Kentucky Teachers Call Wildcat Walkout In Resistance to Legislative Pension Scuttle

Source: Sarah Coomes Crisp, Twitter

Over the past 10 years, Republican-controlled legislatures across the country have slashed corporate taxes, decimated school funding, ignored teachers’ pleas for raises, and tried their best to crush public employees’ collective bargaining power through unions. Now, the teachers are fighting back. After West Virginia teachers went on strike, similar actions have been sweeping red states, from Oklahoma, to Arizona, and now, to Kentucky.

Last week, the Republican legislature majority unveiled a new 291-page pension bill, zipped it through both the House and Senate, and sent it to the governor's desk -- all in less than nine hours.

In response, many Kentucky schools closed on Friday as teachers walked out, according to the Courier Journal. The Kentucky Education Association, which represents teachers and other education professionals, slammed the pension law as a "classic legislative bait and switch."

It stripped all the 'local provision of wastewater services' language out of SB151 and replaced it with many of the harmful provisions of SB1. ... We haven't seen the bill, weren't allowed to testify. The bill hasn't had the required actuarial analysis, includes no fiscal impact statement and no fiscal note.

For more information, read “Teacher walkouts over pay and pensions have spread to Kentucky” at Vice.com

SB4, Unjust Laws, and LSC

This article picks up a conversation about how laws governing immigration affect our college students. You can read the other parts here [1, 2, 3].

Brief Updates with DACA and SB4

1. The Fifth Circuit of Appeals: A three-judge panel unanimously sustained Texas SB4. We address this as the main of our discussion, below.
2. Neither Democrats nor Republicans amassed willingness to pass a clean DREAM Act to protect hundred of thousands of young migrants affected by the loss of DACA.
3. ICE increases aggressive separation of families across the country, including separating parents from children; as part of their strategy, ICE continues consistent policies of disinformation to confuse local communities and institutions
4. Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions III, U.S. Attorney General -- never a friend of migrants -- has promised "using every power” in his suit against the State of California’s sanctuary laws, using rhetoric supporting Arizona’s HB 1070 (“Show Your Papers”), which has largely been shown to be unconstitutional.
5. On 26 February, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the president’s appeal of the Ninth Circuit Court Jan. 9 nationwide injunction that halted Trump’s move to rescind DACA. Therefore, Homeland Security resumed DACA renewals. The White House appeal now returns to the Ninth Circuit.

Source: Center for Law and Social Policy

The Fifth Circuit -- Abandoning the Fourth Amendment

The Fifth Circuit -- the most conservative of appellate courts -- held that SB4

• is not preempted under the federal Constitution’s Supremacy Clause;
• its section requiring local governments (including public colleges) to comply with ICE immigration detainer requests does not violate the Fourth Amendment; and
• its provision prohibiting local laws or policies that “materially limit” immigration enforcement activities is not so vague as to violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Importantly, the Fifth Circuit clarified that local entities -- such as colleges -- are not required to collaborate with federal immigration enforcement; that is, the court identified how local entities may help federal officials and whether they must. Stunningly, the Fifth Court ignored the Fourth Amendment (“against unreasonable searches and seizures”) when it comes to immigration arrest authority. The Court announced that immigration arrests do not require evidence of criminality; instead, the Court claims: “we…disavow any district court decisions that have suggested the Fourth Amendment requires probable cause of criminality in the immigration context.” Remember that immigration courts do not require defense, and migrants often are un-represented before the bench.

Remember, too, that ICE does not require warrants for entering private residences or business … or colleges. ICE uses Form I-274A which is not a warrant requiring a judge’s determination of “probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation.” No warrants. No defense. No rights. Professor of Law Michael Kagan notes:

At issue here is the power of the government to detain a person, citizen or immigrant, without probable cause, and without immediate review. An autocrat would very much enjoy this power.

Texas and Unjust Laws and Why a College Matters

We start with the idealistic and often untrue assumption that we all have rights in our republic: specifically, The Fifth and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution give defendants the right to counsel — to be represented by an attorney in court proceedings. But recall that the Immigration Courts do not provide defense counsel if the defense cannot pay legal protection, like criminal courts do. Further, ICE has increasingly threatened all organizations — private and public—that oppose his hatred. Not surprisingly, the Texas axis of Abbott-Patrick-Paxton enthusiastically support Albence’s xenophobic stance. These two truths — the White House hunts undocumented migrants and immigration courts do not provide defense for indigent migrants — act as inhumane, uncivilized, immoral, and hostile against anti-American claims of a just system. Attorney General Paxton, again, conflates all immigrants as criminals:

Enforcing immigration law prevents the release of individuals from custody who have been charged with serious crimes. ... Dangerous criminals shouldn’t be allowed back into our communities to possibly commit more crimes.

Meanwhile, the current practice of ICE sees all undocumented migrants as targets for detention and deportation.

We see that already in our college. Our undocumented students or students with undocumented family members are increasingly stressed, absent from class, and withdrawing. I have had a student who withdrew because his undocumented family returned to Mexico; the student needed to work to support his nephews and nieces. Another student’s family has made her -- at age 21 -- the legal custodian of her little brother in case parents are deported. Other students in threatened families just disappear, without a conversation. A recent study by Kathleen Roche in The Journal of Adolescent Health shows that students in undocumented families are experiencing increased emotional stress under the current U.S. immigration policies.

