first day of the legislative session, roughly one month prior to SB 451's passage, hours before Governor Jim Justice held his State of the State address, teachers in twenty counties held walk-ins to remind their fellow workers, parents, and community members what it was they were fighting for. The theme of the walk-ins was a need for mental health and community support for children most impacted by the twin factors of neo-liberal capitalism and the opioid crisis.

To give some perspective on the relative crisis schools are facing, West Virginia:

- Ranks forty-sixth for child poverty, and last for child poverty for children under the age of six.

- Has over one-third of children being raised by their grandparents, which ranks it second in the nation for this. Grandfamilies, as they are called, make on average $20,000 less than the average household in the state.

- Is operating at sixty-six percent efficiency for school counselor to student ratio, and at twenty-three percent efficiency for school psychologist to student ratio.

- Has more than one-in-four children experiencing an adverse childhood experience (trauma leading to depression, violence, substance abuse).

The educator and activist Bob Peterson describes this brand of unionism social justice unionism in that the union represents the interests of the community in conjunction with the material interests of the workers themselves. It is little wonder that this was the theme, given that the walk-ins were organized by the newly-formed West Virginia United caucus, whose five core principles include social justice unionism. An affiliate of UCORE (United Caucuses of Rank and File Educators), West Virginia United began in the wake of last year's statewide walkouts. The caucus is a combination of members from the state's three primary education unions - West Virginia Education Association (WVEA), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and the West Virginia School Service Personnel Association (WVSSPA). In a video released back in September that announced the caucus' formation, steering committee member Jay O'Neal stated that, "We need a caucus, because we saw what happened when teachers and service personnel came together, stood together, and said, 'Enough is enough.' We know that our power lies in us; it's not in the politicians down at the capital."

Worker self-management of unions with respect to bargaining and actions is a component of what the famous Wobbly historian and organizer Staughton Lynd calls solidarity unionism. Solidarity unionism, in its broadest form, is a concept in union organizing that recognizes that the individual union member knows best their conditions and their contractual obligations. In lieu of relying on business unionism - lobbying and mediation to gain power - solidarity unionism utilizes direct action to mediate disputes between members and management. Union representatives become less impactful in organizing efforts or disputes, as workers themselves take on the task of building their union at the local level. In addition to social justice unionism described above, solidarity unionism is also one of United's five key principles.

Already, West Virginia United has begun the work of constructing a left-libertarian dual power institution that can challenge both their own business unions and the reactionary right. Members engage in online-on-the-ground campaigns that work to build power across the state within online spaces that are then transformed into on-the-ground efforts. On the Public Employees United page, which was used last year during the nine-day walkout for organizing efforts, over 20,000 public employees engage with one another across the state to educate themselves on this legislation, agitate their co-workers against it, share stories of triumph and anger, and organize as a larger collective. West Virginia United is uniquely poised to capture and redirect this anger towards the larger struggle against austerity, given that their model of organizing relies on worker self-management in both a right-to-work state and in a state where public employees do not have the ability to collectively bargain. The primary education unions in West Virginia act more so as business representatives for teachers, assisting them with insurance, certification, and classification issues. Both WVEA and AFT lobby the legislature to push for laws that benefit members while holding electoral campaigns through their PAC's to provide resources that help elect likeminded candidates. The disconnect between business unionism and the militancy West Virginia has sparked nationwide last year, however, means that the tactics of solidarity unionism and social justice unionism must be central in the fight against neo-liberal capitalism.

The battle between the austerity-minded education reformers and the militant education workers will continue regardless of what happens to SB 451. As of the writing of this article, SB 451 is being debated in the House of Delegates, and its longevity is uncertain. Whatever may come of this lone bill, it is clear that the fight West Virginians are taking on once again is one in opposition to the rampant capitalism we have witnessed since privatization of public education began a little over two decades ago. The victories of the recent UTLA strike provide hope to many in the Mountain State that unions, driven by a desire to protect public services and in direct confrontation with neo-liberal capitalism, can win the day, but we cannot concede an inch to privatizers in the meantime. To open the floodgates would be disastrous to far too many engaged in this struggle. Should West Virginia strike again, it will be because the working-class educators of this state have developed a burgeoning class-consciousness that was lit last year, and is now carried on in the ranks of its militant citizens.

