 Hi, good afternoon, I'm Naomi Walker and I'm the director of economic analysis and research network or earn at the Economic Policy Institute and just earn it's made up of close to 60 policy research and advocacy groups around the country who are working to win and calmly that works for all of us, whether we're black, brown or white. Welcome to today's panel discussion about education and union power and a new age of labor activism. We're going to talk about online organizing anti austerity movements and pushing for racial justice and equity in the classroom. Two years ago in the midst of a cold February in West Virginia, 35,000 teachers and school staff walked off the job. More than 100,000 teachers and other states followed them over the next year. From Arizona, Kentucky and Oklahoma to Colorado and California, teachers stood up for themselves and their students and told state legislators that they weren't taking it anymore. They had reached a breaking point as teachers were forced to take on second and third jobs to make ends meet and to spend money out of their own pockets to supply classrooms. They told legislators that there are austerity policies that led to low wages, terrible working conditions, lack of education funding, racial inequity and crumbling public school infrastructure was completely unacceptable. So today we're going to hear from three people involved with a new book that helped tell that story about those strikes strike for the common good, fighting for the future of public education. There was edited by one of our speakers today Rebecca Collins given and her colleague Amy Shriver Lang. And the book tells the story of the strikes from the viewpoints of the teachers, the parents, the students involved as well as outside academics and analysts. So first up we'll hear from Rebecca Collins given associate professor of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University. And as I mentioned one of the co co editors of strike for the common good. And then we're going to hear from Sylvia Allegretto and API research associate and economist at the University of California Berkeley, who will discuss what workers can learn from teacher organizing. And then we're going to close out the panel. And here from Jesse Hagopian who's an educator and co advisor of the black student union at Garfield High School who'll share his story of direct action and organizing in Seattle and why it is so critical for teachers to incorporate racial justice advocacy and their organizing efforts. And before I turn it over to our speakers I just want to give a quick note on today's format we're going to hear from all of our speakers and then we're going to open it up to take questions that you all have placed in the chat. So at any point during the discussion go ahead and type in your questions to the chat box and then we'll take as many of them as we can before we wrap up so Rebecca I'm going to kick it over to you to get us started. Thank you. Thank you Naomi and thank you to the Economic Policy Institute for hosting us today. I will talk about a few sort of key points or highlights from the book which I have to hold up partly because I love Joe brusky's beautiful photograph of the United Teachers of Los Angeles strike. What I wanted to do Amy trigger laying and I in strike for the common good was answer one of the questions that I think is on many people's minds which is sort of where did teacher strikes go and why are they back and what do they look like now so what they look like and what strikes for the common good that center education funding and racial justice and all kinds of demands that people didn't necessarily think of as part of teachers strikes teachers unions demands in previous decades. The book has some historical context. We touch on some of the battles in the 60s and 70s where teachers unions were tended to be pivot against movements for social progress and racial justice so the famous Ocean Hill Brownsville strike where teachers essentially struck against the interests and demands of the local black community and one of the things I think is exciting about the book is to see how far we've come from that that point where teachers weren't able to see a shared vision for public education for proper funding of public education and for racial justice. One of the key turning points and I won't talk about it that much now is the Chicago teachers union strike of 2012 which I think really changed our understanding of what teachers would do how they had to organize to go on strike and how they organized with the community that teachers in Chicago went on strike for what they said was the schools Chicago students deserve they organized with parents they had massive community support and they also showed they were willing to take on democratic leaders so they were willing to take on Mayor Michael and other Democrats who had become key to this sort of anti teacher anti union consensus that meant massive massive cuts to school funding and school funding. As we know from Sylvia Alegrado's work never recovered from the 2008 recession by design not by accident. What we what we what we did in the book was we really tried to let teachers and other educators and other education workers tell their own stories. And so we also have accounts from community members from activist students from a bus driver, as well as the perhaps more typical scholarly accounts. And I think it's really important to have all these perspectives one of the things that's essential to show is that strikes don't just happen strikes come out of organizing, even strikes that seem to happen quickly there's quick organizing but they're not spontaneous eruptions they're not. They're not natural occurrences there's something that take take a lot of work and a lot of organizing. Many people are probably familiar with the West Virginia strike of 2018 and so I'm not going to spend a lot of time on that I'm going to talk a little bit more about the Arizona strike which followed a few weeks after the West Virginia strike in West Virginia and teachers went out statewide to battle for better education funding, and they were wildly successful they closed the schools in their in their whole state and teachers in other states started to pay very close attention. Their success was was somewhat mixed and we try to be really clear eyed in the book so in places like Oklahoma and Kentucky these strikes were not unequivocal successes they often revealed divisions between active teachers who are active in their unions who weren't in some