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| courtesy of Pixabay: John Potter CC0 Public Domain |
Maybe all Republicans don’t hate teachers. Some Republicans
might even be married to teachers. I’ve known some Republicans who are or once were
teachers. I used to be a Republican myself, many years ago.
But as I recently read of the Conservative Columnist George
Will, who has quit the Party, this isn’t the Republican Party of the Ronald
Reagan years. The Republican Party I remember cared about education, personal
responsibility, and common sense approaches to problems. Today’s Republican
leaders, and apparently voters, show no such inclination.
Here in my state, the state legislature, which is controlled by
Tea Party Republicans, is about to pass a bill requiring criminal background
checks (which process admittedly needed improvement here in this state, as
history has shown) on all potential and current teachers. So far I don’t have a
problem with that. They are also listing the crimes that would make someone
ineligible to receive a teacher’s license and those that would cause someone to
lose their teaching license. Those crimes include such things as homicide,
prostitution, arson, or misconduct in public office. Certainly I’m sure no one
has a problem with those crimes being included.
After a recent peaceful demonstration by teachers in our state
capital, organized to bring attention to the pitiful way our current Governor
and State Legislature have funded public education over the past several years,
a new article was added to the bill making the crime just being present “at the
scene of…disorderly conduct by an assemblage of three or more persons, following
a command to disperse,” reason enough to deny someone a teaching license.
(Question: Will this make all the Democratic Congress members
who sat-in recently ineligible to teach in our state’s public school system.)
This language was added specifically to address the 14 teachers,
students, and parents taking part in the peaceful demonstration who, instead of
letting themselves be chased away by the police, who were acting on orders from
the Governor’s office, engaged in an impromptu sit in. These 14 teachers,
students, and parents were seized, handcuffed, fingerprinted, booked, and
jailed, all for wanting to talk to the Governor about why the state will not
appropriate enough money for textbooks and toilet paper for our schools. The officers
who arrested them, while performing their lawful duty in doing so, are said to
have repeatedly apologized and expressed admiration and thanks to the teachers
and others arrested for having the courage to stand up for our children,
including one officer who described the protestors actions as being noble.
In many of our classrooms, there are no textbooks for the
subject being taught and if there are books, there are not enough for each
student to be issued one, and often not even enough for each student in the
room to have one during classroom instruction. Many of the books being used are
over a decade old and are held together with duct tape. The state’s answer to
the schools - have the teachers spend their own money to make copies because,
oh, yeah, we don’t want to pay for copy paper and toner either.
While the Governor’s office touts the increased amount of
education spending there has been during his time in office the truth is, on a
per-student basis, education spending in this state is nearly $1,000 per
student less now than before the Great Recession, according to US Census Bureau
figures. And the Governor’s office likes to point out the fact that teachers
just got a big raise, but they leave out the fact that it was only the second
raise in 8 years, the first having been several years before and amounting to ½
of 1% on average, not even enough to cover the increase in the health insurance
premiums the state started passing on to teachers that used to be included as
part of the teacher’s compensation. Also, in giving teachers this big raise,
the state took away the annual longevity payment teachers used to get based on
years of service, so for veteran teachers the amount of the raise was little
more than what they lost when they lost their longevity. But the Governor’s
office doesn’t like to mention that.
The Governor was too busy to meet with the teachers, parents,
and students who marched. He offered to send two of his top aides to speak with
the group but when they arrived at the Capitol Building it was locked. When the
two top aides did condescend to come outside and meet the protestors later,
after the protestors blocked the intersection in an effort to get the Governor’s
attention, according to one of the aides they didn’t speak with the protestors
because, “We usually prefer not to hold meetings in the intersection of a main
road.”
I suppose the Governor may just have been too tired to meet with
the teachers. It seems he was up late the night before schmoozing with the rich
and powerful at a fundraiser for the presumptive Republican Presidential
Candidate. Our Governor clearly has time for the wealthiest 1 % of the
residents of our state, whose children assuredly do not attend public schools
in this or any state, but he has no time to listen to the parents, teachers,
and students who care enough about our public schools to march 23 miles through
the summer heat to see him. It comes as no surprise that our Governor and
Republican controlled legislature don’t want to acknowledge these folks. These
are, after all, the same elected officials who just last year tried to make it
a misdemeanor offense for teachers to demonstrate their commitment to public
schools because, according to the Republicans in the State House, supporting public
education is a political view they cannot tolerate.
While the Governor’s opponent was not associated with this march
on the capitol, though the Governor’s re-election campaign manager tried his
best to make the connection, the television footage of teachers, students, and
parents being led away in handcuffs and loaded into police vans will certainly
provide powerful images to use when pointing out the current state administration’s
position on education.
Come November we will see if the people of this state really do
care about their children’s schools.
As always, I remain,
The Exhausted Educator
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