Michael Mochaidean is an organizer and member the West Virginia IWW and WVEA. He is currently co-authoring a book detailing the 2018 education walkouts, their triumphs and limitations one year later.

The Reds in the Hills: An Anarcho-Syndicalist Interpretation of the Contemporary West Virginia Teachers' Strike

By Michael Mochaidean

Historical Overview

In 1990, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers was $21,904, making it the 49th worst state for educator pay; only Mississippi's was worse. The state's Public Employee Insurance Agency (PEIA) was backlogged, with medical expenses taking almost half a year to be addressed. The teacher retirement fund had a $2 billion hole that grew larger each fiscal year, impacting retirees' insurance and state pension.

Today, in 2018, the average annual salary for West Virginia public teachers is $45,000, making it the 48th worst state for educator pay in the nation. By fiscal year 2020, premiums are set to increase for PEIA recipients by 15.2%, 14.3% (2021), and then another 10% (2022). For retirees, it is even worse. PEIA recipients on Medicare are expected to see an increase in their premiums by 38.9% (2020, 29% (2021), and then another (32.8%).

It is no wonder, then, that in both 1990 and 2018, educators across the state utilized direct action tactics to demand greater action be done to fund the state's public programs. Parallels have been drawn between both strikes in the recent past. In a Sunday editorial in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, for example, a poster reflected in "Not Your Mom's Teacher Strike?" that the 1990 strike and the current strike in 2018 suffered from a recurring theme of long-term underfunding of public health care programs, poor teacher pay, and few incentives built in to retain high-quality educators in the state.

The similarities don't stop there. The rhetorical strategy of positioning educators as hotheaded firebrands, whose only concerns are for themselves, have not changed in the almost three decades since the first statewide walkout. In 1990, soon after the strike was announced, Governor Caperton (D) declared that he would not meet with teachers or their union representatives until "calm and reason are restored and the teaching force returns to the classroom." In 2018, Governor Justice (R) recently declared that he would work towards a resolution to this issue when "cooler heads prevail," signaling that Republican legislators were acting calmer and more collected than the educators themselves. Similarly, the state's primary law enforcement agency, the Attorney General's Office, has made quick use of its power of injunction in an attempt to first break public sector unions, and then to establish precedent in future cases. In 1990, Attorney General Roger Tompkins declared the strike illegal in a formal memo that would later be used in Jefferson County Board of Education v. Jefferson County Education Association (1990). The Jefferson County BOE case would go on to state that, "Public employees have no right to strike in the absence of express legislation or, at the very least, appropriate statutory provisions for collective bargaining, mediation and arbitration." As West Virginia has none of the latter, any formal walkout would therefore be deemed illegal in the eyes of the court. In 2018, Attorney General Patrick Morrissey (R) released his own memo on the teacher walkout utilizing the precedent of Tompkins' 1990 memo and the subsequent Jefferson County BOE case to state that "the impending work stoppage is unlawful. State law and court rulings give specific parties avenues to remedy such illegal conduct, including the option to seek an injunction to end an unlawful strike."

Perhaps the only difference between these two events in the color of the state's legislature and governor's mansion. West Virginia, once proudly staunch Democrats, is now a hotbed of conservative Republican lawmakers. Republicans went from having a 18-16 majority in the state senator to a 22-12 majority in 2016. Governor Justice, who ran and won as a Democrat, switched his political party to Republican over the summer in an attempt to court President Trump's influence and, potentially, a cabinet position.