cases teachers who wanted to emphasize and center racial justice demands and those that were more interested in things like pensions so we try to be really open about about some of those differences. In Arizona, the, the strikes were notable for a few things one is just the scale of the organizing and the magnitude of participation. Education funding was extremely low in Arizona, including very very low teachers pay education funding had was dramatically depressed. It never ticked back up after the recession. There are huge layered inequity issues in Arizona about 45% of public school students are Latino more than half are from communities of color. So there are huge racial justice and tax fairness issues at play. What we saw in Arizona and Rebecca Garelli an amazing organizer contributed a chapter to the book which really lays this out is this very deep organizing that was a combination of traditional organizing methods and digital online organizing so much of the organizing happened initially on Facebook and then moved into other tools so that they could organize statewide across hundreds of schools so even though they were organizing online, they were organizing school by school person by person. The, the organizing happened just about 10 days after the West Virginia strike the teachers were paying attention and the key organizers the handful of leaders in this movement all met online they didn't know each other they didn't work together. They started a Facebook group and within about four days 1500 Arizona educators were in the in the in the group and we're starting to strategize and what they did really elegantly and successfully is that they combined online and offline organizing strategy so they would do escalating actions like encouraging the the teachers and other educators to wear red to school on coordinated days but also post a photo on social media so that people could could see that they were getting involved that they were speaking up and they were willing to sort of engage their own social media communities in these conversations. The Arizona teachers had five key demands and you can see how directly the stem from Sylvia Alegrato's work on the teacher pay penalty and the underfunding of education because education funding was so so low in Arizona. So their demands were a 20% salary increase for teachers which seems like a lot until you understand just how much they were struggling and how poorly paid these, you know, teachers mostly with a graduate degree were. They also demanded competitive wages for all classified staff so other workers in the schools this is essential to these common good strikes many of them were also centering the demands of not just low paid teachers but even lower paid other school staff whether cafeteria bus drivers support staff aids paraprofessionals all of whom are struggling in these states. Their demand was no more tax cuts so the leader the elected leaders in Arizona were very very into tax cuts and they said no more tax cuts until school spending reaches the national average so they just wanted to keep up with the average. They also demanded a return to 2008 funding level so again benchmarking to the pre recession level of funding on public education. And then they also demanded annual raises for Arizona teachers again until their salaries reached the national average so they just wanted to benchmark to something sort of in the middle of the playing field instead of at the very very bottom which is where they've been. They took a number of different actions they had actions at the state capital that drew 50,000 people which is remarkable I think those are the biggest protests that Arizona has ever seen. They also really use utilized an innovative tactic, which is the walk in where teachers and other school employees met with supportive parents and community members at the start of the school day, and walked into school together as a show of solidarity so it's a job action they're not not working they're not withdrawing their labor yet at that point, but they're building with their community and showing that their demands for education justice for proper education funding are actually shared demands and so they fought with their communities and the manifestation of that was was these walk ins. They, they had over 100,000 people participating in walk ins which is remarkable. And at that point the governor actually announced a 20% raise for teachers so he started to cave to their demands, but it didn't include any increased overall funding any sense of moving to tax increases and so the teacher said, that's not sufficient. It's time for a strike and they struck for six days. They finally won their strike when the legislature passed a budget with increased school spending overall as well as raises for their further for their educators, but this also wasn't sufficient so they then moved to a ballot initiative campaign to make sure that they could implement a wealth tax that would explicitly fund education and that that ballot initiative is sometimes known as invest in Ed and through some legal trouble with the state Supreme court which was sort of beholden to the governor, they weren't able to get that in 2018 but they remarkably kept their organizing going and were able to successfully win that about initiative this year just last month. And then the Arizona strikes were the biggest teacher walkouts that were prolonged 5757 thousand teachers on strikes so bigger than the utl a strikes bigger than Chicago bigger than all the ones that you might think about and this online to the online aspect of it I think is really crucial as well as the focus on funding and understanding that both strikes and legislative action and ballot box action, all come together to potentially increase funding and move towards education justice in their schools and I'll stop there. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much for Becca. Next, we're going to turn to Sylvia Allegretto. Naomi and thank you team EPI for for putting this together and I just got to say, you know, Becky and Amy did a bang up job and putting this job together. Not just the diversity of the chapters and the thought and the approaches from the campaigns but the eclectic group of authors. I mean, you have high school students along writing alongside their teachers and university students and academic professors and rank and file union organizers and those that are in national positions it's really a great accomplishment. And I'm humbled to have my name alongside these folks. The chapter is about teacher pay which has been mentioned here a couple times and it certainly documents what I've been writing about for 16 years, the long term erosion of teacher pay. And you know how it's important for recruiting and retention and, and the future of the profession. But the chapter also homes in on the intersection of what you know teacher pay and public education employment more generally and the great recession period. And once to and the aftermath of the great recession was critical to the red for Ed and all the movements across the US, which is what I'm going to comment mostly on here today. By the way, I think EPI is going to put a link up to a panel that we did just a couple weeks ago, a whole panel on teacher pay and teacher compensation. If you really want to get a deep dive into that first of all you can get the book and you can also watch the video from EPI. And the reason I want to comment on like the great recession and where we are today is because again you know here we go again right here we are. We have a pandemic led recession. It had immediate and serious consequences for school funding and much more given the nature of the crisis the health crisis. And recessions are used as an opportunity for those long working to dismantle public goods. And then there are the education privatizers. They look at this as their opportunity, perhaps as never before that up and and cash in, especially when we're talking about new systems like online education. I've actually heard people say, do we even need schools. I mean, most folks know or some are just learning that the public school systems are the backbone of our communities and our economy. We're learning through this pandemic led recession. So here we are we're mired in another vicious cycle of tax cuts for the rich austerity for the rest tax cuts for the rich austerity for the rest. We actually balance depleted budgets on the backs of our kids. Think about that. It's unconscionable given our vast wealth and resources. And now, right, we're, we're still holding out for further relief relief that has been passed long ago, all bit dried up. Today they're discussing a bill that's less than a trillion dollars when we actually need that much alone to go to state and local governments. That's based on some research by EPI or Josh Bivens and David Cooper. Well today that their discussion they can't that they probably can't even get through is like 160 billion for state and local governments, it's just not going to be enough. But again, we know that temporary recessions are used to institute permanent changes to public education and other public goods. So what can we expect. We can expect the same and more of what went on around the great recession. When funding cuts to public education were still in effect, a decade later in many states as public education struggled, long after economic recovery, long after Wall Street was booming. After many states were instituting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Yeah, I'm talking to you Oklahoma. Teacher pay eroded school buildings crumble staff shortages shortages persisted and other critical needs went on met the whole of public education suffered. And that's when we saw 10s of 1000s of teachers, students, staff, entire communities hit the streets and say enough is enough. Now we were all watching this with great admiration and excitement. It was amazing or the biggest strikes we've had in this country for over 35 years. But importantly, we have to understand that that didn't just happen. Right. And that's what the book highlights the groundwork, the diversity of thought and approaches to organizing that took place all across the US. They planned, innovated, built relationships and fostered broad support. A powerful modern movement was born, one that included racial justice and highlighted inequities. So yes, here we are again, where recession meets austerity. And we will definitely have to fight like hell to hold on to one of our highest ideals that should never be compromised public education. There's no good reason, except greed that we actually don't have the best and most resilient public school system in the world. Importantly, when I was reading this book, and what we talk a lot about through my connections with EPI and all the work I've done with them and what they have done over many decades is the rest of the American workforce needs to take a lesson from the teachers. The healing of the country from this pandemic, the healing of the assault on workers over the last 40 years, and the necessity to unwind. The pandemic America can only be realized with worker voice, worker power and collective bargaining that must have the full backing of policies and a Department of Labor that advocates for a more balanced, fair and a reasonable economic system that we don't have right now. In the book, it's fascinating, it's informative, and will help lead us as we move forward. So now I want to pass it over to to, because I'm very excited to hear from Jesse, who has written brilliant and fascinating account of the intersection of black lives matter meets the Seattle education system. Jesse take it away. Thank you both for those wonderful presentations thank you Naomi for hosting this and Rebecca and Amy you did a wonderful job with this book there's so many important lessons that we need our educators to read about to really discover the power that they have to not only our education system, but our broader society in a society that's as inequitable and deeply racist as ours, we have to reclaim and transform our unions and use them as a vehicle for social change and that really is what my chapter is is the intersection of social justice unionism and the black lives matter at school movement and the joining together of that social justice unionism approach with the new iteration of the black freedom struggle that's happening right now. And I just want to start with how I got into this work I started teaching in 2001. And, you know the same year the no child left behind acts came online, and I was teaching in Washington DC. I was in a completely segregated school. I think we actually got one white student my third year of teaching there. It really highlighted just how segregated it was in a, in a totally impoverished neighborhood and I would drive by the White House on my way to work and then 10 minutes later, I was in a forsaken land that was a complete food and the only public service that was there was the school buildings that were crumbling and the overfunded police