With that context, we return to SB4 and the State of Texas’s insistent assault on our college students.

Labor News (UPDATE): Black Hawk College Union Members Overwhelmingly Approve Vote to Strike

UPDATE: 

The Black Hawk College strike was averted after an agreement was reached between the Union and the board. Educators will have improved pay, health care, and fairer overtime loads.

Source: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images

Black Hawk College is a community college in Illinois with campuses in the cities of Moline and Galva. AFT colleagues in the Illinois Federation of Teachers (Local 1836) voted on 9 March 2018 to strike as negotiations between the union and administration have stalled. The union has not had a contract since the summer 2017. On March 9, it filed an intent-to-strike notice with BHC, paving the way for the union to strike after a 10-day waiting period that expired Monday.

Union member Professor Galen Leonhardy argues:

Whether our board members force us to strike or recognize the vulgarity of their recent rationalizations, I refuse to take yet another pay reduction, refuse to pay even more for health care, and refuse to support a board that wants to decrease by thousands and thousands of dollars, junior faculty members’ retirements.  

I refuse to have faith in and support a board that has spent millions adding buildings on campus while enrollments fell, new buildings, one of which remains essentially hollow, a place of learning without learners.  

I am done with authoritarian board members hiring and subsequently empowering authoritarian administrators who have fixated on chilling academic freedom while failing to fulfill their own basic responsibilities.

Our union leaders are doing a super job of helping members hold onto our health care, achieve a basic cost of living increase, prevent the board members from diminishing junior faculty members’ retirements, and keep the board members from cutting the salaries of our senior faculty members.  

Our union leaders have negotiated for more than a year with board members, with elected officials who have very limited backgrounds in education, folks who were willing to pay a lawyer astronomical amounts (over $100,000) just to prevent faculty and professional/technical employees from having even a cost of living raise.  Yet those same board members have given raises to our administrators (who appear to pay for their raises by laying off faculty members).

Thanks to the union, we have a wonderful health care and insurance plan. Had we trusted that our administrators would take care of us, we would never have had the quality of health care we currently enjoy.   If I get sick or have an accident, I will be taken care of.  I have a child who needed hospitalization, and the insurance covered almost all of the expenses.  Our family members get to attend the first two years of college for almost nothing.  I have a fair wage and a great retirement plan. And I have To thank the union for all of those things that help me to feel glad that I have the job I have.

Obviously, I am proud to be a union member, grateful to those past faculty members who put their jobs on the line to create the union, and honored to continue that legacy for future faculty members.

For an update on the negotiations:

http://qconline.com/news/bhc-union-exchange-contract-proposals/article_26cb88a9-5b50-5490-b135-b427fe0aac31.html

Considering Our Profession as a Death Sentence

In light of recent violence in Florida, Maine, Austin, and elsewhere, educators and staff must be aware of how education has shifted over decades from a respite of intellectual conversations to a politicized (and often silenced) rhetoric of violence -- physical, sexual, and emotional violence. Managers (politicians, including very local elected or “selected” politicians in the guise of educator administrators) respond to violence as policy and police without the systemic critique how society sees educators and students as threats.

Educator P. L. Thomas addresses this is part of his blog critique of the neoliberal educational complex:

For decades now, many of us in education who believe in the possibility of universal public education have feared the death of teaching and learning, but we have imagined that coming from policy, free market and accountability approaches to so-called reform.

But something more sinister is happening: Schools have always labored under the weight of the communities they serve, and teaching and learning is now dying a slow and horrible death because of America’s gun culture combined with those bureaucratic monsters many of us were mostly pointing to.

To read more, see Thomas’s “The Death of Teaching and Learning in America.”

Labor News: West Virginia Educators on Strike -- Update

On Tuesday, West Virginia officials agreed to a budget deal, ending the teacher strike by raising pay for all state workers by 5 percent. The deal follows more than a week of protests across the Appalachian state supported by the AFT.

More than 277,000 students were out of the classroom for nine school days as teachers pressed for higher salaries in West Virginia, where pay ranks near the bottom for U.S. teachers. 

The West Virginia Education Association hailed the deal, saying on its Facebook page: “WE WON!”

The win for teachers is especially notable given their political situation. While West Virginia has no laws explicitly making such a strike illegal, public employees such as teachers do not have a legal right to strike against their state or to collectively bargain. Teachers participating in the strike risked disciplinary action in mounting a work-stoppage, but they still worked together to make themselves heard, rally public support, and improve pay for all state workers. 

To remind us that these educators’ lives are among the poorest labor environment (the 48th lowest salary in the nation), we recommending the interview with teacher Katie Endicott, a high school English teacher, with the New York Times. 

We also recommend another interview with Jacobin’s Eric Blanc, who sat down with Jay O’Neal, a middle-school teacher and union activist in Charleston. O’Neal explains his organizing strategies, parents’ attitudes (positive), and union member dynamicism.

In the wake of the success of these teachers, it appears teachers in Oklahoma — one of only two states with lower pay than West Virginia before their action — may be following.