Such changes matter little in a state where both parties have played on the contemporary cultural fears or economic anxieties of their citizens. From the painful ramifications of trickle-down economics in 1990 to the neo-liberal drive to privatize public services in 2018, Democrats and Republicans have used whichever economic theory happens to be in vogue at their time to harm state workers, bringing them to the brink of death only to resuscitate them with a glimmer of social democracy. In the aftermath of the 1990 strike, for example, annual salary for public teachers increased by $5,000, to be distributed over a three-year period from 1991 to 1993, while the $2 billion pension gap was addressed over the course of the decade. More recently, the state's legislature has proposed meager percentage-based raises to be distributed over the next several years. Proposals vary, but range from a 5% increase spread over 4 years to a 4% increase spread over 3 years; each percentage raise would be $404 per educator. Governor Justice announced only a few weeks ago, when pressure began mounting on the legislature, that there would be no change in premiums or deductibles for state employees using PEIA. Such changes reflect a recognition of the power of grassroots democracy when coupled with direct action and statewide solidarity efforts, yet fall short of any substantive change in the fundamental workings of the state's social or economic trajectory. State Senator Richard Ojeda (D), now famous across the state as a "working-class Democrat" and somewhat of a celebrity (who, coincidentally, is also running for West Virginia's 3rd Congressional District this year) has proposed a series of severance taxes aimed against the natural gas industry to help fill gaps in PEIA funding. For every 1% raise in the state's severance tax on natural gas extraction, the state estimates that it will have around $40 million in new revenue. Much like the coal and timber industries before it, such a severance tax would plug metaphorical holes in the state's public services budget, but would do little to provide meaningful change to the operative conditions of workers. Recent statistics put the death toll for West Virginia miners from 1883 to 2018 at 21,000, while statistics for those that have died in the timber industry are inconsistent. In both instances, corporate profits have trended upward over the course of their history.

As the famed robber baron J.P. Morgan once said, "We are not in business for our health."

Theoretical Interpretation

Sol-i-dar-i-ty (noun): 1) unity or agreement of feeling or action, especially among individuals with a common interest; 2) mutual support within a group.

The renowned union song Solidarity Forever is over a century old and has been sung at labor gatherings and trade halls since Ralph Chaplin first penned it in 1915. The chorus extols the listener to remember that through unity in action, with a shared purpose, strength can overcome the greatest odds. "For the union makes us strong."

Chaplin's inspiration for the lyrics came about during his time covering the Kanawha coal miners' strike in Huntington, West Virginia. Over the course of his lifetime, Solidarity Forever would become a mainstay among business and industrial unions. Its lack of sectarianism provided all sympathetic union members the opportunity to sing together, regardless of labor orientation.

Chaplin, however, grew dissatisfied with its popularity and would go on to pen, "Why I wrote Solidarity Forever," wherein he states that, "I didn't write Solidarity Forever for ambitious politicians or for job-hungry labor fakirs seeking a ride on the gravy train." Solidarity, for Chaplin, was a process, a verb. It had to be reshaped in each new movement by a brand of committed industrial unions with a tendency towards dismantling capitalism and abolishing wage slavery. Unlike the more widespread AFL, the IWW, to which Chaplin belonged, took the struggle of workers' rights throughout the first two decades of the 20th century to include direct action politics - ranging from work slowdowns and work stoppages to lock outs and sabotage efforts. Solidarity through unified action, and unified action towards the "birth [of] a new world from the ashes of the old," could be the only end-goal for union efforts.

Peruse the secret Facebook group "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED" and you'll find post after post referencing Chaplin's most famous song. To the passerby, it may seem that the affinity for this song is first and foremost its tune familiarity - sung to the Battle Hymn of the Republic - while secondly, the song provides inspiration for trying times to the everyday worker seeking that reprieve from the capitalist system Chaplin describes. Educators on this page have posted signs detailing their "solidarity forever" with fellow unions, such as the UMWA, UE, and IBEW, and vice versa. The highly-paid staff for these business unions, not to mention their traditional lobbying tactics, would be enough to churn the stomach of any good Wobbly, and it appears at first that the teachers are being led by the same sort of social democracy that they have fallen for in the past.

Leninists, too, have begun critiquing the teachers' strike, yet from an angle that argues, in essence, that the class struggle cannot operate within the single-dimensional framework of public employees. Quoting Lenin in Our Immediate Tasks, they argue, "When the workers of a single factory or of a single branch of industry engage in struggle against their employer or employers, is this class struggle? No, this is only a weak embryo of it. The struggle of the workers becomes a class struggle only when all the foremost representatives of the entire working class of the whole country are conscious of themselves as a single working class and launch a struggle that is directed, not against individual employers, but against the entire class of capitalists and against the government that supports that class." Utilizing the age-old Leninist argument that a revolutionary vanguard party is the sine qua non of all worker struggles, Leninists have challenged the belief that the teachers' strike can have significant impacts on their own, as they are by and large directed, or funded by, business unions, and that the "trade-union consciousness" which Lenin speaks of in What is To Be Done? inherently casts a shadow of doubt over the efficacy of any worker struggle outside of the vanguard.