that were there to brutalize my students and my students families and, you know, the first assignment I ever assigned to my students the first research project. They were researching someone they admired from history that had helped create social change and they came in and these beautiful posters that they produced and we were going to celebrate their posters on Monday and have them present them in class. And when we got back to school on Monday, all of the posters were destroyed, because there was a hole in the ceiling I didn't know about, and it had just rained in our classroom over the weekend, and flooded the room with like a inch of standing and so they were never able to present that poster. And you remember 2001 is also the year of the attacks of 9-11. And we could see the smoke rising from the Pentagon from my classroom window on that terrifying day. But there was something else that was terrifying that happened, and that I learned from that experience, which was that our government could mobilize untold billions of dollars to go bomb in the modern in the Middle East, but couldn't fix the hole in the ceiling of my classroom, just minutes away from the halls of government. And that experience was deeply troubling to me and set me on a path of wanting to figure out how can I not only bring social justice and anti-racist pedagogy in the classroom but how can I be part of collective efforts to transform those egregious conditions in our country. And in my time teaching in D.C., our union had negotiated a 9% raise, and then inexplicably, the D.C. Public schools announced that our 9% raise was going to be canceled, that there just wasn't the budget to do that, and so we would no longer have that. And our union organized a rally at City Hall. And there were speakers enchanting, and the union was, you know, having its usual lineup of speakers, and then all of a sudden the teachers just broke free and took the streets unplanned and just outraged that we could have worked that hard for a contract that could just be ripped up. And then they not only blocked traffic but then poured into City Hall, and we marched up to the mayor's office where somebody quickly ran in and locked the door so we couldn't get to his actual physical space. But as we walked up the stairs to his office, everyone was chanting, no 9% October 1, no work October 2. And that chant really filled me with energy and I think launched me on a whole path of my life, because it was only a week later after that rally that all of a sudden, lo and behold, they found the money for our race. And I learned the power of collective struggle and the power of unionism to create change. So I want to talk about the Black Lives Matter at school movement and how it got started and its intersection with social justice unionism but I don't think you can really tell that story without first acknowledging the story of enslaved black people who snuck off plantations to teach each other how to read and write even though it was illegal and the punishment could be maiming or death. Right. And I don't, I want to tell this story about Black Lives Matter at school but I don't think you can tell it without first acknowledging the struggle during reconstruction, where black people created public schooling in the south. And that incredible effort of the Freedman's Bureau and so many black educators found finally founding public schools in the south after the Civil War also benefited poor white people who hadn't had access to education. And I, you know, I think we have to acknowledge all before we can talk about Black Lives Matter at school, let's look at the teachers union in the 1930s in New York that formed it was largely the impetus of the Communist Party at the time, and they wanted to create a social justice union approach to organizing and, you know, they partnered with the NAACP and they worked to fight to get racist textbooks out of the curriculum that we're glorifying the Ku Klux Klan. Before we can talk about Black Lives Matter at school, we have to talk about the freedom schools during the Civil Rights Movement in the south, where the final exam wasn't a high stake standardized test but going to register to vote. Right. And, or the Panther Liberation Schools and the whole history of Afrocentric schools in the late 60s and 70s that flourished across this country and that's really the legacy of what this, this movement stands in that tradition. And I think we also have to talk about the conditions that created the need to organize a campaign for Black Lives in schools. And that was painfully brought home to me last night, when I saw a story here in Seattle where I teach about a kid named Jaleel. And he goes to an elementary school, a second grader here in Seattle, and it was revealed by investigative journalism in our local NPR station that Jaleel was locked in what they called the cage at his school, because they said he had disruptive behavior. And this is a kid who was suffering from PTSD from an abusive father. And instead of figuring out how to nurture this student, how to mentor him, how to heal his psychological wounds, this principal ordered that he be locked in the cage, an enclosed area that was fenced off outside. And he was brought his meals where he had to sit on the cold concrete and at some point didn't even have shoes on just sitting out there with kids walking by pointing and laughing. This is the conditions that Black children face in this school system across America. Black students are four times more likely to be suspended for the same infractions, and Black girls are the most disproportionately disciplined at seven times the rate of white girls. You have a situation in the US public school system where 1.6 million children go to a school that has a police officer, but doesn't have a counselor. And if you want to talk about all the other resources our kids need, there are 14 million kids that go to a school that have a police officer, but are missing one of the following. A school nurse, a school counselor, a school psychologist, a school librarian, these vital services for our youth. And you can see the priorities of the system that's building a school to prison pipeline. And it ends up the situations like a six year old girl last year in a Florida school was having a temper tantrum which is a developmentally appropriate behavior for a six year old. And instead of figuring out how to nurture and support her, the police officer handcuffs her and there's a heartbreaking video of her being dragged to his cop car where she's