Cain’t Live on No Apple a Day

While there are a few blue or purple states where public school teacher pay is truly embarrassingly low (e.g., Colorado although there is movement to correct this), most red states have seriously underpaid teachers, crumbling schools and overcrowded classrooms, seriously lower test scores than the national average, lower life expectancies, and more people without healthcare or facing exclusions for their most critical medical issues.

The same red states where their GOP members of Congress were tripping all over themselves to give the top one percent of wealth – corporations – a 40% tax cut, trying desperately to kill the Affordable Care Act and pull all those healthcare dollars away from those who desperately need the coverage to pay for those tax cuts for the rich. They equally have targeted Social Security and Medicare for serious future reductions in benefits also to cover those tax cuts.

Teacher compensation is a great index of how states treat the majority of their constituents. There is a rather direct relationship between teacher pay and life expectancy, public education performance statistic and the quality of available healthcare. And for the most part, red states get an F. As bad as upward mobility is for the entire United States – heavily dependent on the social lubricant of education – it is virtually non-existent in red states.

But there is restlessness in the reddest of the red, where the teacher pay clings to the lowest levels in the entire nation. “The recent uproar over teacher pay and education funding began in February, when West Virginia teachers held a nine-day strike. The walkouts ended with teachers receiving a 5% pay raise.

“Next came Oklahoma, where teachers this month also went on a nine-day strike for higher wages and more funding. The strike ended with the teachers accepting the $479 million lawmakers originally agreed to for school funding and pay raises — well below the $3.3 billion teachers wanted.

“In Kentucky, the Legislature overrode a veto this month by GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, passing bills that boost education funding.” Los Angeles Times, April 29^th.

The underlying vector in these low-pay venues is to cut expenditures everywhere at the state level, reduce government involvement in people’s lives and lean more heavily on individuals to pay for their own tabs on everything. Hey, the wealthy put their kids in private schools anyway, so who cares? Ever listen to federal Education Secretary, the profoundly inexperienced and under-educated billionaire, Betsy DeVos? Philosophically, she’s actually opposed to the mere existence of public schools. She’d rather give vouchers, which, in her less-than-intelligent mind, will push more children into schools where religious instruction is prioritized above all else. I’m hearing China cheering.

Those on the right who oppose spending on public education argue that the school systems are bastions of waste and bloated administrative bureaucracies. They claim that stories of teachers holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet or that teachers have to pay for non-existent school supplies or scrounge to find enough textbooks for their students are “fake news.” Old tattered textbooks, some ten and even fifteen years old, have been stretched years beyond their useful life. But all that bad news is hard truth. Right-wingers insist that teacher strike are selfish disruptions sending thousands of children onto the streets, many without childcare, to do mischief. They demand harsh penalties for the teachers that walk out. They refuse to take any responsibility for the failures in their public school systems.

The next red state to face the wrath of horribly-paid teachers? Arizona. “The National Center for Education Statistics lists Arizona’s average teacher salary for the 2016-17 academic year at $47,403 — well below the U.S. average of $58,950. The state spends about $3,300 less per pupil than the national average, according to the Arizona Office of the Auditor General.

“Lynne McKernan, a seventh-grade writing teacher at Mountain Trail Middle School in Phoenix, said lawmakers left the Capitol on Friday [4/27] without speaking to teachers… ‘In the middle of a crisis, they chose to adjourn rather than sit down with our representatives who have asked to speak with them for weeks,’ McKernan said in a telephone interview… State Supt. of Public Instruction Diane Douglas threatened to strip teachers of their certifications.

“McKernan has three academic degrees and is paid about $36,000 annually. With little funding for resources, she has worked in classrooms with duct tape on outdated books and peeling mouse pads… ‘Other schools have the roof caving in,’ she said. ‘We used to catch mice at our school.’

“Students have shown solidarity with teachers, saying the crumbling infrastructure at some schools distracts them from their studies. ‘People call this #RedForEd movement a disruption? ... Oh really, what’s really disruptive is the water from the leaking [ceiling] that’s dripping on your desk,’ tweeted Luis Payan, a freshman at Valley Vista High School outside Phoenix.” LA Times.

We are rapidly splitting into two distinct nations: haves with individual opportunities and local social support systems and those who are increasingly abandoned to fend entirely for themselves regardless of their economic condition… a lack of concern that applies equally to their children who are powerless to do anything about their plight. And increasingly, those two political visions are rather clearly divided into blue and red states, respectively. It’s time to Make America Fair Again, for America once again to be “land of opportunity” and not what red state America has become, “land of opportunists.”

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you really want to watch a great nation crash and burn, you only have to follow the recent populist sloganeering and implementation to see the direct and immediate results.