The theoretical sectarian struggles to this point have been ones that center the discourse on this struggle as one that de-historicizes the larger framework of this narrative, provides a monolithic overview of individual and independent associations into one larger struggle, and relies on standard tropes to paint broadly the teachers-as-union-slaves narrative. In this sense, I hope to set the record straight on the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike that is currently unfolding while providing my own interpretations of its theoretical foundations.

What Is Our Struggle?

Last year, I was fortunate enough to attend my association's state Delegate Assembly. Every year, the West Virginia Education Association (WVEA) hosts an assembly to elect new officers, provides a framework for future legislative efforts, and meets to discuss relevant issues with educators from across the state. It was at this assembly that I began to grow frustrated with the efforts of President Dale Lee and Executive Director David Haney - both of whom used portions of their assembly speeches to denounce educators who had voted for Republicans and "against their own interests" the previous November. In light of this treatment, I wrote a scathing article about these events in The Socialist Worker in July, hoping to simply vent my frustrations with a wider audience of like-minded thinkers, but assuming little would come of it; I was wrong.

A few weeks after the article was published, a now-comrade of mine - who for the sake of anonymity will be referred to as "Fred" - contacted me with a simple request: "We need to talk about your article." Fred had been at the Delegate Assembly, too, and felt as frustrated as I by the inability of union leadership to effectively mount a serious opposition to reactionary legislation. Over the summer, Fred and I began discussing dates for a grassroots "day at the capitol" lobbying day. We settled on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day because we knew the legislators would be in session and educators would also have the day off, so it would be both convenient and time sensitive. Throughout the next several months, Fred began working on a Facebook group that was then called "West Virginia Public Teachers UNITED." Our goal was to agitate and educate sympathetic teachers across the state into one large group. Each educator was expected to add at least 10 new members that they knew would support our efforts. Over time, we saw the page grow from a few dozen members to several hundred.

By November, we began to worry. Someone had added a member of the executive committee to the group and union leadership was not happy at the efforts we had made. Nonetheless, they realized that if they attempted to halt what progress we had made, they would be halting a real attempt at substantive change, something that hadn't been seen in decades; they took control of the lobby day and began coordinating with local leadership for the next few months. During that time, however, educators continued to post about possible legislation that would arise during the 2018 legislative session. Fears turned into anger as posters began to demand action, and it was at this time that serious talks of a statewide strike were seen. Posters who had been present during the 1990 strike or who had a family member who was on the picket lines then began drawing parallels between the two events organically, recognizing the underlying themes of decades of economic exploitation and the inherent failures of the American democratic experience. The posters were being educated daily, and this education led to their agitation at the state of affairs.

As the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lobby Day rolled around, posters began making concerted efforts to find carpools to the capitol. It looked online as if there would be a mass of teachers waiting in the rotunda to hear what could be done to fix public education for the foreseeable future; in reality, only a little over a hundred educators and supporters showed up. They were greeted by President Dale Lee, who in a surprise move, mentioned the upsurge in revolutionary talk. "I've heard a lot of people talk about 'It's time for a walkout or time for a strike,'" Lee said at the time. "But those are not the first steps in that decision. It's not the first step in what we should do to achieve our goals. If we were to get back to that, there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be laid beforehand." In essence, Lee had given the go-ahead to local leadership to begin efforts at rallying people to join in direct action politics. Mobilization efforts began almost instantaneously. Stories of legislators accosting teachers, refusing to meet with some groups, and outright rejecting basic facts and data from others showed the educators who did arrive that there could be no compromise with the reactionary forces they were fighting - it had to be all or nothing.

The next major rally was scheduled for February 17th. In between the rallies, local counties held a vote of authorization. This would allow state leadership to act on behalf of counties and locals at large. Once the vote had taken place, country presidents would meet at Flatwoods, WV to certify the vote in their county and provide leadership with a firm number of who would support direct action and who would not. The total percentage in support of authorizing statewide action was above 85% - well beyond the expectation of 70% that had been floated as an ideal percentage. The numbers in check and the votes certified, leadership decided to prepare for an eventual statewide walkout that would occur on Thursday, February 22 nd.