screaming please give me a second chance. But in this country, second chances are reserved for hedge fund managers, billionaires who sabotage the global economy in the great recession, and then float to the ground with golden parachutes. But for six year old black girls, they get driven to the police precinct she was taken to the youth jail where she was fingerprinted and had her mugshot taken. Right and her grandma came and picked her up and explained that the reason why she was having a hard time in schools because she suffered from sleep apnea. Right. So we need to understand that in this country we don't have an achievement gap. We have an education debt. There is a great debt that is owed to our nation's youth, especially the black youth of this nation. And that debt looks like the fact that according to a recent report, the formula authorized for title one should have appropriated $48 billion to title one schools but instead Congress appropriated $15 billion. So there's a shortfall of $33 billion that are supposed to be going to our neediest schools and as well NPR recently reported that $23 billion more dollars go to predominantly white school districts compared with districts that serve mostly students of color. And that is really why black lives matter at school erupted across this country. And it started in Seattle, and it's really an incredible story and I just want to tell that story and end with some conclusions about how black lives matter at school and social justice unionism can help transform this country. I think before I tell you the specific origin of black lives matter at school people should know that I helped to found a union caucus called the social equity educators. And this was when I moved back to Seattle, and the school district was getting ready to close 10 schools in Seattle. And of course they were all predominantly black and brown students of color schools and so I helped to organize a coalition to oppose those school closures because unfortunately our union voted to support the school closure saying that if the district save money on these schools then there would be less teacher layoffs and I thought that was extremely backwards and that we should join together with the communities and fight to keep all the schools open in the city as rich as ours. And we got five of the schools off the list, but they went forward with closing five schools. And it was out of that we founded the social equity educators and went on to help lead the map test boycott and at my high school. And I was able to vote unanimously to refuse to give a high stake standardized test the map test and we were, you know, the tested subject teachers were threatened with a 10 day suspension without pay, and not a single one of them back down. And it started an international campaign that put so much pressure with rallies and letters and speakouts on the school district that by the end of the year, not only did they not suspend any teacher but they actually got rid of the map test for all of Seattle's high schools and it was just a resounding victory for our struggle and it was those past victories that helped us lay the groundwork for what happened with BLM at school and so it really started at John Muir elementary school with a group of educators that wanted to celebrate their black youth in the wake of the murders of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in 2016 they wanted to start the school year off, supporting the black youth and nurturing them letting them know they were cared for. And so they organized an event with a group called black men united to change the narrative and the school PTA, where they were going to have all the black families, and everybody else and the educators come and high five all the youth that were coming in the school that morning, and then hold an assembly on black culture and history at the school, and the art teacher, a wonderful woman named Julie trout designed a shirt that said black lives matter we stand together with the picture of a tree with the many branches coming down into the trunk. And when that image of the t shirt went to the media far right organizations like bright Bart and blue lives matter started publicizing this and the school was bombarded with hate mail. And then one particularly hateful person made a bomb threat against john Muir elementary school just for the audacity of the educators to claim that their black students lives have value. And so the school district officially canceled that event and they brought in bomb sniffing dogs that morning to see if the threat was credible to the great credit of the educators and families they carried through at the event but it was much smaller than it would have been. So, I was deeply troubled by that and I reached out to them, and we brought them to the caucus of the social equity educators and we came up with a plan to have our union support them and we said if we really support you we won't just pass a resolution saying that we'll actually all wear the shirts to school and so we picked October 19 as black lives matter at school day. And we called on every educator to come to school with the shirts and we and our union passed the resolution overwhelmingly, and then our caucus, working with the union helped to organize the day of action. And we got together with the local NAACP and the black student unions and the p and the pta and the t short order started coming in. First the ones and twos then the dozens then the hundreds and then we had some 3000 teachers out of the 5000 teachers in Seattle 5000 educators in Seattle come to school wearing those shirts. The eruption of struggle that caught the eye of the teachers in Philadelphia, and they continued the movement and took it to the next level by taking it from a day of action to entire week of action. And now every year, we have the first week of February as black lives matter at school. So I'm going to go to black lives matter at school calm and learn how to participate in the week of action and now the year of purpose. So I know I need to wrap up here. Looks like about at time but if I can have a couple minutes to just conclude. Thank you. I just want to say that. I think the fundamental problem with our education system is this fundamental problem we have with all of our systems and institutions in this country and that is that they are a product of an economic and political structure. We have built on profit, racism, oppression and inequality, namely capitalism, and you see that the, when the eight richest