Sagging School Funding Fuels U.S. Teacher Protests

U.S. teacher demonstrations are likely to spread as more educators hit the streets to take on states that they claim are choosing tax cuts over the education of students in elementary and secondary public schools.

Teachers rally inside of the state Capitol rotunda on the second day of a teacher walkout to demand higher pay and more funding for education in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S., April 3,
Protests have erupted in states with some of the lowest teacher salaries in the nation, leading to multi-day job actions in a few states.

Educator unrest began in West Virginia, where teachers ended a nine-day strike last month after the state approved a 5 percent pay hike.

This week, massive teacher protests closed schools in Oklahoma.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said the demonstrations, which have so far taken place in right-to-work states with weak labor laws, underscore how fed up teachers have become over the deprivation caused by inadequate funding due to tax cuts.

“I do think this will happen more and more because the era of passive resignation seems to be over. And that’s only good news for the children that we serve and the educators we represent,” Weingarten told Reuters.

Oklahoma has the lowest median pay among states for both elementary and secondary school teachers, according to 2017 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The state’s budget has been hit by a combination of tax cuts and a slump in energy prices, a significant source of tax revenue.

Weingarten said teachers there are struggling with stagnant pay, decades-old textbooks and big class sizes.

Meanwhile, teacher unrest is growing in Arizona.

Median teacher salaries in the Grand Canyon state are among the lowest in the nation, leading to a retention problem. A report last year by the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University found that almost a quarter of teachers hired between 2013 and 2015 were no longer teaching after a year, while 42 percent of teachers hired in 2013 lasted no more than three years.

Dan Hunting, a senior policy analyst at the institute, said taxes in Arizona as a percentage of the economy have been reduced by about a third since the early 1990s, resulting in less state money for schools.

“It’s going to take a while for us to get out of this. There’s not going to be a magic bullet,” Hunting said.

The common thread in all three states is tax cuts that were undertaken in the years before and after the Great Recession, according to Michael Leachman, director of state fiscal research at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The group describes itself as a nonpartisan research institute.

“Teacher compensation is the biggest part of school budgets,” he said. “If you cut the revenue that’s available to spend on schools it makes it hard to pay for qualified teachers.”

On a national basis, 47 percent of funding for public schools comes from states, with 45 percent raised locally and 8 percent coming from the federal government, Leachman said. In more than half of the states, per-pupil funding from state and local sources from 2008 through 2015 was below 2008 levels.