On that fateful day, estimates of 5,000 individuals met at the capitol to protest the lack of reforms the state has pushed and demanding long-term funding for PEIA, greater percentage raises for teachers, and a halt to reactionary legislation across the board. At one point, the state's Attorney General became so frightened by the protests outside his office that he barricaded his door with a large, taxidermied black bear. Walkouts continued the following day, even though numbers had dwindled significantly from Thursday to Friday at the capitol.

Meanwhile, online organizing had continued unabated. Several months prior, Fred had decided to change the name of the page from "West Virginia Teachers UNITED" to "West Virginia Public Employees UNITED." Fred realized the stagnant numbers we were drawing would not be able to sustain a mass movement, but even more so, Fred realized that the struggle our group faced was one that transcended our profession, yet was inherently wrapped up in the politics of it. West Virginia teachers could not succeed, he argued, without the widespread outpouring of support from all public employees, who have also been at the forefront of this onslaught against the public sector. Moreover, cross-labor solidarity efforts could show the public that a teachers' strike was not intended simply to alleviate the ills of an under-funded education system; rather, they were an attempt to save all public employees from the state itself. It was at this point that the Facebook page had reached critical mass - over 20,000 active posters. Posters began to talk frequently in person about the lessons they learned from the page, the information being disseminated taught them the limits of electoral politics and the need for greater direct action politics to effect any change. Organization began on the site as well during this time, with some counties splitting off to decide how best to coordinate local efforts for picketing, leafleting, walk-ins, walk-outs, and public relations campaigns.

Posters listened carefully for word on Friday afternoon of an impending rolling walkout to circumvent the Attorney General's upcoming injunction against the unions. Local leadership had told members that week to prepare for this action, listing the benefits of it and how to best organize in defense should educators be required to go to work those days under penalty of suspension or firing. During this week, too, posters complained vociferously that such an action would not have the intended consequences for the legislature. If the legislature knew when we would strike and how long to prepare for, then they would have no need to make a compromise, the argument went. Once again, to everyone's surprise, Lee stated that the walkouts would continue into Monday. It appeared that the grassroots push to have leadership take an active role in listening to its members had its desired effect. Even under threat of injunction, union leadership was keen on the idea of pushing for statewide action, almost indefinitely, until the principal demands had been met.

Theoretical Connections to Anarcho-Syndicalism

At the heart of anarcho-syndicalism is a two-fold attack against the ills of capitalism: 1) a decentralized, horizontal model of leadership that treats all members as first amongst equals, and 2) an abolition of the state through workers' self-management. The quintessential anarcho-syndicalist union of the early 20th century - the Confederacion Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) - initially organized around these sets of principals as well. Based in Barcelona, the CNT was an anarcho-syndicalist union organized across all sectors of employment. CNT capitalized on the worsening economic and political conditions of Spain in the lead up to global war to form autonomous collectives in the major urban centers throughout the peninsula. Though still mostly a rural nation, Barcelona became a central hub for modern industry in their singular productive industry textile mills. The Spanish losses of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War over a decade prior had damaged Spain's already fractured economy by forcing it to rely less and less on its sugar production and more on national industries based in the peninsula. Catalonia in the north, for example, was the only region in Spain where industrial output was greater than agricultural production.

Beginning with only 26,000 members in 1911, the CNT initiated a general strike which would later be deemed illegal by local authorities for several years. The illegality of this action, however, provided new in-roads upon which the CNT would build. In the interwar period, the CNT had a central role to play in the organizing of the 1919 La Canadiense general strike. This forty-four day general strike forced the Spanish government to agree to the world's first eight-hour work day. 70% of Catalonia's industry was halted during the La Canadiense general strike, and the CNT reached a membership of 755,000 as a result of their successes. According to libcom, "about 10% of the active Spanish adult population was a member of the CNT in 1919."

Declines among the CNT would slowly matriculate as businesses began hiring thugs - similar to the Pinkerton agents of American lore - who would murder union members and leaders with ruthless efficiency, though over the course of the Spanish Civil War, membership would balloon up to 1.58 million by the end of the war. The culminating blow to the CNT would ultimately come with the ascension of Francisco Franco and his Fascist forces, who outlawed the union and forced it to go underground. Much of the history of the CNT is paralleled across reactionary Europe and the United States, to groups such as the IWW and the IWA, which have recently seen an increase in membership.