people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion people. We're going to have severe problems in healthcare and education and housing and all the rest of it. And I just want to say that these numbers don't run parallel it's not just that there simply happened to be eight people with that much wealth and and the rest of us. At the bottom, it's that there are rich people as a consequence of of mass poverty. And so I think occupy movement was right that we have to figure out how to organize the 99% against the richest 1% but we will never be able to unite that 99% in a struggle for the resources we need to survive. If we don't make the fight against racism central to our to our movements right and so that's how we can unite us and that's the important role that the unions can play in this struggle. Because I think that when you look at the history of social movement unionism you can see a mechanism a lever that can actually exercise power in in support of our movements. You can see that really where the term emerged out of South Africa in the struggle against apartheid when the Union, the Kasatu Union of mine workers joined together with the student movement in the streets against apartheid and when the economy was shut down because of the striking workers then the movement that youth were leading across South Africa had a new power. And I think that we need to learn that lesson and apply it here today. When you look at the strike wave of educators that that Rebecca was talking about over the last few years it's demonstrated that the captains of industry aren't the only people who have the power and in Chicago and in LA and in the red state revolts. We saw how collective struggle can transform the world not only winning better pay and benefits for for our teachers but also like in LA winning a million to help support undocumented youth in in legal fees, or, or stopping the random quote unquote random searches of youth by the police. It's the power of our striking educators and I think it underscores the old saying that teachers on strike are still teaching. And that's the struggle that that I want to be a part of for racial and social justice so thank you all for having me as part of this panel today. Great. Thank you so much Jesse for that really compelling and frankly heartbreaking overview of what is happening for black and brown students in schools. And I also the point that you just raised that even teachers on strike are still teaching I thought is a is a really good one. So thank you for that and Sylvia and of course Rebecca for all the work and putting putting such an important book together. Now I'd like to move on to some questions that have been posted in the chat if you hadn't had a chance to put your question I'm sorry I keep saying the chat not the chat the Q&A section at the bottom of your screen. And so I'm just going to get started with some of these, some of these questions that have come up here. Just give me one second. And there were a couple of several questions that came across in the Q&A about the links to both Jaleel story and some of the statistics on discrimination against black students. Those you can find those in the answered tab, Rebecca's posted some links and the Garcia who is on the webinar as well it was API education. Economist also included link to another set of stats that might be useful for you all who are interested in digging into this work. Sure. A question came across from one participant I've been hoping in this time of common collective difficulty, we could all come together, all teachers across the nation to threaten a nationwide teacher strike to demand improved equity funding etc. What are the panelists thoughts on this. And will just to any of you who want to tackle that. Yeah, I'll jump in and then I'd love to hear especially what Jesse thinks Sylvia may have thoughts too. I'll just say that strikes are very very hard Jane McLevy who's perhaps our foremost strike thinker these days has contributed a great chapter that really talks about how hard super majority strikes are. The idea of organizing nationally for a super majority of teachers to walk out on strike is is very daunting, but it doesn't it doesn't mean it's not possible but it happens you know person by person workplace by workplace. There is a movement again using this sort of combination of online and offline organizing called National Educators United which Rebecca Garelli who wrote the Arizona chapter that I referred to a lot. It is a leader in and I think there are really really deepening links between activist teachers whether unionized or non unionized whether they have bargaining or not. I think that's the country so I do think that the movement is building. I wouldn't go out on a limb and say they'll be a nationwide walk out but I think they'll continue to be more actions and also more coordination. Yeah. Thank you for that question I think it's a great one. And I think we do need nationwide strikes. I think it would be incredible to see that kind of power. And I think we've had opportunities that could have galvanized educators across the country to take that kind of bold action when you look at the children being caged on the border and being separated from their parents. And I think we broke the heart of most educators in this country and I think if we'd had leadership that it said this is illegal. This is immoral. This is despicable and we educators are charged with defending youth in this country and we will shut down this nation school system until those youth are returned to their parents. This is an opportunity to show the kind of strength that our unions could have him and social justice movement unionism, but of course, there would be massive political pushback from both from both parties, and the common orientation of our unions about how do we get Democrats elected as the main strategy for creating social change and so that's what our unions invest millions and millions of dollars in doing and that would have that kind of national strike would have upset. And I think that the Democratic candidates that are our unions have helped get into office, because they like unions, and so far as they're helping to support them getting elected but when it comes to building social struggles to demand a fundamental country or challenging those in power, it makes powerful neoliberal Democrats very uncomfortable. And so I think that our unions weren't yet ready to take on a challenge like that because they haven't broken from an ideology of unions being in partnership