Fighting Poverty, Drugs and Even Violence, All on a Teacher’s Salary

Raucous cheers echoed off the high marble ceilings of the West Virginia Capitol on Tuesday as state leaders announced they had met striking teachers’ demands for a 5 percent pay raise.

“Who made history?” chanted the throng of red-clad teachers, who had defied state officials and, at times, even their own union leaders, by staging a nearly two-week walkout. “We made history!”

The strike indeed takes a place in history, and not just for the result.

Since the earliest days of teacher organizing more than a century ago, almost every moment of teacher activism has come during times of social upheaval. In 1897, the modern teachers’ union movement was born in Chicago, where teachers presided over classrooms of up to 60 children, many of whom could not speak English, in a city surging with immigrants and struggling to control rampant child labor and typhoid in the water. All for the equivalent of $13,000 a year in today’s dollars.

Later strikes came during struggles over racial inequality and the future of public school teaching itself. And as classrooms light up again across West Virginia this week, teachers will be resuming their daily struggles against two modern ills: an intractable drug crisis on top of a growing nationwide fear of bloodshed in the classroom.

“The work is all-encompassing,” said Karla Hilliard, a high school English teacher in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and one of roughly 20,000 teachers who participated in the statewide strike.

“In West Virginia we deal with high levels of poverty and the opioid epidemic,” she said, “but then there are the smaller things, like kids who come in and they don’t have support at home and they just need someone to care about them and love them.”

The strike began in protest of a plan to give teachers a 2 percent raise this July and 1 percent in each of the next two years, after years of stagnating pay and rising health insurance costs. Last week, after Gov. James C. Justice, a Republican, announced a plan to increase pay by 5 percent, union leaders said classes would resume. But teachers refused, demanding that the Legislature vote to make the raise official. That finally happened Tuesday. It was not immediately clear where the money would come from, but the governor promised there would not be cuts to Medicaid, which provides health insurance for the poor.

Teachers in the state last year earned an average of about $46,000, $13,000 less than the national average. In only three states do teachers earn less: Mississippi, South Dakota and Oklahoma. In the last week, 40,000 people have joined a Facebook group calling for a walkout of Oklahoma teachers.

But some West Virginia lawmakers have expressed concern about the cost of the raises. While its cost of living is in the middle of the pack, the state is poor: Its median household income of $43,385, according to Census Bureau estimates from 2016, placed it 49th in the nation, ahead of only Mississippi.

West Virginia has the nation’s fourth-highest unemployment rate and an opioid overdose death rate that is more than three times the national average. All of this plays out in the classroom.

“I can’t tell you how many students we have being raised by grandparents because of parents’ drug addictions,” said Jay O’Neal, a seventh-grade English teacher and a leader of the strike. “It’s just part of a broader problem teaching here, dealing with the effects of poverty.”

At O’Neal’s school, Stonewall Jackson Middle School in Charleston, teachers use their own money to stock a closet for students whose clothes are dirty or do not fit, or who come in wearing shorts when it is freezing outside. At faculty meetings each year, they draw some children’s names off an “angel tree” and provide them with Christmas gifts, because otherwise they would not get any.

Recently, O’Neal said, teachers have noticed that some students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, have been coming to school unmedicated and disrupting an entire class; the teachers suspect parents are selling their children’s medications.

Since the mid-19th century, it has generally been the women who have been expected to do this kind of difficult, nurturing work. That gender divide played a big role in early teacher activism.

Today, about 75 percent of teachers in West Virginia and across the United States are female. When teachers first unionized in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, 97 percent were women, and they were paid little more than maids.

Policymakers did not see that as a problem. Instead, they wanted to devote their extra funds to recruiting male teachers, who they thought would be tougher, and thus better able to control those huge, 60-student classes.

The women teachers got angry, launched their federation, and within several years had secured a raise. They shocked the nation’s elite by marching, in petticoats, alongside Teamsters and other male unionists. Margaret Haley, a founder of the Chicago Teachers Federation, was inspired by Susan B. Anthony and other suffragists, just as today, some West Virginia teachers have come to activism through the 2017 Women’s March, the #MeToo movement or Black Lives Matter.

The politics of teacher strikes shift over time, but in every generation, their leaders have forged ties to broader social movements. Many of the union leaders who led the nation’s most famous — or infamous — teacher strike, in New York City in 1968, were first active in the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington and Freedom Summer in 1964. Nevertheless, when black and Latino activists pushed for community and parent control of struggling schools, including the right to remove teachers, the union went on strike to protect teachers’ tenure rights.

The seven-day teacher strike in Chicago in 2012 came a year after Occupy Wall Street, and rode a wave of dissatisfaction with elite influence in public education. Teachers won a raise and successfully pushed back against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s desire to evaluate teachers based on their students’ test scores.

Today in West Virginia, policymakers have their own ideas about how to improve schools. The state Department of Education has revamped vocational education, while the Republican-controlled Legislature has debated weakening teachers’ seniority protections and providing parents with tax incentives to pay for private school tuition.

But the striking teachers asked that the state Legislature first consider the basics: the salaries and benefits that they say would keep them from fleeing the state. Terry Moe, a political scientist at Stanford University and often a critic of teachers’ unions, said that West Virginia teachers were not asking for anything radical.

“A 5 percent raise is not much,” he said. “There’s a good case to be made that West Virginia ought to put more priority on education, and they’re not.” President Donald Trump has suggested one way teachers could earn more — by agreeing to become armed, in order to protect students from school shootings, like the one that killed 17 people in Parkland, Florida, last month.

Hilliard’s school, Spring Mills High School, has had drills and lockdowns to prepare faculty and students for threats such as a potential school gunman. Recently the school ran a “code red” drill that she thought was real, because teachers were not warned in advance. “It was nothing short of terrifying,” she said.

“Our job descriptions are expanding,” said Hilliard, who opposes the idea of arming teachers, which West Virginia does not allow.

“It becomes, ‘Lay down your life if you have to.'”