The theoretical tendencies and historical parallels between the CNT and the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike can show the deep-seated roots of anarcho-syndicalist tendencies underneath the surface of otherwise conservative states. In theory, anarcho-syndicalists view local autonomy and organizing around shared interests at a directly democratic level will provide the greatest change in society. Noam Chomsky, in his Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and Practice, relays his views of anarcho-syndicalism to be, "a federated, decentralized system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other social institutions…" The CNT's model of this association model contrasts with Marxist-Leninist tendencies which seek to form a revolutionary party model upon which a vanguard will appear and act as democratic leaders to herald in the revolution.

Similarly, the contemporary West Virginia teachers' strike has both the material and organizing conditions that make an anarcho-syndicalist system possible. First, West Virginia's economic devastation is a result of what has been called the "resource curse" or the "paradox of plenty" - wherein regions have an abundance of natural resources that can spur larger economic growth in various sectors, yet tend to become stagnant economically - and what Immanuel Wallerstein would deem the "Periphery status" within world-systems theory. According to Wallerstein, periphery states lack economic diversity, are semi-industrialized but only insofar as they provide products to core states, become targets for multinational corporate investment in extracting surplus labor or resources, and have high a pool of labor that is disproportionately poor and lacking in education. Wallerstein tended to view nation-states as at least somewhat monolithic in this regard - treating the United States as a collective core nation and China as a collective core periphery state, for example - without a recognition of the complexities of capital within the communities of those states themselves. If we expand Wallerstein's notion of periperhy status to West Virginia as a whole, a more uniform pattern of shared economic destiny can be understood:

In the case of West Virginia:

1. Ranked fourth highest in the nation for obesity and the highest prevalence of adults reporting fair or poor health in the country.

2. Over 30% of the state does not hold a high school diploma

3. The median household income is $36,864, while the median household income for the country at large is $59,039.

What differentiates the conclusions between a Marxist-Leninist trajectory of these material conditions is that a vanguard party is largely disregarded in the state or is too small and fractured to have any larger sense of statewide support. Furthermore, the support from Marxist-Leninist parties has been largely, though perhaps regrettably, superficial. Workers World and PSL have written articles supporting the teachers, to be sure, and have created a diverse range of graphics to show their solidarity with the collective struggle against capital. Yet, these gestures tend to attract only minor attention on an online space with educators.

On the other hand, collective struggles that decentralize power and return the dynamic to a community-oriented and labor-oriented structure has seen greater advances throughout the course of the strike. Over the past weekend when Dale Lee stated that a statewide walkout would commence on Thursday, February 22nd, local communities began their own decentralized organizing for food distribution centers. In Morgantown, for example, the local Monongalia County Education Association independently took on the task of setting up collection sites for food and other resources that could then be distributed to schools with the highest rates of students on free and reduced lunches. The outpouring of support led to this single organization collecting over 400 bags for lunches, 400 bags for breakfasts, and three-dozen snack bags - all with collections for only four schools total. This is without an even deeper analysis of the various food centers that have begun providing resources to local non-profits and managing distribution centers to students living in rural parts of the state where accessibility to resources is limited. In both senses, it has not been a vanguard party structure nor as movement towards social democracy that has funneled this energy into collective action, but rather, one that has a distributive model of community governance.

It remains to be seen what the result of such actions will be: union leadership could allow electoral strategies to win out and a compromise may be reached before any further action takes place; the Republican-dominated legislature could continue to stall on the issue of funding, providing for a special session to take place, costing the state even more money in the process; or, the state could begin a significant crackdown on educators and other potential dissidents in the process of maintaining "law and order." The last scenario is not unfounded, given the fact that the House of Delegates updated a 1933 law to give capitol police the ability to break up "riots and unlawful assemblages" while providing legal cover "for the death of persons in riots and unlawful assemblages." Thus, the state could effectively begin mass arrests against educators and union leadership, similar to what occurred to the IWW, CNT, and IWA, though driving them underground is unlikely. The difference is that such a direct assault would provide educators the necessary public relations to cover themselves and galvanize greater support in opposition to both capital and the defenders of capital. Thus, a direct assault by the state could essentially be the death knell to a dying institution.