Arizona teachers begin strike as wave of education walkouts rolls west

Teachers in Arizona will embark on another landmark strike on Thursday, the latest in a series of teachers’ walkouts over wages and funding that has spread across the US from West Virginia to Oklahoma.

Tens of thousands of teachers across the state are preparing to walk out despite threats that their teaching licenses will be revoked. Seventy-eight percent of Arizona’s 57,000 teachers voted to strike. About 820,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million public-school students will be affected by closures, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.

Their decision to strike comes even after Arizona’s Republican governor, Doug Ducey, proposed to give teachers a 20% raise. The proposal, which would still have left the state’s educators among the worst paid in the US, was rejected by the teachers union and the Arizona Parent Teachers Association after it was revealed that the plan would be paid with cuts to other state programs.

“Governor Doug Ducey’s idea of taking money already designated for other worthy purposes is a ‘rob Peter to pay Paul’ scheme that is wrong and unacceptable,” said the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Arizona president, Ralph Quintana.

The unions have instead proposed a 2.5% tax on financial and legal services that they estimate would generate $2.5bn a year. The union hopes that that money could be spent on restoring full state funding for educational programs as well as reversing cuts to special education, arts and dual language programs.

However, opposition remains to raising state taxes from many of the wealthier suburbanites, who enjoy schools better funded through state taxes and the retiree population, which has grown by 27% since 2010 as seniors flock to the state to take advantage of low taxes.

The strike comes as Republicans in the deeply conservative state are reeling from a local election that saw their candidate win by a five-point margin in a seat that Donald Trump won by 21 percentage points in 2016.

Unlike West Virginia or Oklahoma, the issues of immigration will probably take center stage in Arizona, as nearly 45% of the school system’s students are Latino and more than half of Arizona’s public school students hail from communities of color.

The state – which has passed tough immigration laws in recent years – has been successfully sued for attempting to ban Mexican-American studies in schools under threat of defunding school programs.

People say “let’s not bring the race”, said the Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva. “‘It’s simply about a conservative state and their teachers.’ Well, it’s much more complex. Some of the strongest support you are having is from Latino schools and Latino parents.”

Grijalava said the Arizona teachers strike was calling out the racism that he believes is at the core of the underfunding of schools in the Latino community.

“It might not be overt [racism], but it’s certainly covert,” said Grijalva.

Since 2008 the state has cut $1.5tn from the school budget and salaries for teachers rank as the 50th lowest in the country.

Phoenix elementary school teacher Alexis Aguirre said she had had enough. Aguirre, who said she lives from paycheck to paycheck, said: “We have seen the dynamic of older white folks moving here in their retirement and having a culture shock in their community that is brown, that is immigrant. So they are coming into our community and they are telling us that we need to change that they don’t have kids and they aren’t going to fund schools.

“I pull out of the parking lot and [see] my students digging through trash cans with their parents looking for aluminum cans so they are living day-by-day and that’s what’s really hard about there being so few teachers of color in the classroom,” said Aguirre.

In Arizona, Latino community advocates said they were hopeful that immigrants and labor unions could help build new alliances and foster new partnerships around the need to improve schools.

“It’s always been a civil rights issue for Latinos, just as immigration is a civil right for Latinos,” said Grijalva. “I think what the teachers are doing with their strike only clarifies that issues and gives it a profile that it didn’t have before.”