with our bosses and in collaboration with wealthy elites rather than in struggle against and unequivocally supporting educators and youth and that's the real challenge we have we have to make a paradigm shift in what the purpose of unions are for and return to some of the incredible examples of the 1930s of mass general strikes, when there were like, when, you know, Minneapolis, Toledo and San Francisco shut down completely and mass general strikes of every worker in those cities like, I think we're reaching the levels of polarization, again, where we could see things like that happening again but it will take, as Rebecca said, these don't just happen, right, they have to be organized. And so that's really what we're what we're trying to do. Great. Thank you. So we have 10 minutes left and I'm going to try to move us quickly. There are a bunch of good questions in the Q&A and so let's try to plow through a bunch. One, I want to direct at Rebecca I know there's a chapter in the book a question came in would love to know more about corporations and tech companies preying on K through 12 students and teachers through standardized testing. And how does it relate to exploitation. Thank you. Thank you for that question it's a great it's a great question and I'm going to expand it out a little bit and say not just standardized testing but technology software profiteering from all kinds of selling of ideas about innovation that are couched in tech and data and possibly surveillance in schools and there's a chapter by Roxana mirachi and Robert carpenter and I'm reading the title because it sums it up a lot which is Silicon Valley philanthropy capitalism and policy shifts from teachers to tech. The chapter really covers the way that especially Silicon Valley software companies, but in partnership with the philanthropic arms of those same individuals and companies have really pushed everything from charterization to the rise of so called virtual schools to massive standardized testing to you know displacing much of the work of skilled teachers into into software that that claims to provide for example personalized instruction but actually is really about screen time and data collection and getting districts hooked on these contracts with for profit companies so extracting profit from public education and what we see with remote schooling during the pandemic is a rapid acceleration of that. My colleague Naomi Klein has called it the screen new deal right which is what we're seeing so we don't know what the recovery is going to be like when we return to in person instruction but we can only imagine that these big software contracts these big sales pitches this idea that that students need these tools to succeed, rather than you know other ways where education places where education funding could be spent. We, that's massively accelerated during the pandemic and we can only expect to see much more of that as we go forward. Great. Thank you. Next up. Let's see, can speak the speakers discuss a little the process of coalition formation when unions and communities come together how did it happen. What were some of the challenges and how are they overcome to build solidarity for the common good. I have to hear I can weigh in on that and speak from some of the contributors but maybe Jesse wants to take it first I'm sure he has some, some good thoughts on that. I think you're muted just started off. Um, yeah, we see a lot of different versions of coalition buildings so we have some pretty deep discussion of what happened in an LA where when the descent caucus came to leadership in the United Angeles they hired organizers from their communities to work with their community so parent organizers they work with some deeply embedded long standing grassroots organizations that had that had been doing the work for some time and they also just worked with you know their students and their parents was a great organization called students deserve which is some of the leaders contributed to the book and it's they just did fabulous work making common cause with their teachers which shouldn't be that hard right students and teachers want properly funded high quality schools. The organizing that is required is very very deep and part of the challenge is that teachers unions were posed as in opposition to their communities as greedy as not wanting high quality schools is only wanting selfish things and so, and this was a really consensus sort of from the political class a consensus view of things and so this deep organizing had a really really challenging starting point, even though there's great logic and consistency to communities wanting good schools wanting proper investment in public education. So, it took a lot of time it took visionary leadership and many of these unions that were able to do it successfully it wasn't it wasn't easy and it often involved turnover of leadership rather than long standing leaders sort of changing their mind or their approach. It took work with existing community organizations to really understand what the communities want. So in the case of LA and then I'll stop, they actually made. They worked with these community groups to generate the common good demands that were part of the strike demands they said you know, we shouldn't decide all of the demands you the community should, you know, think through what is most important to you so I think one of the demands that came out of this process was making sure that there was no more so called random which nobody believed was random searching of students, especially in the high school which only fell on black and brown students immigrant students. And that was a community generated demand and they were able to win that demand for the strike. Yeah, and I'll just add very briefly that I think the key to that process is not waiting until you're on strike to then ask for the community to support you, but actually forging relationships over the years. So I think, in the example of utl a and the Chicago teachers union that year in and year out. They are working with black families to generate demands around issues that they're struggling for, and then when they're on strike families know that they're actually part of their struggles for what their families need right and that it's not when they hear when they read in the newspaper that the strike is selfish for teachers to get more for them. They don't believe it because they've seen it firsthand over the years and you know it when you build that kind of relationship then at moments of strikes