Reading, Writing, Running – By Seth Cline (usnews.com) / Sept 21 2018
Fueled by conditions in America’s classrooms, teachers are stepping into the political arena this fall.
One was on the roof of a Habitat for Humanity house in California when it occurred to her. Another was in a state senator’s office in Oklahoma City. Still another was at an education conference in Minneapolis when she began to consider it.
It’s a decision hundreds of educators across the country have made this year: To change the conditions in their classrooms, they would have to run for office themselves. Some 550 educators will be on election ballots this fall, according to the National Education Association, running for everything from local school board to governor.
Their numbers are particularly pronounced in states where teachers took to the streets and statehouses in the spring, places like Oklahoma, Kentucky and West Virginia. At least 20 educators filed to run for Congress this cycle, and the hundreds of educators running for statehouse positions came from both political parties from Maine to Alaska. Though the exact issues varied – compensation, the upward creep in class sizes, the trickling pipeline of qualified educators – they pointed to a common theme of neglect in state K-12 education budgets.
That activism led to a spike in educators filing their election paperwork, says Carrie Pugh, the national political director for the National Education Association, which has compiled a database of the educator-candidates.
“[The spring activism] was a tipping point that instantly moved 50, 60, 70 other people to step up and participate and the other ones are volunteering in campaigns they haven’t volunteered before,” Pugh says.
“Most of them, they didn’t wake up or grow up thinking they were going to run for office. They experienced year after year of politicians making promises that weren’t getting the job done.”
The phenomenon is particularly visible in Oklahoma, where teachers walked out for nine days and many marched over 100 miles from Tulsa to Oklahoma City in April to protest teaching conditions. By the end of the demonstration, educators had secured a modest pay raise, but many felt it was not enough to counteract years of shrinking education spending.
“In light of the walkout, I think a lot of politicians were patting themselves on the back as if they had finally fixed education,” says Carri Hicks, a Democratic candidate for state Senate in the state.
A fourth-grade teacher near Oklahoma City at the time, Hicks had for years taken personal days to lobby state lawmakers for better conditions in classrooms. It was one of those encounters in the office of a state lawmaker that led to her decision to run.
“I introduced myself and said, ‘Hi, my name is Carri Hicks. I’m a teacher from Oklahoma City with 28 students in each of my classes,’ and he put his hand up and said, ‘Stop right there.’ He told me I was lying,” Hicks says. “[My co-worker and I] busted out laughing after he said the average class size is 16. I said, ‘I invite you to come stand in our classroom.'”
After years of being told by lawmakers to “tighten our beltstraps” in those meetings, she and many other Oklahoma educators decided they needed to try something different, she says. Hicks’s husband took a second job in 2017, and that fall, she chose not to return to the classroom in order to run for state Senate. She was one of more than 100 education professionals or their immediate family members who filed to run for office in Oklahoma this year, according to the Oklahoma Education Association.
“Each of us looked around and said who is representing us currently isn’t representing our needs so it’s my time to run,” Hicks said.
Jahana Hayes, a former history teacher in Connecticut, reached the same conclusion. Hayes, who was selected as the National Teacher of the Year in 2016, was with a group of her students working on a Habitat for Humanity house in an area of California damaged by wildfire when the realization struck.
“I was on the roof with these kids and I’m thinking, ‘I have these kids who have nothing and they’re out here helping this community rebuild,” Hayes says. “Literally in that moment, I just thought, ‘Who will speak for them?’ I get teary-eyed just thinking about it.”
Hayes has since won the Democratic primary in Connecticut’s 5th Congressional District and could become the first African-American Democrat in the state to serve in Congress if she wins in November.
It was through her travels for National Teacher of the Year that Hayes realized the extent to which teachers are left out of the process of making education policy.
“There is a certain level of frustration with this idea we’re being held accountable for policies we didn’t have any part in crafting,” she says. “People talk about the failures of No Child Left Behind or the Every Student Succeeds Act or Common Core standards, but what I learned as I was traveling was many times I was the only teacher in the room.”
That’s in part due to structural hurdles. Both Hayes and Hicks struggled with whether to step away from the classroom to run or try to do both and still have time for their families.
“Everything about the system, either by design or default, prevents someone like me or a teacher from running,” says Hayes, who is now working at a new job mentoring teachers while she campaigns. “My family relies on my salary. I can’t take leave, I can’t quit my job. It’s hard for people who are similarly situated to begin to imagine overcoming all these barriers.”
“Everything about the system, either by design or default, prevents someone like me or a teacher from running.”
Running for office also often means knowing people – or winning over gatekeepers in party offices and political circles who do. Even Hayes, whose teaching awards raised her profile significantly, says she was told that nobody knew her when she first contemplated running.
There’s also a whole new set of skills to learn. Groups like the National Education Association and the Center for American Women and Politics out of Rutgers University are aiming to close these skills and opportunity gaps.
Both organizations run training and outreach programs aimed at engaging women and educators in the political arts, and both have seen interest spike dramatically of late. The Ready to Run program out of the Center for American Women and Politics operates in some 20 states, offering a one to two day campaign training in March, says Debbie Walsh, the center’s director.
“We start advertising in October. Usually by the end of the calendar year we have three to four people who’ve paid or registered,” Walsh says. “In 2016, we started getting registrations coming in the day after the election, and by the end of the calendar year we had 100 people.”
This year, the flood of interest continued, even before the spring’s protests. She says the group was forced to turn people away in New Jersey.
“We heard the same thing from our partners around the country,” Walsh says. “And not just blue or moderate places – we have programs in Utah, in Oklahoma, in Iowa, Illinois, Ohio. The same thing, moving to bigger venues.”
The NEA’s political organizing arm has seen a similar bump in interest, says Pugh, the group’s national political director.
“The number of volunteers – that is people who’ve made calls, canvassed, gone to rallies, things like that – that we’ve tracked was 10,000 higher in July than what we tracked in the entire 2016 cycle,” she says.
It was at an NEA event that Lakilia Bedeau first set her sights on political office. An education service provider in Kentucky, where more than 20 educators ran this year, Bedeau says that she grew agitated when Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin and other state lawmakers attempted to cut funding for the kinds of non-academic social services her students rely on.
“I had to take that personal, and I’m thinking, ‘Has he lost his mind?'” she says. “I’m seeing the non-academic barriers these kids are facing, and the current politicians just don’t have a clue about what’s going on with our students and families. So I thought, why not me? Why not an educator?”
After running for an NEA position at the the organization’s annual meeting and coming up short, she says she was encouraged by Pugh and others to set her sights higher.
“I had so many people coming up to me, saying, ‘Don’t stop. You should run for Congress,'” Bedeau says. “You know, others sometimes see things in you you don’t see in yourself.”
So Bedeau applied for and won a spot at the NEA’s See Educators Run campaign training in Chicago in August.
“We had people talking to us about budgeting, how to fundraise. We had simulations, we broke up to talk about a mock election, so it was intense,” she says.
Educators who’ve already taken the plunge say politics is no easy road either.
“Deciding to go all-in on a campaign is pretty lonely. You’re out on the doors a lot of the time, you’re missing out on your set of friends and your family,” says Hicks, the Oklahoma Senate candidate.
And while there are some similarities between cultivating relationships with students and with voters, in politics those relationships can be friendly, and less personal.
“Parts of it are daunting and scary. When you’re Teacher of the Year, everyone loves you. This is a little different,” Hayes says.
“I joke with my husband: If I get elected, it’ll be half the work of teaching,” she says. “People always ask me, ‘Won’t you miss your students?’ and I say this is just advocating from a different perspective.”
