Take a Closer Look at #RedforEd
After Invest in Ed was kicked off the ballot by the Arizona Supreme Court, the Red for Ed movement is back with a vengeance. The noble effort by teachers to fix the school funding problem was vetoed by the Republican establishment and their corporate cash cows. Undoubtedly teachers will activate their Red for Ed energy and Remember in November.
So goes the narrative being pushed by the newspapers, echoing the narrative being pushed by the teachers' union.
If you thought the “National Red for Ed” day on September 4th was a grassroots response to an unjust court ruling, you aren’t paying attention. The NEA has been on an aggressive “Red for Ed” campaign for months. Their digital advertisements flooded my computer screen all summer. When you click on the banner, it takes you to a page to sign the “Red for Ed Pledge” where you type in your personal information.
As the AEA continues to whip teachers into a frenzied outrage over the Court ruling, I want to go back and revisit the teacher strike, knowing what we know now.
If we believe AEA president Joe Thomas when he says their team had been researching the ballot initiative for over a year, we can conclude that the Red for Ed leadership knew there was a school funding plan in the works that would become a citizen’s initiative.
Since the initiative was finalized and filed with the Secretary of State’s office during the strike, it’s fair to conclude that the initiative was close to being finalized by the walk out vote — one week after Ducey’s 20% raise proposal was announced.
The rationale for the strike was that Ducey’s plan was unsustainable financially. There was no dedicated funding source. A strike was a rejection of the plan — an attempt to force the legislature to raise taxes to pay for the plan. That’s what everyone was told.
Turns out, the leaders who called for a strike knew about a ballot initiative to provide a dedicated funding source. They planned on filing it during the strike to begin gathering signatures.
I’m not a reporter, but this seems like an important investigative matter. Our entire school system was ground to a halt for a week — seemingly under manipulative tactics.
What the leaders of the movement didn’t do was fully explain what was going on. They never said that, instead of striking for a tax increase (which was highly unlikely to succeed), we could have gotten behind a ballot initiative to increase funding. They hinted that a ballot initiative could maybe/possibly become the second option if the legislature didn’t do it — but they gave no indication that an initiative was basically ready to go.
This just adds to the deception behind the strike that I’ve already written about previously — the confusion of the walkout vote and how nobody really knew what they were voting for. Teachers had no idea what a “strike authorization vote” was, and it wasn’t explained as such. The leaders didn’t bother to explain what the vote would trigger. During the vote, one of the leaders admitted to me on Facebook that they had a strategy and it was being concealed.
Another question that never got sufficiently reported on during the strike was how the school districts made their decisions to shut down the schools. Was it true that a critical mass of teachers were calling in sick each day? How many at each school? Was there direct communication between the district admins and the union leaders during this time? These questions are important because we don’t know how many teachers would have actually gone on strike if their schools hadn’t preemptively shut down.
The teacher movement wasn’t a façade. Long simmering discontent, combined with public sympathies, combined with firebrand activists and effective organization strategies: that’s what created and sustained the movement. Again and again, though, the decisions by those in the driver’s seat of the movement reflect a willingness to use deception, moving their followers step-by-step toward some unspoken goal.
When you tease out the logic from the rhetoric, the virtues of Red for Ed all but evaporate. The strike and the initiative should be critically reported on by serious journalists. The story isn’t about Big Corporations vs. the Little Teachers Who Could. It’s about how Arizona’s public school system has been turned into a political pawn.
I understand the critique of Republican leadership on public education in Arizona. But please take a critical look at the other side before handing over the car keys.