or other social issues you can come together and have immense influence to overcome, you know, the press that's controlled by by billionaires. Great. So we are in our last two questions. I am going to ask a final question of all three panelists to give sort of lightning responses to about what are the key takeaways that should inform current organizing or efforts by policymakers but before we get to that. There was another question that came in this one's for Jesse about the school bus drivers janitors nutrition workers and most school systems are not typically considered part of this discussion and they are usually more BIPOC, then educators. Have you had success at incorporating those workers into your movements. Well I think that question is really important and the question hasn't been answered by our unions but but it's the right question that all of our unions need to ask and we have to fight to get more black teachers in the classroom there we've lost 26,000 black teachers across the country since 2002, mostly because of neoliberal school closure policies and black and brown neighborhoods. We have a lot of black educators in our school buildings that are mostly instructional assistants and office professionals and school lunch and bus drivers and all the rest of those and absolutely they need to be centered in this struggles to make black lives matter in the school and empowered in our unions and that's a challenge that our unions, some unions do better than others but where we're going to be successful is when we can all come together and to do that you have to fight racism in the union. Thank you Jesse. Unfortunately we are not going to get to a whole list of other questions we could do a whole nother webinar to get to those because there were some really pointed and very good questions but so our last question though is going to be for all the panelists starting with Sylvia. What is one key takeaway from recent or historical teacher uprisings that should inform current organizing work that's going on or efforts by policymakers. Well, I mean, I think just in general, and now that we're in another recession that we just always have to keep in mind because it always comes down to money. And you even have good folks saying I don't know if we can afford this right you're hearing it now with the pandemic relief but you know in this country, it's not resources and wealth. That's the problem. Right. It is simply will. And it's a lack of shared values and a lack of shared goals look if you're a rich person and you think your kids should go to a really good school. You should really think that every kid in the country should go to a really good school. And that is not without our out of our reach and part of the issue is what has been touched on a lot is now everybody wants to take some kind of profit. Away from the public schools were dismantled them all together. And so I think it's just really good to keep in mind that when I say tax cuts for the rich, another round of tax cuts for the rich austerity for the rest. That's been happening for 40 years which has really concentrated wealth, which Jesse had talked about. It has really been a redistribution of a massive amount of income and wealth from those in the broad middle class to those at the top. It ends up starving everybody else so I just think the whole, the whole, the whole book and the whole narrative of what's going on now with coven this idea that we're not passing relief has to be kept in the perspective of us having enormous resources and wealth in this country. Great thanks Sylvia Rebecca Jesse. Sure. I guess a couple lessons one would be that organizing is essential even if the situation is unjust or untenable, or providing a much lower quality education than our students deserve because of under investment. It won't change without organizing and for policymakers I would say listen to educators listen to teachers listen to people who work in schools and understand what the situation is on the ground every day by the people from the people who know best what is going on. Great. Thank you and Jesse to close this out. Yes, I would just say that we need to understand that the decisive factor and improving our lives in this country is not about who's in power but about understanding our own power and the red state revolts to me really underlined that because it was in states with governors that said that ran on platforms that they would never raise taxes for any reason, especially to help schools or you know something public good like that. And yet the same governors and state after state who had promised to never raise taxes did so to support the public school system not because they suddenly cared about kids or teachers but because the entire state school system was shut down, and the governor said they will be closed until we get the resources we need. And you know that is a critical lesson that the entire labor movement needs to relearn that we have more power than they do when we organize it collectively and the last thing I'd say is a lesson from Chicago. They put forward a demand in their strike that the city create affordable housing and they actually lost that demand. But I think there's a great lesson in that defeat that they put forward a really bold demand that captured the imagination of the city and the families and help them win so many other demands. And I think that when we start raising demands that go beyond just our narrow contract needs but speak to the broader social good. We can draw in large numbers of people around us that can help support these strikes and see them as a vehicle for creating social change and equity in our communities beyond just the education system. Great. Thank you so much. So I want to thank our speakers for giving us such thought provoking remarks today and really recentering us on the principles of direct action and collective action racial equity and this notion of having a bold vision that we're willing to throw down for So I hope that all the participants will visit us at epi.org backslash sign up to sign up for epi's newsletters. That way you'll be the first to know about our new research and any upcoming events like this. And I also hope that you'll follow epi on Twitter and our Twitter handle is at economic policy. So thank you again. I hope everyone gets a little rest and respite at the end of what has been a brutal brutal here. So thanks again to our speakers and thanks to all of you for joining us. Take care. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks much.